Short Story Press Presents Sandy's Mended Heart

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.

Short Story Press publishes short stories written by everyday writers.