In a sun-dappled meadow at the edge of an old forgotten forest, there lay a hairbrush—a simple thing, with a cracked wooden handle and bristles worn uneven from years of faithful service. It had been dropped by a hasty traveler long ago and now spent its days half-buried in the grass, watching the world with silent longing.
Then, one golden afternoon, she appeared.
An antelope—graceful, wild-eyed, her coat the color of autumn leaves—stepped lightly into the clearing. The brush had never seen anything so beautiful. Her hooves barely disturbed the earth; her ears twitched at every whisper of the wind. And when she bent to nibble at the tender shoots of clover, the brush felt its wooden heart (if such a thing existed) tremble with adoration.
"Ah," sighed the brush to a passing beetle, "if only I could run beside her, if only my bristles could touch her glorious hide!"
The beetle, being a pragmatic sort, merely shrugged and scuttled on.
Undeterred, the brush devoted itself to dreaming. It imagined the antelope pausing one day to rub her flank against its bristles, sighing with pleasure as it untangled her fur. It pictured her carrying it gently in her teeth to some secret glen, where they would live out their days together—she, wild and free; it, useful at last.
But antelopes do not fall in love with hairbrushes.
One evening, as the sky blushed pink, the antelope returned to the meadow. The brush trembled with hope—but she did not see it. Instead, she lowered her head, sniffed once at its worn surface, and then, with a flick of her tail, bounded away into the twilight.
The brush lay there, as it always would, half-buried and waiting. The wind tousled its bristles, the rain softened its wood, and the years passed. And though it never saw the antelope again, it dreamed of her until the very end—when its last splintered thought was of her, running forever just beyond its reach.