Once upon a time…

By Peter Bowden

There was a wooden fence at the edge of a small town, and behind it lived a boy who believed the world was bigger than what his eyes could see. Each morning, he’d climb onto the middle rail, just high enough to glimpse the road that curled away like a ribbon toward the blue hills. Sometimes he’d wait there for hours, hoping for a sign—dust rising, a stranger passing, anything to tell him that the stories he whispered to himself might be true.

His mother called him for supper before the sun slipped below the sycamores. He’d jump down, brush off his knees, and run inside where biscuits waited in a basket and the radio played softly in the corner. But his thoughts were always half a mile ahead, past the bend in the road, where adventure surely waited in a beat-up truck or the shadow of a cloud.

And then one day, it happened—a girl with a suitcase and scuffed shoes came walking up the road. She stopped at the fence, smiled like she already knew him, and said, “You’ve been waiting for a long time, haven’t you?” And the boy nodded, heart thumping, not because she was a stranger, but because he wasn’t alone anymore on the other side of someday.


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