Page 119 - NS 2024

brooks running in its wake. Min splashed over these mindlessly, weaving around the sopping wet thorns of the blackberry bushes that threaded together into a vegetable membrane that had to be forced through. At one of these junctures where the brush became too thick to evade their grip, she ripped her arm out of a particularly clingy vine in an awkward jerking motion, only to trip over a concealed rock or root and fall face-first into the sharp, tangled mess. To make matters worse, she had fallen onto a slope leading into an obstructed valley, and poor Min found herself tumbling down this terrain uncontrollably. Plants mercilessly tore at her clothes, skin, and face. All that she left exposed seemed to be subject to vindictive punishment at the whims of the greenery. Mud thrust itself into her hair and eyes, even under her clothes; it pressed itself against the newly formed wounds, a cruel salve of infection and grit to the stinging pains of cuts and the throbbing of the bruises. She may have lost consciousness momentarily
when she smacked her head against a small rock on the way down. When she came to, she felt a trickle of blood running down her temple and nestling in the pool of mud settled against her earlobe. Her vision slowly regained definition, and as it did, she began to make out the small clearing she had tumbled into...as well as the decrepit thatched hut cradled within it.
Min didn’t believe in God. But she did believe in sin. As she started to form a concrete view of the dilapidated, sagging shelter before her, she felt that all-too-familiar jolt of fear and guilt. She had gone too far.
She found herself struggling to take full breaths; her chest would heave, not content with the capacity her damaged lungs could allow for. Sister Tonya had been right; if this was what smoking had done to her, she would never submit to the urge again. The tremendous pain of her wounds and the ambient discomfort of the wet and the mud gave way to pulsing adrenaline.