*Fiction — August 18, 2022
Korea
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He asked me where my grandfather lived, and I told him Korea because I didn’t know. Sometimes I pimp it out like that: instead of “I don’t know,” I say Korea. We had just eaten dinner and the dinner was wrong. We didn’t know it was wrong until we got to the bar. He was in the bathroom emptying out and I was in our booth, fists on the table with my head bowed, not in prayer but in a kind of conversation with my gut, and we, he and I, already had the feeling of being in something together, having entered it without our knowledge, something that began before the two of us ever met.
He returned to our booth. “I feel much better,” he said. “Go and do what I did.”
I refused and we had a few drinks. I could barely swallow them. But he was becoming drunk. I stood up. I hurried to the men’s room and into the stall. Rashly, I opened the toilet lid, its foul mysteries muddying my hands, and began to shiver with all the body’s violent noise. Whatever was wrong had been so terribly wrong. Korea. Don’t ask me what it means; I’ve never been there. But I think it might be like that: the stricken look my mother regarded me with, as though I’d done something to her by bringing it up. Whatever happened had happened erroneously, and the source of the error was still unknown.
Then I heard him, his tough steps rattling my knees through the bathroom floor. I already knew he was tough. I turned around and opened the stall to face him. He was looking at me and the sink was running behind him. He wet his hand beneath the faucet, ran the water over his lips. Then he rushed into the stall so that I almost fell back into my bowl of wrong, and he began to kiss me.
Maybe it’s like that. The feeling of ugliness, ambient filth, what it means to be sick and unready for love.
“I don’t want that now,” I said, my teeth bruised against his.
“Yes,” he said, grabbing me, “Now. Want that now.” I burrowed past him out of the stall, tucking That up beneath the band of my drawers, because it was betraying me. And it continued even after I was on the street, allowing myself to forget the jacket I’d worn before to see him. Performing the honor of leaving behind something ruined. Concealing the places in yourself where the ruining moved your blood. You might forgive those places. It could be the part where you forgive them.
My skin was a hard kind of cold, but I was sweating. I returned home. There I found my very good friend, perhaps the only good friend I have in the world, living there as I lived there. And outside, suddenly, snow was falling like the light of a strange ambulance as she stood in the kitchen where our lamplit plants calmly died. I began to feel pain in my knees as I approached her, aware of the volume of my breath. I did not want to learn. I could not imagine remembering. It felt to me as though I did not have the right. And Korea, I answered, Korea, when she asked me where I’d come from, but I can’t recall just how she posed the question. It may have been she only asked me why I ran.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.