Her entire world could fit into a shoebox and there would be space for more. It was how she saw things. The agony of living a life unlived. And there was no plan, just the mundane job of working in the butcher-shop and coming home with a stink she spent more time in the shower trying to erase. That was recent history or just history. In 3 months she had been almost everywhere, breakfast in Belize, dinner in Tokyo…Thankful for the day this mysterious map arrived. One minute, she was wondering why Finland was shaped like a rabbit, next moment she was in tent watching the Northern Lights- of course she screamed and panicked herself back home, tossing a sheet over the map she had rolled out on her centre table and avoiding it altogether. A week later she tried again, this time Togo. The math seemed simple. Look at the map to visit any country and the places she had been to faded to black. She couldn’t visit twice. That was particularly great for her sex life, she thought. There were so many countries left. When this was over where would she go? Surely not back to the meat cleaver and other sad stories.
The day this package arrived at her door. She almost kicked it over to her neighbours because nothing ever came here but it was her name scrawled in full that stopped her foot mid-air.
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