Getsulma

On the highest motorable road in the world, H. tells me she's thinking of staying. Yesterday, a nun named Khunzes declined to tell H. her 36 vows – "Unless you become a nun." We laughed. Now we're not laughing.

But the street signs are still laughing:

Drive with care / makes accidents rare

After drinking whisky / driving is risky

Darling I like you / but not so fast

"So what do you want to do?" I ask. "Become a Ladakhi nun?"

"Would that be the end of the world?"

I don't know. We're on top of the world. I can't see the end.

From Guest Contributor Zachary Smolar

For the prompt Frontier

On And On And On

On the fifth anniversary of his father’s heroic death in a far-off jungle, a nine-year-old boy pleads and screams as he’s dragged into a tool shed by his drunken stepfather.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary, the boy, reeking of cheap whisky and cigarettes, staggers into his daughter’s bedroom while the young girl cowers against the wall.

On the fifty-eighth anniversary, that girl collapses into her lightless closet, and as her fury-laced glares and impaling shouts become anguished sobs, her teenage daughter sits alone in the bathroom and once again glides the thin, comforting edge of a razor blade across her thigh.

From Guest Contributor J. Paul Ross