A small girl splits open a juicy orange, dropped ripe from the grove. The sun is risen to its zenith, and her father, all weathered-skin and cracked palms, watches from a worn deckchair. The sky is an improbably deep blue, one of those really special days where you can’t look up or down, left or right, without seeing something wonderful. The father knows his girl is the most wonderful of all. As she enjoys the orange, the fruit of a complex array of natural systems and not a little hard work from him, he wonders about her future. What lies ahead for her, beyond the grove?
Wind catches her hair and she laughs, and turns back at him with a grin. He could write every day for a thousand years, study with the greatest tutors of many generations, and never quite be able to capture what he feels inside when he sees that smile.
Mirror Lake Fiction 