The Escape

By Peter Bowden



The festival was already breathing when she arrived—lanterns swaying like sleepy fireflies above small tent tops, wind chimes laughing from porches. The park had dressed itself in its finest wonder, colors dripping from canvases like melted dreams. A jazz band played loud and clean. People clapped. Some danced. It was good. The smell of roasted peanuts curled around her like memory.


She walked slowly, as if afraid to disturb the magic. There had been too many days before this one—days of fluorescent lights and talking too quietly and waiting on joy like waiting for a bus that never came. But here, children with painted cheeks galloped like colts, and old men in straw hats carved animals from peach wood while humming half-remembered lullabies. The world felt stitched together with music and sun and things made by hand.


And then she saw it—a small painting of a window thrown open to a sunrise, sky ablaze with orange and violet, a bird mid-flight. Something in her chest, long sealed, flickered open. She bought the painting, held it to her chest like a heartbeat. As she walked home through the fading day, she felt lighter, like a breeze through tall grass, the festival spoke to her—reminding her that happiness doesn’t always roar; sometimes it hums low and steady, lingering in the last soft notes of a song that never really ends.



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