When There Is Nothing Left But Love

In our desperation to head home, Nora hauled me along into the village in our hunt for a phone.

It’s the twenty-first century! Surely someone must have a phone around here! we thought. When we knocked on the door of the next cottage, however, Nora’s hand signals asking for a phone only met with baffled looks.

Our best efforts at miming remained futile. We departed after a good while, empty-handed.

Tabitha and Laurel hadn’t fared much better. We returned to find them sitting side by side, disconsolate. Laurel was the first to speak. “If we can’t get any results here, we should try moving further in. Perhaps we’ll get to the city. We may even meet some fellow countrymen!”

“The probability of that will be really low though. We don’t know how much longer the road up ahead is. If we aren’t careful, we may be mistaken for thieves and locked up,” Nora countered. She plopped down onto the floor with a sigh, looking defeated.

“What’s so bad about getting locked up?” Tessa asked thoughtfully. “Surely, the local policeman knows a little more than the average villager. If we manage to explain our situation to them, it might be our ticket home.”

“That’s right!” Laurel leaped to her feet in excitement. “If we get in touch with the local police, they may be able to send us home. We won’t have to wander around so aimlessly either.”

We all agreed that this was the most promising idea we’d had. We cheered up instantly at the thought and launching into a feverish discussion of what we should do to capture the attention of the local police.

We were in a village on the mountain. Who knows if there’s even a functional police station around here? I wondered to myself.

Tessa remained steadfast in her conviction that she shouldn’t participate in any criminal act, regardless of its motive. She slipped off before our discussion even began.

however, were enthusiastic. “Leave

up to one of the villager’s yards under the pretense of borrowing

arms laden with fruit, fully expecting the police to be hot on their

girls’ theft. However, on account of Nora and Tabitha being foreigners, the villager had assumed that both girls were foraging for

least of all the police. Nora and Tabitha were rather taken aback by this outcome and returned the stolen goods rather

Nora and Tabitha had returned. Embarrassed and slightly

same result. Some villagers even gave us additional food items from their own hoard out of

confined to the boundaries of their farm. They remained largely oblivious to the wider modern society beyond

with almost naive simplicity, assuming that the two girls had been starving or poor.

ways any further. However, news of our presence here in the village

practically the whole village came to visit us bearing gifts of

the most rudimentary of phrases and lots of guessing, we discovered

up the villagers’ language, having been exposed

to converse

he said ruefully, “There was no need for you to behave this way! We could have found someone

the foolishness of our plan. It was our utter hopelessness that had