The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  But first he took me past Santiago, over the gold dust of city lights, to a place where the land was dark and the sky was cluttered with tiny stars like points of light shining through a velvet cloth, and everything else was hidden beneath blackness. We heard the roar of the oil-painted trees. I dipped my hand into the cold water of the well. I couldn’t resist splashing Sangris while he was impatiently waiting for me to say the words. He wrestled me down under the sunflowers. And there, in the place where my father had tried to plan me, with the roaring of the trees drowning out all other sound and the heavy petals of the sunflowers forming a second sky over our heads, I told him that I loved him.