On the Docks in Braila

After a drunken healer's clumsy bloodletting kills his and his mother's cow--the extra income from which allowed them to make ends meet--fourteen-year-old Adrien Zograffi must begin an apprenticeship in a toolmaking workshop in the Danube River port of Braila, Romania. Not long after he begins, a set of floating grain elevators appears on the river. The apprentice Adrien finds himself swept up in the protest movement of the dockworkers, whose livelihoods are threatened by the arrival of the automated elevators.

Genre: novella
Length: 12,400 words