The Impatient Pilgrim

The girl had a hen, and the hen would not lay while she was watched, and the girl was always watching.

She wants the end of everything first. She eats the heel of the loaf because the middle takes too long. She finishes other people's sentences for them, and gets them wrong. Her mother has a warning about being careful that nobody has ever heard past its third word. In her thirteenth year, as the custom of that country allows, she asks for the road, and is through the gate at a run.

The road does not hurry for her. She takes a cart to a walling town and arrives before the quarry that feeds it, and has to walk back. A thatcher ties a knot so slowly it sets her teeth on edge, and gives it to her to untie when she has a minute. An orchard-woman gives her a twist of apple pips that will not come up without a winter on them. A founder pours a bell, and the cooling is the part no hand can touch. On a bog a man with a kettle that has never boiled tells her the start of a joke and nothing more. Then the snow shuts the pass, and she counts the holes on the board by the fire, and puts her pack on.

A fable of the road in fifteen Steps, to be read one a night with twenty minutes outside after each. It is funny, quiet and exact, and it is about the middle of things, which is nearly all of everything.

The Impatient Pilgrim is Book Three of the Pilgrim Cycle, after The Honest Pilgrim and The Stubborn Pilgrim. Each book stands alone.