She would publish short stories in literary quarterlies, and maybe even The New Yorker. She’d also get her PhD so she’d be able to support herself as a professor. Combined, these two pursuits would guarantee her a quiet, contemplative, academic life; a life spent in the company of stories and storytellers, in the land of language and words. It was all she wanted; all she’d wanted since her fifth-grade teacher had read her class “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and every word, every pause, every image, had echoed through her and made her heart feel like a struck gong.
