Short Story Press presents "Sandy's Mended Heart", by Norah crowley.

This story follows Sandy, a 19-year-old woman, as she makes the difficult transition from living in an insular religious community to “outside” life in a college town. Sandy struggles with:

• Living alone when she has always been surrounded by a close family
• Meeting different types of people when she has always been in a small community
• Making her way with new people who don’t think or act like those at home - she has to figure out how they think and what they actually mean by what they say and how they act
• Meeting men who live and work in environments - a college campus, a military base - that are the total opposites of the community she has known all her life
• Dealing with her need to find love, and hopefully a marriage, in a new world without the guidelines of her strict community or the oversight of her family
• Falling in love with a man who is so totally different from her father, brothers, cousins, and all the men she has known in her life and in fact is a soldier, someone whom her pacifist religious community would find totally unacceptable
• Finding a church home and a place where she can live with her strong religious convictions even though she does not totally accept the limitations of her original church
• Coping with love and loss, putting lessons of forgiveness into practice, and picking up the pieces of a broken heart without becoming bitter