Cappadocia

"I've got something in my hand," said the white backpacker with the two-week beard, "A thorn or some shit like that. I can't get it out."

He held his palm out to the Japanese girl he had been hiking with for the last three hours. She took it in both hands and looked it over very closely. Then she began to work with her fingernails at the root of the hair-thin spine that had pierced him on one of his excursions off the trail. Scrambling up the side of the tuff-walled valley to see where they were going. Or maybe just to impress her. She tutted with frustration and moved around him to make better use of the sun. His hand flinched as she tweezered with her nails, never quite catching the exposed spike, never quite starting its slow unsheathing from his skin.

When she finally drew it out he shivered with relief.

"So small," she said, holding it up for him to see.

"Jesus," he said, "that's fucking tiny. How could something that small hurt that much?"

He wiped his palm, its filmy residue of sweat, on his trousers. He could still feel a hot stab where the thorn had been.

"Thanks, ah…" his voice hovered.

"Sumiko."

He smiled at her and looked away through his sunglasses at the kilned lunar landscape of Cappadocia and looked back.

"Thanks Sumiko."