Insurmountable

Do you remember the stories about the girl given one impossible task after another? I do not mean the one where she goes to the middle of the field to confess the sorrows of her heart to an old stove, nor the one where she passes the city gates to greet the bloodied head of a horse whose sole rider she once was— though perhaps that is the same story? I do like the one that begins with the great despair of the uncountable: a heap of grain— or is it salt or sugar or pearls?— that she must reckon by nightfall. It ends as such stories do, with a certain hope held out to those like us: how the marginal creatures emerge from the interstices to take the mountain apart, crumb by patient crumb.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.