1

Having already incurred a serious penalty for making a vulgar approach, Hansen was forced to begin his courtship again, not with the relatively intimate circle of Nina’s uncles and cousins, but with distant kin in single-story houses on the far fringes of town, who would sit him down at their kitchen tables and poke at his stomach and ribs, and speak in a language of single syllables uttered from the backs of their throats, while at the same time feeding him copious portions of turnip, dumplings, and goat, and finishing meals with pints of plum brandy brewed in their very own stills, before sending him off to the next kin, so that by the time he arrived at Nina’s house in the autumn of the following year, the butcher would be able to cleave enough meat to make a satisfying meal.

2

Not all of the objects appended to Olga would prove useful to Heath, that would be too much to ask, especially at this time of year, when the number of women coming down the road was diminishing, so that Heath had to load his cart quickly and haul it out to the road, for already Olga was cresting the hill, Heath could see the paddles and racks tied to the loops of her belt, and the antlers, wheels, wickets and stones dragging behind her on the road, clanging and stirring up dust, and if Heath failed to lift up his objects and sing out each of their names, then Olga would continue on down the road in the direction of Frederick and Klaus, and Heath would have to cook his own meals until the beginning of spring.

3

Maybe Frank was not fully engendered, but that didn’t keep him from scooping up crawdads from the bottom of the river and washing them down with a bottle of grog, Frank being the kind of man who preferred shellfish to trout, and who owned a boat with a shallow bottom, so that he could row to the shore, where the women were stuck to their knees in the mud and waving their arms like the antennae of shrimp and calling out to Frank for help, or so it seemed to Frank, thinking highly of himself, as he lifted the women into his boat and turned them around this way and that before eventually throwing them back, for Frank was only in it for sport.

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I was trying to build worlds in one sentence, to see if the sentence would suffice for building a world. For some reason, everything got really dark.