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.

Tabitha, however, were enthusiastic. “Leave it to

of the villager’s yards under the pretense of borrowing something. They then grabbed a bundle

laden with fruit,

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

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

had returned. Embarrassed and slightly frustrated, Nora and Tabitha decided to turn to

to be met with the same result. Some villagers even gave us additional food items from their own hoard out

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

and Tabitha’s acts with almost naive simplicity, assuming that the two girls had been starving or poor. They’d done what they did selflessly,

not to pursue our thoughtless ways any further. However, news of our presence here in the village had

the whole village came to visit us bearing gifts of

rudimentary of phrases and lots of guessing, we discovered that

Tabitha was the quickest to pick up the villagers’ language, having been exposed to other similar foreign tongues

was able to

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

realized the foolishness of