In February, Mayinants Tsatur turned exactly as old as his father had been when he left for war. Tsatur still remembered how his mother, her arms wrapped around his father’s neck, shook her head and begged him, in a voice gone hoarse from crying, “Please don’t leave, I won’t let you go!” Her bare feet dangled in the air. She was short of stature, with her head barely reaching her husband’s shoulder, thin, almost translucent, light as a feather. For her delicate beauty, Arusiak had earned the nickname Doll. Everyone marveled at how a simple village woman could possess so much grace. She toiled in the fields and washed her linens in the river, but nonetheless resembled a porcelain figurine: delicate, slender, outlandish.

Read this short story from the book To Go On Living.