READ FIRST (please): This is a collection of one-shots. No, I take that back. This is a chronicle that follows this girl I made up, named Delilah. This is a romance! But I'll warn you that this first one reads a bit differently - - So keep in mind that this collection wouldn't be a chronicle if every romance worked out right off the bat. I try to keep it real. And there is a moral to the story, or the collection, or chronicle, or whatever: You'll get a happy ending. Eventually.

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I. Hey There, Delilah

He was the type of boy who couldn't define beautiful. He liked to point out every color in the sunset; starting with hot pink, then salmon, and then four different shades of yellow (gold, urine, canary, lightbulb), before he finally got to the white of the setting sun or the forty different shades of blue in the evening sky. Once, he stopped just to show her a spider's web still wet from the rain that fell half an hour ago.

He said, "It looks like what fairytales are made of."

She said, "What?" An amused but confused smile curling up her mouth and crinkling her eyes.

But he only shrugged and continued on his way, muttering a soft, "Never mind."

She followed along, not thinking much on it.

It wasn't long before he met the other girl and the first faded into the white noise of memories that still played at the back of his mind, like a television in a child's room -- always there, always on, but hardly paid attention to.

The boy showed her a June Bug that got stuck under his windsheild-wiper during the drive to her house, still alive and buzzing in that annoying way that June Bugs do.

He said, "It sounds like a train wreck in hell, one that keeps happening over and over."

She said, "His name shall be Henri." And she pet the bug with the very tip of her pinky. "With the h-e from 'hell' and the n-r-i from 'train.'"

His eyes lit up.

He asked, "Should we keep him?"

She looked at him, replying, "Would you like to live the rest of your life in a glass jar?"

"Well," he said, considering it. "There are people who live in bubbles."

"You don't live in a bubble."

"There are people who live in jail cells."

"You've never lived in a cage."

She had a point, but he took Henri home anyway, cupped in the palm of his hand laid in his lap as he drove. He wanted to prove that life under glass might not be so bad. At home, he took a jar from the kitchen cabinet, poked some holes in the top. Took some grass from outside. Some green leaves off the trees. Finally, he gently slid Henri inside and set his jar by his bedroom window.

Henri had stopped chirping.

The next day, the boy called her again.

"Hey, Delilah," he said. "Henri's dead."

She didn't say 'I-told-you-so.'

They threw him a funeral in the backyard at her place, digging a hole in the garden with a stray branch off the oak tree in the neighbor's yard (He pointed out, "We'll have to bury the stick, too").

Mummified in a square of toilet paper, they laid Henri to rest.

The boy said, "He was a good bug."

She said, "It just wasn't meant to last."

They looked at each other, and then the boy walked away. They didn't speak again after that day.