An Intervention of the Intended

by David Michael Conner

Even, pale-gray light suffused the clear openness of Reston, downplaying the generally obvious beauty of Amanda Baker, a town’s resident for a long stretch of her life’s timeline, as far back as her memory could inform her. Her past being entwined with the town’s rapid history, she had changed with it over her scarce twenty years; in the beginning, the forested area hosted a girl without reserve who danced among her naturalistic surroundings as free as a doe. Maintaining the natural analogy, her large brown eyes seemed deerlike. But if Ms. Baker were the delicate animal, then she would still sport spots as evidence of her pristine youth, and yet her formal manner would indicate her growth into the burgeoning small city’s current state of deforestation and the surrogate influence of the green of minted currency that framed Reston’s society.

Worldly age notwithstanding, our young Ms. Baker had been thusly engaged in a relationship of a quite close affiliation, though not to an extent which would not withstand moral scrutiny, with a man nearing two times her age. Having completed her university years, Ms. Baker had reached the age—indeed, the age of legitimate imbibery only weeks ahead—at which she would accept the crucial progression of beginning a family.

But though the boughs in her environment had been replaced with grand edifices, Amanda’s short life was not to be free of the cruel laws of nature. Only days after receiving the anticipated proposal from her longtime companion, the young woman—one might even consider her an old girl—met with the sickle of he who harvests, in this case animal, just at the peak of fertility.