It was a pretty summer’s morning and I slowly wandered along in the early morning sun. The path on which I walked was cracked from the long days of sun. I’d been walking for about 10 minutes, across the landscape that was so sparse compared to that of the city I had not long left behind. I took a deep breath of the warm, sweet air, and it tingled my throat pleasantly. So far, I had passed three small houses, all in uniform white and looking slightly impersonal, and a pair of high wrought iron gates that were barely visible among a thicket of tall evergreens, which I imagined would open onto a long and rather depressing driveway, and at the end of it, there would be a towering ominous looking building that would be the scene of a gruesome murder committed by the butler (who else?). I glanced behind to make sure that there were no sinister goings-on at the gate, and when I was satisfied, I carried on along the pathway. There were fields and greenery as far as the eye could see, and everything glowed a pale golden in the rays of the waking sun. In the distance, I could see a white patch, sitting indistinctly on the horizon. I assumed that it was a cottage, similar to those I had passed not long before. I walked towards it, as this was the way that the path led me . My thoughts wandered carelessly, and I got lost in the labyrinth of my own mind, when I realised that I was close enough to see the cottage clearly, and I saw that it was much nicer than the other uniform ones nearer to the village. The cottage and its garden were that of a fairy tale; the roof was thatch, and the walls were freshly white washed. Little birds perched prettily on the tiny white chimney, and serenaded the morning; their unrequited love, that every day they sweetly sung for, but never was their love returned. The windows, odd and uneven, had pieces of lace net over them, to prevent the few people who passed that way from seeing in. There was a tapestry hedge surrounding the garden that was filled with all kinds of flowers, of all colours and sizes, smiling upwards, arms outstretched, bathing in the gentle rays of the Mother Sun. They were all crammed into any space that was to be found, each colour in a little square, so that the whole garden was like a patchwork quilt. It was a place where one would expect crooked old ladies to make pies with ripe summer fruits and leave them to cool on the windowsill, for girls to be sitting at spinning wheels waiting for a King to ride by and whisk her away to turn her flax into gold. It was such a pretty little cottage, that  I decided to walk around to the front, as I had approached it from the back, and see more of it before I walked on. The entrance to the garden was a little white picket gate, was a boy. He was young, only about 16 or 17, but had an air of someone much older about him. His expression was unreadable. Not blank; he just seemed to be thinking too many things too rapidly for any one expression to surface before he was thinking on the next thing. He looked quite out of place standing there, at the gate of the fairy tale cottage; a piece of monotone modern reality in an ancient dream. He wore a plain white shirt, open at the collar, which was tucked carefully into the plain black trousers. His dark hair was slicked back, his skin as pale as his shirt. He looked as though he had been cut out and placed in the wrong picture. His eyes squinted against the sun, into which he was facing, a thin cigarette hung from his pink lips – the only colour on his face. The plainness of his dress made him intriguing, as it was so expressionless, so without character, but he must have something below the surface. He looked like the sort of person who would keep everything inside until he completely trusted a person, not the sort who would bare their soul to a complete stranger on a first meeting. He thrust his hands into his pockets and looked down at his feet, which were clad in plain black brogues. I stopped and watched him, this intriguing boy. He stood looking at his feet for a while; he didn’t seem to notice me. He lifted one hand out of his pocket and took the cigarette from his mouth, exhaled a stream of silvery smoke, then placed it back between his lips. He looked up straight into my eyes, and it struck me how startlingly green his eyes were. He took the remains of his cigarette from his lips, dropped it into the grass, turned and walked up the path into the fairy tale cottage. I stared after him for a few minutes. The cigarette stub was smouldering in front of the half-open gate, and I stepped forward and crushed it under my boot.