(Advice to ASL students: If the deaf person teaches you a sign, do not thank them again and again. Simply repeat the sign and remember it.)

Beatriz feels alarmingly soft in your hands, and you graze her body with your palms the way you would pet the long grass by the river where you live. She tosses her dark hair aside, wraps her hand over yours, and clenches down on her own flesh.

For the rest of the day, they worked side by side in silence with a renewed love that passed between them that needed no reassurance of its existence...

There is no clear medicine in this story’s honey.

I had a plan. I would chance upon a mountain spring. Glacial. Immaculate.

Where can a girl go, but to a husband’s home? Somewhere in cities, impractical idiots dream of a revolution—our own land, our own country—but here in the village, there are only mountains and marriage.