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.

“I can’t believe you would write about something like that,” my sister said. She had called our house, it was pure luck that my mother happened to be out.

I had to get used to this, the hunger, or it would eat me from inside out.