As a mother, I wanted to keep my son from harm.

Known in Mandarin as zouhun, or walking marriage, tiesese is an alternative to matrimony in which men visit women at night to fulfill the need for procreation and sexual gratification.

A house’s underneathness is crushing—weight of sleep pressing from the flats above, little lumps of coal releasing miniature avalanches which rattle down the black pile, furnace grimly dead, asbestos-covered arms prying into every corner.

“The faith responded in kind; a prophet had a vision and decided that the Messiah couldn’t be born until the faithful had their treasure back, or the female line of the family had died out; whichever came first. And however it worked, it had to happen by the time of the decamillennium.” […] “This is a terrible thing, isn’t it? Here we are, about to start the second decamillennium, and your faith wants to hunt down and kill—preferably put to death ceremonially, in fact—a woman who has never been convicted of anything and whose only crime appears to be having been born, and being born female.”