Patrick Arthur Chimney had a silly name, and had never forgotten the taunts he had endured throughout his school days, which weren't very originally wrought, but had stung him deep nevertheless. Those old words rang in his ears as he took his customary shortcut from the day's university lectures, across a patch of wasteland that had become overgrown with wildflower, and adrift in its gentle undulations with dry autumn leaves.
"Sweep," had been an especially common choice of his tormentors. "Been up a chimney, Chimney?" was often a nonsensical follow up, and though he had had the good fortune to leave behind the small town in which those that made his school days a misery had mostly remained, he couldn't quite leave behind those words, or the way they had made him feel. This was chiefly why he chose his shortcuts — of which this unworn path through a lonely patch of ground was just one — to avoid the bulk of the students on his journey home. They would gather without him, in fluid groups, and make their way back to the halls-of-residence in a complex turbulence of social interactions, into which Patrick felt he had only the most limited insight.
He could hear them still, their shouts and laughs carried on the autumn breeze. Carried also were a few wildflower petals, and some leaves loosed from the branches of the trees that surrounded this patch of land, and separated it from his imagined troubles. For the truth was that Patrick was not a bad-looking boy, and that his inabilities were driven only by the same uncertainty that every human being feels, and that he needed only to look a little past it, to know that all other people felt, more or less, as he did.
In the distance, a small bird sang an autumn song, and the breeze shifted, turning to a slight headwind, brining with it some dust lifted from the dry ground. Patrick had to turn his face a little, which meant he missed the very beginning of what started to happen next.
As the wind moved, the autumn sunshine seemed to change slightly, the shadows turned, and in their occluded centers, where the light was the least, a small spark might have been seen, and seen to grow. If he had been watching at that moment, Patrick would have rubbed the dust from his incautiously opened eyes, and would have spotted a single leaf, twisting in the wind, inexplicably halt mid-flight. Caught impossibly against an invisible object.
By the time the second, and the third leaf had come abruptly to rest mid-air, Patrick had lifted his head into the wind, and blinked away the dust, and stopped, and stared. Before him, more leaves gathered against something, driven there by a wind that was now blowing briskly towards a single point. Something with a shape that began to resemble a figure, slowly revealed, standing motionless on the ground, among the slender stems of the wildflowers.
As more and more leaves, in reds and oranges, and some petals along with them, in purples and blues, appeared to hang in the air, the figure moved. It turned, having apparently being facing away from Patrick, and as it did so, the curve of a shapely breast betrayed its owner as a woman. It is an extraordinary thing that even though this shape was imperfectly, and incompletely, picked out from the empty air by the leaves that covered it, it was still a lovely and erotic sight as she turned around further to face him.
Under the cover of the leaves, first a darkness gathered, and then, as each gap between each leaf was finally almost entirely closed by the arrival of another, a light became visible, shining from the few remaining cracks. It grew in intensity, and picked out in each leaf their fine branching veins, until it became so bright that Patrick had to look away again, which meant he missed the very final moment of the figure's appearance.
The light, in a single instant vanished, the leaves fell in a rustling drift, blown away gently by the now-calmed breeze, and in their place stood a pale, tall, and very, very naked, young woman. Her long hair black, her eyes hazel, her breasts full and firm, her belly just slightly round, and between her legs, a patch of dark and unruly hair. She stood and stared at the astonished Patrick, who had by the time the light had faded, opened his eyes. He had rather limited experience with the opposite sex, being teased at school, and then too afraid at University, he had failed to move far beyond a few unsatisfactory fumblings on awkward dates. One memorable evening had resulted in his coming, rather too quickly, in a probably relieved girl's hands.
He had often replayed this scene in his mind, and played out multiple endings, some of which ended with — as he imagined people might call it — going "all the way".
Patrick's chest tightened, he had no idea what on earth was going on, and would very likely have said something foolish, or perhaps even run away, which would have been a tragic mistake, had the young woman not taken a half-step towards him, and introduced herself.
"Hello, I'm Sophie."
This introduction was no explanation at all, of course. Sophie is just a name, a lovely one, and certainly one befitting a beautiful naked young woman who has just materialised in front of the astonished Patrick. But a name by itself left him with no more idea of what was going on than the moment before he knew it.
"Er... Hi, er," offered Patrick. And then, in an unsure voice; "Are you ok?" Some instinctive chivalrous intention rose up in him. He began to remove his jacket. "Here," he said, as he moved towards her, "Take this."
"No, it's ok," she replied, waving it away, "I don't wear clothes."
He looked at her, incredulously.
"I don't seem to need them," she explained. "They don't really suit me, if I'm honest," she added, and gave her round breasts each a slight squeeze from underneath as she spoke; "I prefer to be naked." She smiled at him, a lovely unaffected smile, her lips full and red, her teeth white, and perfect.
Patrick continued to stare at this vision before him. He was a clever young man, capable of clear and lucid thought, with powers of concentration that often caused him to lose hours while working, though it would seem to him that only minutes had passed. He read widely, knew Ovid and The Metamorphosis, was aware that impossible things occurred in fiction almost with every word. He lived on the edge of being real, held to the factual foundations of a world of things by a gravity. Always though, with a feeling in his heart that there was something above him, out of reach, that he could sense, but not touch or see.
He thought to himself, as this young woman gazed at him, so easy and comfortable in her body, its curves and shapes as much a part of her as her thoughts and dreams must be, that perhaps those real things might not be all the things there were, after all.
"What just happened?" he asked, "You seemed to just appear, there was a light... it was bright, I closed my eyes, and then there you were." He looked around, foolishly, at the tall wildflowers that stood in patches between them and the trees, maybe fifty meters away. "Where did you come from?" he asked, eventually.
Sophie replied, "Oh, I was always here. I'm a nymph. A spirit. I'm a magical creature of the flowers, and the trees..."
Patrick's instinct, the gravity of real things, for the moment overrode his heart. The sense in him of a possibility of something else, still just feebly felt, quieted beneath it.
"Sophie, that's just silly," he began, in the rather tiresome tone he sometime took with people when he felt that he was best situated to explain the ways in which they were wrong. "You must have been lying down among these flowers, and we should go and find someone who can help." And then, in what he felt was a reassuring voice, he added, "It's going to be ok, Sophie."
She looked at him patiently. "I'm here for a reason you know." She clasped her hands behind her back, stood on her tiptoes, and dropped back down again, making her breasts bounce slightly. "So you should put your jacket back on, and sit with me, over there, and I'll explain." She indicated, with a wave of a bare arm, some of the leaves from which she had so miraculously, and so nakedly, appeared. "Come along."
She turned, revealing a perfectly turned bottom, walked the few steps over to the leaves, spun back around, and sat, cross-legged, down on them. The black hair between her legs parted to reveal her sex, pink and beautiful, to the increasingly incredulous Patrick. He knelt opposite her, unable to think of anything more sensible to do.
He told himself, still gravitationally anchored to the real, that his mind must be at fault, and therefore that this was a hallucination of some glorious kind. He began to make up his mind to at least try to enjoy it. The situation didn't seem dangerous, he was quite alone, other than this beautiful naked woman, and he didn't have anywhere else that he needed to be. Being in any sort of rush was a state of mind that he preferred to avoid. He relaxed a little.
Sophie lifted a leaf from the pile between her crossed legs, and showed it to Patrick. "I'm as real as these leaves are. More so, even." — If she is real, wondered Patrick, could she read this thoughts?
