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. Short Story Press publishes short stories written by everyday writers.