It was a sunny day in the meadows of Galatea. A boy named Claude was laying on the ground beneath some tall threads of grass that were waving back and forth in front of his eyes. He looked through them at the ceiling of the world, where the sun was busy making its way over to a delta in the west. The grass seemed to cry for his attention by blocking out the brightness every few seconds. It was miraculous to the boy that things that couldn't move or speak still had ways of making themselves known.
He lay like that for several hours, closing his eyes and letting his thoughts wander. He was tired; tired of life, tired of work... Tired of spending hours on the farm. He wanted to be like his friend Pierre, who made a living escorting people up and down the river in a boat all day. The only skill required of him was to row, which seemed like a perfect and easy life to Claude. How nice it would be to just drift along with the current, meeting new people, getting paid to see nature and all the treasures it brings.
The sky began to darken, so he got up and stretched his arms. Since he'd been on the ground for so long, the loosening of his muscles felt even better to him than a massage would. He looked around. The fields whistled in the wind with every bit of discretion that a kitten stalking a squirrel had. The grass was interspersed with yellow flowers that complemented its greenery perfectly. Below the hills there flowed a stream that meandered through the meadows as slowly as the sun moving above. Surrounding the valley there were sugar-glazed mountains connected to each other by rainbows. When it rained in the valley, everything had a hint of sweetness that may have been caused by an ocean of sugar instead of salt. Nobody knew for sure, because none of the travelers came from beyond the great delta to tell them. The delta itself was a cosmopolitan of all sorts of bird species that flocked there whenever the lands of the north became too cold. It was a landscape exempt from any roughness, and for anyone who'd never left the valley, as Claude never had, the world seemed like a place of permanent serenity.
Sometimes cherubs would come to the valley and play sweet lullabies for the children of Galatea, but most of the time they just played with each other in the clouds. They lived in the mountains, on terraces of travertine that had snow hanging off them like frosting: giant crags of ice that had been landlocked millions of years ago by colliding plates. There's a myth about the cherubs, stating they'd come from the interbreeding of birds and humans, but most visitors laughed at such ideas.
Claude looked to the west and saw a golden apple tree silhouetted by the sunset, and beyond that the orange-stricken waterways of the delta. There was another silhouette moving over the greens; this one had the shape of a woman. He spotted another, much smaller than hers. They were bouncing towards the apple tree over the blades of grass, ever so lightly. When the woman spotted Claude watching her, she waved at him, inviting him to come near.
He was more of a shy fellow, so he kept away from them for a while. But the urge to see her better was stronger than his fear of strangers, so he crept forward. Once he came close enough, he saw that she was holding a parasol to keep the wind from blowing any loose grains into her face. She wore a ruffled white dress that fanned out towards the bottom, and a hat that kept a bundle of auburn hair underneath it. A scarf she wore blew sideways in the gale. Her cheeks were as rosy as a youngling’s, yet the way she walked gave her the type of poise held only by women who were older in years. The peachy color of her skin matched the fibers of the grass and the yellow flowers about her feet. He wanted to capture this image of her forever, but he didn't know how.
Already the bulbs of the flowers were illuminating themselves upon the darkening of dusk. They did this every night, as soon as the sun set behind the delta. The whole valley would light up, like a bustling metropolis with a matrix of glossy windows. His eyes lit up too, because he was coming to realize that she was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. In the half-light of the setting sun, he watched her as she bent down to pick up one of the flowers and show it to the child. She was looking into it with the kind of depth that revealed the location of a hidden soul. The light emitted from its bulb painted a sunny face entranced by what it was seeing. Off in the distance, the cherubs were making their music again; the silky, milky, notes of their lullabies swirled around her ears and made her smile with warmth.
In her eyes he saw the most curious reflection: a stream running through a garden, and a bridge arcing across it. The flowers of the garden had a brilliant array of colors, the likes of which he'd never seen in Galatea. Yet he still felt they were familiar in some way. He could have sworn he'd seen the woman with the parasol wandering through that garden before, holding her child's hand; and maybe he'd even been there with them, in a life long ago.
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