Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Page 12

  She feels the softness above the bones in his hard palm.

  Then there is the bus and the door, and she is hiding in the thickets of men until the back of his sooty white shirt fades into the swarms of workers at the station. She clutches the window frame, catching her breath and feeling her pulse. The bus pulls forward.

  STACKS OF CASH grow taller than her sons. She sews her savings into the hems of her petticoats, and when they weigh her down, she buys thick gold belts that she fastens across her broad belly. At night her eyes close and grow green: she converts belts to houses, belts to bedrooms, belts to Western toilets and marble verandas. Belts become private schools and eggs at every meal. Belts become doctor visits and clean teeth. Belts trace the shape of her waist and the length of her life, and when she feels them move under her sari she feels a deep-set satisfaction.

  She visits a newsstand and pays for a filmi magazine to read at teatime.

  “I saw you here with your husband once,” the vendor says, and she shakes her head, belts clanging beneath her blouse.

  “You saw some other woman,” she says.

  The vendor studies the brightness of her blouse and nods. “You may be right,” he says. “Anyway—that man passed some months ago.”

  WHEN THE GODDESS called Savitri chased Yama to the ends of the earth, for a dead husband whose life was not yet finished, she charmed Death with her words and fooled him with her wisdom. Papamma thinks of Savitri Devi, that cunning mother goddess and her white-willed tongue, and then—sticky-smiled—of the wide-eyed Savitri Ramasamy, whose Bollywood business was plastered on the front of every new magazine she purchased. The actress’s husband was a liar and cheat, the rumors said; famous actor and all that, and still a man with two women.

  There will be a pyre, she is told, and she is alight briefly with the thought of Vasu’s body burning, but she cannot bring herself to watch him melt to black ash. She shaves her head and burns her bright clothes. Her sons swaddle her shoulders in gray-brown cloth and she clutches them close to her dry red eyes.

  “For him?” they ask her. “Still, for him?”

  “A marriage is a marriage,” she says.

  Madhavi comes to the hut.

  Her heart beats in threes. She does not answer the door.

  Kristen Sahaana Surya is a student of fiction at the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a lawyer living in New York City.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  From the first sentence, Sena Moon’s story grabbed our attention. There’s something so deliciously strange and alluring about this story’s syntax that makes everything feel a little off-kilter. A deep and treacherous darkness looms beneath every surface of this story—in the vivid descriptions of Seoul, and what at first seems like a mundane conversation between two former friends. Moon crafts conversation with such skill and unravels the dark underbelly of her characters’ lives to create a wholly surprising and compelling narrative.

  Michelle Donahue, Prose Editor

  Alyssa Greene, Prose Editor

  Quarterly West

  DOG DREAMS

  Sena Moon

  “HELLO, HELLO,” GOES the voice, immediate and rushed. It gives me an unexpected long pause to decide whether to hang up on this intrusion. Just when my thumb decides yes, I hear the voice calling out, “Jimin-ah, is that you?” before drowning into nothingness. My thumb perspires against the heat of the END button. It’s Yeju.

  Seoul is sweltering that summer. Sometime around May, the sun became a nuisance and not a sporadic beacon of warmth and beauty. By June, hellfire. People share near-death experiences over the phone and I secretly rejoice. The heat wave is as good a reason as any to remain in status quo, holed up and hunched in my room, festering.

  “Please don’t call again,” I write back. “Even with a different number.”

  But my phone pleads. “An hour,” it says, “just an hour. Okay, thirty minutes. Even less. Please.”

  We meet at a tent bar where older men drink alone. The orange tent is partially open to let out the heat. A rickety fan spews hot air in the corner, facing the cook, whose face is awash in an oily red sheen that resembles the color of her apron. We order food. The smell of scallions sizzling in fresh oil makes heads turn lazily toward the sky, whiffing and panting.

  “I’m paying.” Yeju scrambles over to the counter. The cook palms the money and offers us soju in return. Silently, we each down a shot and watch the flour puddles turn golden brown on the skillet.

  Yeju is barefaced today, her formfitting blouse a smattering of funfetti against white polyester. The flimsy material is sticking to her skin and turning beige. Below, a pencil skirt of moderate length, no heels. A cheap vinyl bag with the print of a running poodle on its side completes the look. Not her usual form. In fact, it looks more my speed. I could have worn that skirt.

  She catches me assessing.

  “How’ve you been doing?” she asks.

  I’ve been telling close acquaintances I’ve been sick. “Benign tumor. That threatens to be aggressive.”

  The cook scissors thick pancakes into manageable portions before serving them up. The sides are burnt and crispy, a little too much flour and not nearly enough scallion. Yeju tears off the burnt bits before she wolfs down a piece.

  “So,” I prompt. “Start talking.”

  The hollow of her cheek bulges as she pushes her mouthful to the side, chipmunk-like. She begins.

  It all started with a man and ended with his wife slapping her in front of six of her coworkers. The man, K, had a small apartment and a Hyundai Avante to his name, and also a funnel chest that prevented him from getting fully nude with her, ever. But he’d shown himself to his wife, and that niggled Yeju.

  “I’ve heard this a million times before,” I tell her. “Twenty minutes.”

  “There’s more this time. I promise.” She rips into another pancake.

  The married K was good friends with another man, an insurance salesman called S. Yeju considered S a proper gentleman because he bought her two glasses of white wine and nothing more. He didn’t press for sex. Her sob story to him about being the office wife turned into a nuzzle, where he kneaded her thighs with his veiny hands as he gently headbutted her neck over and over again. One night, he drove her along Han Kang Bridge and they watched the rainbow lights “flirt with the night sky”—his words.

  “I’m leaving,” I tell her. I wish to curl up in bed and wake up in December.

  “No, listen.” Yeju fills her paper cup to the brim. “Initially, I was trying to get back at K; I admit this. But I ended up really digging S. I met his family and all.”

  She drums her fingers on her neckline. “S had a brother. Slim, good-looking kid, only seventeen. He was a neujdung-i, thus the absolute baby of the family. The mother was forty-six when he was born.”

  The man next to us snorts. Yeju ignores him or, rather, doesn’t notice.

  “His brother was blind. Nothing congenital. This kid was born healthy and stayed in tip-top condition throughout his adolescence. Then he suddenly went blind when he was sixteen.”

  Her hand makes a pulling motion as if she’s switching off a light. Despite myself, I am hooked. Yeju has a knack for this, which is why she was so successful as a bar hostess. Most girls there just listened, but Yeju could really talk.

  “Naturally the family was devastated, S most of all. He adored his brother, from what I’ve heard. In fact, he claims he’s only ever loved me like he loves his little brother.”

  I gag. “It’s a sales pitch. He’s in insurance.”

  “Right. But the insurance payout saved his family. They were about to lose the house. The mother was diabetic, which led to renal insufficiency, which eventually led to hospice care. The father lost his job in a layoff and refuses to wash himself anymore, because what’s the point? Add to that the poor blind boy and you’ve got yourself a chronic situation”—she uses the English word—“and S felt guilty because he thought, well, blood money. That money sav
ed them.”

  Yeju takes a pause to swig and I follow suit.

  “They say soju tastes sweet when you’re miserable,” she titters nervously.

  I’m entirely unimpressed with this role she’s given herself. “And?”

  “And, well. He decided anyone he cared about should understand the benefits of insurance. You never know when you might drive your car off the road or go blind.”

  “That’s awful pessimistic of him.”

  “Like you, Jimin. Your semi-benign tumor?” She challenges me now, her heavy-lidded, half-moon eyes waxing. I am waiting for the moment she asks me to partake in her beau’s insurance scheme.

  “Anyhow, I told S the only way I’d spring for a policy that big is if he’d do it with me. And like I told you, he’s a gentleman. He applied first. I applied next. We are moving toward a new level of commitment as a couple.”

  “How stupid are you?” I ask.

  “No, but we are.”

  She plucks a ring from the depths of her blouse, tethered to her neck by a delicate silver chain. Baby diamonds huddle in a neat line atop a thin platinum road. The ring looks a hair too small for her fingers and does not belong in this seedy tent. “He proposed,” she says.

  “Did he?” My plastic stool scrapes concrete as I stand. The alcohol shoots to my brain and my teeth start to pound. “This was mildly interesting.”

  “Jimin-ah.”

  “Good to see you, Yeju. I think we’re done here.”

  I walk through the tent flaps without saying goodbye, realizing a few drunken steps later I’ve left my sandals under my seat.

  Yeju emerges a moment later in a halo of light, my sandals in one hand and her vinyl bag smothering her chest in the other. Her mouth rounds into an O as she trips over a beveled tile on the sidewalk, releasing a scratchy yelp as she lands on hard concrete. On all fours, she looks up and addresses the night sky. “I’m fine.”

  I quicken my pace. Yeju tails me. Gravel bites into the soles of my feet as Dangsan Road expands and brightens upon itself, and I reach the four-way intersection where two boys and a girl are walking a Pomeranian dressed in red booties. This nugget of a dog gets critical of my dirty, naked feet and proceeds to wrap its strap around me as it loop the loops, yip-yip-yip.

  “Ottokhe—I’m so sorry.” The girl apologizes as she hands the harness to her friends and helps me loose. Twenty yards back, Yeju is still hobbling after me with shredded knees. When the streetlight hits her squarely, all three adolescents gasp and jaywalk from the site, dog in arms. The light turns blue.

  Yeju finally catches up and throws herself onto my back. Her arms snake over my clavicles as my back arches, my legs kicking up seconds after my brain tells them to, slow and heavy like they belong to someone else. My mouth is smashed against her biceps. MAC Ruby Woo lipstick drags along the polyester, leaving permanent garish streaks. There is no one around, only cars.

  “His little brother didn’t go blind,” Yeju gasps. “S took out a youth insurance policy a year before that kid went blind.”

  I go limp.

  “From a syringe.” Her arm is a hot noose, her whisper scallions and liquor. “He said the needle went in like going through thick pudding. Or like yanggaeng, red bean bars. S was crying buckets when he told me.”

  Sensing my body slacken, she unfolds herself some.

  “Would you listen now?”

  I nod. We are face-to-face. Yeju gives me a look I instantly recognize as the one from my wedding, the time she caught the bouquet.

  She was my purse gal. Yeju flanked me throughout the preceremony, collecting envelopes stuffed with cash and holding my purse while suits and mid-length dresses floated into the boudoir and took glossy photos of us looking unnaturally happy. My parents didn’t approve of this harlot, this semi-prostitute-in-waiting—as my mother called her—standing in as my best girl. My mother, the stay-at-home tutor, and my father, a distinguished professor of a university no one has ever heard of—they like to think themselves as proper, well-meaning folk. They did little to hide their contempt. Yeju stayed until the end, her beautiful nails a bloody mess by mid-reception from being chewed on when she thought no one was looking.

  I should’ve defended her. But her social accounts are peppered with documentation of takeout coffees and beautiful food, men with missing heads that only hint at the identity of the recorded. The most they show are pearly smiles, because Yeju crops every photo she uploads to keep her life undefined.

  Yet defined her life was, at least in my eyes. She used to tell me stories about her men, paying clients and nonpaying ones. The way her hair cascaded onto pillows of every bachelor pad and motel imaginable—once, the back seat of a moving train; once, the gleaming wooden surface of a temple floor. The smell of hand sanitizer. Sanitized hands patting under pillows, groping for a condom, a knife, an ulterior motive, for her phone, to tell me that I was the only person she could truly be open with ever since that day we met in the hospital where we both lost something: her a womb and me a baby. In the end, her stories meld together—the motels, card keys, and cheap toothbrushes that spit bristles into her mouth so that she eventually gives up and gargles using her own travel-size Listerine, spitting again and again into a bowl that is perpetually coated with fluid, under a light that casts violet shadows on her face. I may have tolerated my mother’s vision of Yeju, if not outright believed it.

  She didn’t want the bouquet. I threw it to her anyway. When the time came, she caught the flowers half-heartedly, almost quizzically, as if the hydrangeas and peonies had taken flight by their own volition and landed in her arms, like an evil omen, or a reminder. When we locked eyes amid the flurry of cheers, Yeju shot me a look. Later, before I went off to Saipan for my honeymoon, she toasted me and slurred: Be happy enough for the both of us.

  “I’m planning to do the same to K,” the Yeju in front of me says.

  “What?”

  We are still under the streetlights, backed by the constant flow of traffic. I look down and half expect to see my wedding dress dragging in hot gravel.

  “You’re the only person I’m telling.” She pats the rump of her vinyl bag. “K took out an insurance policy, too, under S’s guidance.”

  “Are you still seeing K?”

  “No.” She shakes her damp curls. “Could if I wanted to.”

  “Did S put you up to this?” I ask, feeling more absurd by the minute. “How do you know S won’t do the same to you? After all, he blinded his own brother.”

  She considers. “I just know,” she says. “That brother is living with us now. We’re paying for his everything, and that’s okay. I’m living with S, and that’s okay, too.”

  I watch Yeju rummaging around in her bag, fishing for validation.

  “If anyone finds out,” she says, “I’m going to bring this to the authorities.” The syringe rests at the bottom of a ziplock bag. “He kept it,” she says.

  We walk back together. Our tired legs glide over the intersection, the flickering lights, the tent bar, the gravel. We are swept into the maw of a dark building, lifted by an elevator that smells vaguely of dead roses, cat pee. At the entrance of my apartment, Yeju leans tentatively against the doorway, tracing her breath with palms folded over her chest.

  “We’re friends, aren’t we?” she asks.

  “Maybe.” I wave her off. “I might tell on you.”

  “That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”

  Yeju sinks gently to the floor, shivering despite the heat. A paper-thin rivulet of blood is traveling down her left shin, heading straight for the talus. She says she’s not drunk, just exhausted.

  As she lies still on the sofa, her head slowly dividing the two cushions propped beneath her cranium, I dress her wounds with Mercurochrome, dabbing red over red.

  “What did it look like?” she suddenly asks.

  “What?”

  “His chest. I want to know.” Her eyes are wide open, thick pudding and red bean bars.

  “Searc
h up any old funnel chest on the web and you’ll see.”

  Yeju shakes her head. “But it’s not his, y’know. I just want to know what was so bad about it that he had to hide the damn thing.”

  The deep hollow of K’s chest floats by my line of vision, a fleshy bowl that cradled my palm every night for the six years we’ve been married. He cried real tears the day he revealed it to me. He cried over many things, one pearly tear for each flaw.

  “With no kids in the picture, you’re going to get a good amount.” Yeju smiles. “Maybe you can go back to school. Or try flying yoga. Remember you wanted to try flying yoga?”

  I don’t remember a time when I wished for such things. Yeju dozes off, her nose kissing the hash-mark surface of my sofa. Her handbag is half open and loose by my feet. Her knees are an open wound, as are my soles, and I vaguely recall my high school teacher saying, Heat travels up, girls, heat travels up. My body burns as I drift into an adjacent room, dialing.

  K picks up and calls out my name, then “Hello, hello,” immediate and rushed. “Jimin-ah, is that you?” He’s ready to come back home.

  I open my mouth to find a blister taking over, knotting gray matter over my failing lips, sealing them shut.

  Sena Moon is a graduate of the MFA program in prose at University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she was a recipient of the Tyson Award in Fiction and the Hopwood Undergraduate Short Fiction Award. She is the third-place winner of Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers (May/June 2018). She hails from Seoul, Korea.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  “Bat Outta Hell” is masterful at peering into a family—a whole world—from the point of view of a character who is as much a part of that world as apart from it. We know little of Julian’s motivations, and somehow that limited—may we say hazy—perspective tells us everything. There is no aha moment in the grappling of sexuality, no meditation on what it means to be a man, and yet the observations of Julian, the actions of Jay, and the behavior of the peripheral characters all contribute to this family’s cosmography. The editors felt this story included all the necessary details to render a vivid and unique portrait, enlivened by a protagonist whom we love, without knowing if he could love us back.