A child awoke in a field of green and above him a bridge of colours stretched out: van­ish­ing beyond a mass of trees. The excite­ment in his stom­ach made him leap to his feet. He needed to find the end of the rain­bow; he needed to know where it went.

Glanc­ing back to the cot­tage he called home, he saw his mother hang­ing clean clothes and smiled. Should he tell her? No, he would not be gone so long as to allow her worry. It would only be in the next farm, or the one beside that — an hour or two at most. He would return before she knew he’d ven­tured beyond their fields.

Turn­ing from her, he bounced along the corn and made his way to the west — to the Jessop’s farm. Hope­fully the rain­bow would not end there, Mr. Jes­sop was a ques­tion­able man and Edward did not him.

The fence divid­ing their land came into view and he approached with cau­tion. Sneak­ing under it, Edward qui­etly made his way through the thick brush and inter­twined weaves of thorn branches. Exit­ing the other side, he could see the Jes­sop farm in the distance.

Look­ing to the sky, the rain­bow did not curve into the man’s land, it con­tin­ued over and onward with vigour. This is where it would get tricky – and interesting.

- — -

Burst­ing into the room, a griz­zled man sport­ing a fedora quickly side­stepped a swing­ing base­ball bat. A light flick­ered on and the mar­ried cou­ple that occu­pied the bed­room looked upon him with fear and anger.

The hus­band took a sec­ond swing but Eddie bat­tered him down with a swift smack of his hand. Push­ing past the downed man, he approached the win­dow and smashed it, look­ing down the fire escape to Sickle Street below.

“…Why?” The hus­band asked. “You were in my way,” Eddie sim­ply answered. Not look­ing back, he dis­ap­peared into the night.

Rain began to pour over­head and Eddie saw his mother’s face and recalled the first day he’d began to look for the rainbow’s end. It must have been twenty-years ago now. The boy had turned to a man: an excited curios­ity to a fevered obses­sion. He’d cov­ered three con­ti­nents, passed through count­less coun­tries and bro­ken into more houses on his west­ern path than he cared to recall.

No one would stop him until he found the ori­gin of the coloured bridge, and after two decades, he felt he was finally close to find­ing it.

- — -

It had been another month since he’d vis­ited the hus­band and wife of Sickle Street and Eddie was in a desert, climb­ing a dune.

Strug­gling to find the top, he glanced ahead. The rain­bow curved down behind the beige hori­zon. Pulling him­self for­ward, he stared in awe. He could not have imag­ined what the rainbow’s end looked like, and he could not have imag­ined that what lay at it’s end was so unexpected.