The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

He had no idea that the universe could be found in a single instant, a drop of water, a blade of grass, a leaf of an apple tree.

hadn’t understood that love could be visible, as real as the grass or the river.

Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need. But

She was young and attractive, yet she felt her life had not yet begun. Why then did it seem as if it were already over?

It wasn’t that she was lazy, it was simply that she was out of sync with the pedestrian everyday world.

She felt old and out of it, no longer a college student and nothing else instead.