Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

To give herself something to do, and because she was nervous, Hannah ran her fingers across the top of the wooden nightstand. The edges were a little battered, but the surface was polished to a mirror shine that smelled faintly of lemons.

In the United States, it would be a good bet that the nightstand drawer held a Gideon Bible, because the Gideons were like ninjas. They could get into any hotel room, past any lock, and nobody ever saw them. You only knew they'd been there when you saw the results of their mission.

In some U.S. hotels, the Bible would share space with a Book of Mormon.

In other countries, it varied. Sometimes you got nothing but a pamphlet advertising local attractions. Sometimes you'd get a Bible. Sometimes you'd get the Bhagavad Gita. Sometimes you'd find a Koran, in classical Arabic with a side-by-side commentary in English or another major language.

Hannah slid the drawer open a few inches. It was empty except for a dusty postcard picturing a howler monkey with "Community Baboon Sanctuary" emblazoned across the bottom in bright yellow letters. Hannah flipped the postcard over. It was blank.

Renata answered Hannah's earlier hypothetical question.