Chapter One

Once upon a time there lived a little girl, who lived with her grandmother on the top of a tall hill. They lived in a tiny cottage, which was approximately cube-shaped, though no one had really had the liberty of measuring the sides of said cottage. It had a roof made of tin, that the rain would pour onto during the monsoon period, and the little girl would lie awake at night listening to the pattering sounds it made as it drowned the world about her.

The little girl and her grandmother subsisted by selling confectioneries, which they would prepare early in the morning. They couldn't make much, the grandmother being old in her years and a terrible sight to behold when forced to be mobile, but they made what they could. Tiny sweet-cakes, coconutty treats and layered flour pastries they would knead and bake as the sun rose steadily from behind the hill on which they lived, until it was loftily above them. The little girl would then bundle up what they had produced in a little cloth, slinging it around her neck, and go out their little cottage and down their tall hill, so as to sell her pastries at the tiny town below.