Tales in the sand

✍ Scribed by Gaiman, Neil

• Book ID: 106877140
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 5 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Here, a story is placed at the center of an adulthood rite, and it is a specifically and determinedly gendered tale. An older man takes a younger man out into the desert soon after the young man has been circumcised. The young man must go out into the desert to find an unspecified something; he returns, as they apparently always do, with a heart-shaped piece of green glass. And then the older man tells the younger man a story that, he says, must only be told here and must only be told once to each man: “For this is the way it has always been. Each of us hears the tale once, in this place. And each of us tells the story once in this place … if Grandmother Death spares us long enough to tell it…”