Excerpt: Untitled

I stayed in the village in which I was raised until I was nearing twenty-five, when there was a woman vying for my attention and the consequent children. My mother and father and three brothers encouraged me with her, but I found myself shunning her. It was not out of malice or even disinterest in her, but the simple fact that I did not want what she did. I did not want to have a home with her, nor have children, much less raise them in the village I had not enjoyed growing up in. So many times I had looked over the field and wondered what was beyond the horizon, and I would not myself condemn another generation to that fate. So much to my mother's disappointment, I left there for the next village, the one whose spires I could see just on the edge of my world, with the right light and weather.