Often my images stem from some kind of story fragment running around in my mind...
When She Gives You 'The Look'
They climbed the hill, the late afternoon sky starting to dim.
"Do you have to leave so soon?" she asked.
"Well, I told you when I arrived that we would only be for a few months. This was just a trading mission afterall." But he had to admit he was going to miss this place. It was so — green. Did he really want to return to his world of smoke-belching factories? Where everything was always covered in that thin film of soot? There were things he would miss about this world. There was Himiko; yes, he felt he would miss her most of all.
"A few months? Has it been that long?" she mused. "It seems like only yesterday that you arrived here with your strange ways." Her lips curved slightly in a shy smile.
"Yes, we've had some fun times." She had introduced him to so many of the pleasures of this world.
"And could you not stay if you wanted to?"
"Stay? I don't know. My whole life I've only known my own world. Yours is so ... different."
They crested the hill, the next valley lay spread out below them. The sinking sun bathed the land in golden light, the sky turning pink. On the valley floor were carefully tended farm fields golden with ripening grains interspersed with pastures of grazing animals. Fruit trees were scattered about the landscape, lacking the orderly rows of his home world's massive greenhouses . The wide hillside was covered with flowers in riotous abundance, painting the hill in pinks and yellows. Flowers that, back home, would have been struggling to survive in tiny window boxes below a perpetually leaden grey sky.
She was gazing at the world laid out before them, "and with all our differences, is there nothing our world can offer that would tempt you to stay?"
"Stay? I just don't know. Everything here is so ..."
At his pause she turned to look back at him, that small smile still on her lips.
Looking at her, he finished, "... so beautiful."
She reached out to his hand with her oh-so-gentle touch.
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