Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I c… - Khaled Hosseini

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

But then it passed, as all things do.