Her Beloved

      She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally decided to walk through the door, but not before she took one last look at her favorite picture of her and her beloved before her hair had begun to gray. He had simply left just outside her porch years ago and since no one has seen her past it.
      She stepped out and she beheld the night time and all its old glory. The moon, the stars and the streetlights were almost blinding and despite the small and compact size of the neighborhood to her things couldn’t be any more far away. Each step felt as if it could have been a mile long leap away from the home in which she had promised to wait.
      The air itself was nearly intoxicating as it slowly hit her that everything had changed. The houses all looked just the same and were new, clean, and in wonder she slowly turned around to see her house was nothing of the like. It was old with paint chipping and bent and twisted pieces of wood. Even more alarming was to look down for the first time to see her lawn had browned and died a long time ago while the grass was indeed greener on every side of her chipping white fence.
      Not even to the end of the lawn the lights inside the other houses begin to ignite and reveal silhouettes of strange figures she would conclude were her long lost neighbors. One by one the houses lit up like candles in the night, and one by one they came out of their houses like ghosts and stared. Some came out alone some in pairs and some in families. Their faces were over whelmed by the light but their voices echoed like nothing she had never heard.  By now everything was in full effect. The lights, the wind, the ghosts and the shadows all together played there siren songs in wonder and in bliss of the return of the lost lamb.
      Her wrinkled, bare feet cross the grass into the long endless concrete road and as she did the voices became slow applauses and cheers of those who use to know her so well. They began to come of their properties into their yards and steadily but surely the echoes grew deeper and deeper and deeper until it was unbearable and she began to cry.
      These tears were not of pain nor joy but freedom, her tears sled gracefully off her silk pink night gown onto the cold concrete pavement. She picked herself together and faced it all. All ghosts began to resemble long lost faces and stars began to assemble themselves into constellations once again. Everything was beginning to piece together.
      But of all the lights only two moved. They moved side by side one always next to each other never letting go like her and her beloved. They came down the road with alarming speed and grace. She could not recall what these lights had meant in time for them to have done their duties. She lie bent and broken on the street while simultaneously the lights dimmed, wind stopped blowing, and all voices muted. One last person stepped from behind the lights. And the last thing she would ever see, was the eyes of her beloved.