Ask Aleksan what his biggest fear is, and he’ll answer without hesitation: hunger. Pain can be soothed with medicine, cold can be spooked off with warmth, fear can be chatted away. But nothing can placate or cheat hunger; it hovers overhead in a cloud of infernal darkness, taunting you and killing every shred of your humanity. Aleksan is intimately acquainted with hunger; he lived with it for two endlessly long years. “Nothing can be more frightening than hunger,” thought Aleksan, and he knew exactly what he was saying because he had stared hunger straight in the face.

A short story from Armenia asks what the purpose of human life is.