Morning Walk

by Igor Zenin

Whitewashed cottages lean into a hillside path older than the fog still rising off the valley below it — this is a Moldovan village at the hour when almost no one's awake to see it. Villages like this one are thinning out fast, the young gone to the cities and further, leaving the old ways to people who never planned on being the last ones keeping them. The walk reads quiet because there's almost no one left to walk it.