Flowers of Mold & Other Stories Page 3

  •

  There is a flower basket on top of the bedside locker. “We wish you a full and speedy recovery.” It looks like you’ve had a visit from the club; the words Icarus Wings Hang Gliding Club are written on the pink ribbon trailing from the basket. The roses are withering into a blackish red. Your mother tells you what one of the members said: if not for the sail, your injury could have been much worse. But you know it’s your long hang time that spared you.

  “People are meant to have both feet planted on solid ground.”

  Every time you wake, your mother says these words over and over again. You get moved from the ICU to a general ward. Because of the chitchat of visitors and the coin-operated TV, the room is always noisy. After the scars heal and a stint in rehabilitation, you’re discharged.

  The president of the hang gliding club calls occasionally to see how you’re doing. You assure him you’ll never make a mistake like that again. After your crash, two other women dropped out of the club. The next scheduled flight is in Jeolla Province. You recall the sensation of soaring through the air. An aerial view of the narrow trail you followed to the top rises before you.

  “It might be a little difficult at this time, but next time you go, please let me know.”

  You hang up with a chuckle. But you never hear from him again.

  •

  On nights you couldn’t fall asleep, you went out onto the glassed-in balcony and looked out. But too often you failed to catch the outside view, and more and more you found yourself gazing at your own reflection. You told yourself the sleepless nights would stop once you started exercising again. Illuminated by the security light, the playground sand shone like a glacier field. The shadows cast by the swings grew and shrank as they undulated on the sand. It was then you saw her—the girl on the swing. You recognized this girl. It was you, ten years old. You threw on a sweater and opened the door. It had been a long time since you took in some fresh air. Walking to the swings was as difficult as cutting across the school field as a child. But the girl was gone. You sat on the swing and gripped the metal chains. You backed up two paces and lifted your feet. The swing began to move slowly. The playground safety-rule board loomed up, and then grew distant. You felt dizzy. The chains started to squeak. It took much longer than before to propel yourself up. The moment your swing went as high as the beam, without thinking you let go of the chains and jumped. Your body hung in midair. You curled up in a ball, clutching your legs and drawing your chin into your chest. But there wasn’t enough time for even one somersault. Like a gunnysack, you flopped onto the sand. As you hit the ground, you heard your right leg crack and out it popped from under your skirt, glancing off the seesaw and dropping to the sand.

  “My leg!”

  As you tried to stand to fetch your prosthetic limb, you noticed your watch. Even in the dim security light, you could read the two hands—3:14.

  When you had woken up in the ICU, you had looked at the curled-up petals on the wilting rose wreath and the white bed sheet. Unlike the bulge in the sheet where your left leg was, the area covering what should have been your right leg had been flat and smooth.

  You managed to rise on one leg and moved toward the seesaw. Your shadow was stretched out on the sand. You looked at the shadow cast by the stump and the empty space below it. In that shadow, half of you could now hang in midair forever.

  Nightmare

  The alarm didn’t go off this morning. She lay curled up like a millipede and heard the old grandfather clock strike six times in the downstairs living room. It was always five minutes slow. She woke from habit and the early light, not the few digital tones of “Animal Farm” that her alarm clock normally played on loop until she turned it off. Her fingers crept up to her bedside, but she couldn’t find the metal chill of the clock.

  She lowered her hands and wrapped her arms around her knees. She whispered to herself, “Go on, sleep a bit more.” She was given an alarm clock much earlier than other children her age. Her parents were always busy. They stopped waking her as soon as she turned nine. It wasn’t that they neglected her. The orchard was simply too big for two people to manage. Except for the small front yard, the rest of their land was a pear orchard. Every day they pulled weeds, but tougher weeds grew back in their place. So it was the alarm clock that woke her. The clock didn’t grumble like her exhausted mother. All it required was a new battery once a year.

  She pulled the sheet over her face, but the sunlight bore through it and penetrated her eyelids. Each time she inhaled, the sheet clung to her nose. She smelled Tide, Ivory soap, and saliva, but together they smelled of the wind—the wind right before rain came, as it blew between the orchard trees.

  The man’s clothes and hair had smelled the same.

  Her small room was as clean and tidy as a hospital room. The books she had hurled in self-defense were back on the shelf, and the buttons, wrenched from her pajama top, were firmly in place. But the stench of something rotting lingered in the air. She frequently had vivid dreams where she could fly. Rough hands pushed her off a cliff and footsteps pursued her into a dead-end street. She found herself in a car speeding at 150 kilometers per hour where the brakes didn’t work, and she felt a man’s hot breath on her ear. These bad dreams made her shoot up in height.

  But this morning, her alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Her bladder began to ache. As she climbed out of bed, she felt something sharp underfoot and her body pitched to the side. It was the alarm clock, hidden by the edge of the bedspread. It had stopped at 2:35 A.M. When it had hit the floor, the battery had tumbled out and was nowhere to be found. On the rim of the clock was a dried bloodstain the size of a pumpkin seed. This was no dream.

  She had dashed down the stairs in the middle of the night. Though she weighed next to nothing, her steps rang out on the hollow wooden steps. The master bedroom door opened and a woman’s face emerged, glancing about. Shortly afterward, the living-room lights switched on. The woman stuck her hand under her pajamas and scratched loudly. Then her sleepy and wrinkled eyes widened. Her daughter’s pajama top was open, the buttons torn off, exposing her breasts. Her pale nipples were erect, and there was a towel stuffed in her mouth. The woman knew immediately what had happened. Her husband, who had followed her downstairs, ran up to their daughter’s room and rushed back down once more. The front door swung open, slamming against the wall. He ran past the yard and cut through the orchard, his footsteps growing distant. The patter of dog paws followed close behind.

  Some thirty workers were sleeping in the barrack. Not wanting to wake them, her father crept past the building. When her mother forced a spoonful of nerve tonic into her mouth, the girl choked and coughed it back up. Far away, the dogs barked fiercely. It could mean only one thing: the two shepherd dogs had scented a stranger. The tonic made the girl drowsy.

  It was very late when her father returned. “No one fled through the pear trees. It was just the workers’ clothes, hanging on the line. Plus, your bedroom window was locked.”

  “That’s right,” her mother said, as if putting a lid on the matter. “The window was locked from the inside.”

  The girl fell asleep on the living room sofa. When she opened her eyes again that morning, she was lying in her own bed, as if nothing had happened.

  •

  She limped to the bathroom. Her tailbone was sore. She sat on the toilet, emptying her bladder for a long time. She turned on the taps and washed her face. Water splashed and soaked the front of her shirt. The mirror steamed up. She ran her palm over it and gazed at her reflection. The longer she stared, the stranger her features appeared, like a Picasso painting. “So you think you can get away with it?”

  Like any other morning, she smelled rice cooking. She heard bowls clattering and the knife clacking on the cutting board. The front door opened and her father walked in with the morning paper. He smiled brightly at her, who stood in the middle of the stairs. He passed her a section of the paper and they sat down at the table. She realized some
thing was the matter only after she read the date on the paper. An entire day had vanished while she slept. In one corner was a short news report about an unidentified man who had lost his life after being hit by a car. It wasn’t a story that would attract much attention. Hit-and-run accidents were common. But the site of the accident was right off the highway, an hour’s distance away. In the middle of the night, she had heard the rumble of the tractor in low gear as it left the orchard. It had returned only before sunrise.

  Her father had on his reading glasses and was reading aloud the weather report. The food was no different from any other breakfast: marinated soy bean sprouts, grilled mackerel, and radish broth. Even the way her mother seasoned the sprouts with an excessive amount of spice and salt was the same. The meal was much too ordinary to come on the heels of a distressing night. Any other mother would have taken to her bed. Then it would have been the girl sitting by her mother’s side, holding her hand, murmuring, “I’m okay, so don’t worry.”

  Her father complained about the food, saying too much salt might as well be poison. It was a familiar scene out of some tedious family drama. Her parents were like a pair of middle-aged actors well acquainted with their roles.

  “What’s wrong? No appetite?” he said worriedly to his daughter, who sat poking at her food. He snapped at his wife, “See? Who’d want to eat this garbage?”

  The girl gazed at his smooth, round forehead. “Father, you don’t have to keep smiling like that. I know what happened.”

  Stunned, he put down his spoon and chopsticks and gazed at her face. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “You saw him, too, didn’t you? The one in white who ran off through the trees?”

  “I don’t know what you saw, but it must have been the workers’ clothes on the line. Or maybe the men wandering around drunk. You’ve done nothing but sleep since you fell down the ladder two days ago. You had a bad dream.”

  “But someone came into my room.”

  Her father picked up his spoon once more. “Nonsense. As long as I’m here, this house is safe. You just had a nightmare. Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

  The girl shut her mouth, as if swallowing a ball of rice. Her parents worried about her future. They bristled at the phone calls that had started coming for her as she grew older. They hoped she would become the wife of a promising young man, give birth to healthy children, and lead a life of ease and comfort in an apartment in the city, playing the piano, instead of pulling weeds. There were things impossible to share between parent and child. Forced to play the piano she hated, a pit formed inside her. Time passed and this pit grew a little deeper and a little wider. Her parents told visiting relatives and friends that she was a quiet girl of few words.

  All through elementary school, she had bought her notebooks and pencils from The Smile Shop. The streets around the school were lined with stationery stores, but the children tended to gather at The Smile Shop after school, because it gave away things like coloring books, mini readers, and candy. The windowless store was always dim. It was long and narrow like a corridor, and at the back of the store was a room where the owner cooked and slept. A heavy smoker, the pale man coughed frequently. He sometimes pulled the girls who had come to buy notebooks onto his lap, and rubbed their cheeks or stroked their thighs. His palm was cold and moist. If they whined, he gave them another piece of candy. One day a girl in sixth grade went missing. She was found gagged in his back room with a doll, her hands tied to the door handle. He had used the doll to lure her.

  “Did you go to that store, too?”

  The parents had pressed the girl for an answer, but she shook her head. “No, no, I’ve never been there. I go to Smarties Supplies.”

  Dust settled and cobwebs covered the bric-a-brac tossed into her pit.

  The father had returned home very late. She had heard his tractor in her sleep. He would have pursued the man in white until the very end. He knew the six-acre orchard like the back of his hand, and so would have known to wait for the man on a certain corner. The man, unfamiliar with the land, would surely have circled the same spot, and the father would have brought the pickaxe down upon his back. He would have loaded the man into the back of the tractor and headed for the highway, which most certainly would have been deserted at that hour. He blasted the radio, in case the man should wake and raise a ruckus, but there was no chance of that. A car that had come out for a late-night drive ran right over the man’s body.

  •

  “Hey boss, a lot of the blossoms fell already. What should we do?”

  “Today’s supposed to be nice. That’s what the weather report said.” Her father shook the newspaper in the foreman’s face.

  The foreman blinked his cloudy eyes. “You can read all that with no reading glasses? Don’t tell me you still trust that weather news! Did you forget when it hailed last summer? How it tore all the blossoms apart? My knee here is the weather base. It never lies and it’s mighty sore right now.”

  The girl was used to seeing the two squabble with each other. The other workers started showing up at the house. Pear blossoms open for only ten days, and hand pollination had to be completed during this time. Blossoms had fallen on the workers’ heads. It had been a rainy, windy night. Not a single blossom was intact; only three or four petals dangled on each one.

  Brushing the blossoms off their heads, the men stepped into the living room. The girl helped her mother take the rice and side dishes to the living room where a low table was set up. The men smelled of the wind. They yawned, stretching wide their mouths. The smell of liquor lingered on their foul breaths. These men headed to the town’s bars after work and stumbled back to the barrack after midnight. Some returned right before dawn, their clothes badly rumpled. Their dark skin was like recycled paper, weathered by the sun and stained from booze and cigarettes. Their eyes were always bloodshot, and their hair reeked of charred meat and cheap perfume—smells that had seeped into their pores.

  Every spring and fall, buses came from all over the country, carrying men from faraway places. Bars and restaurants sprang up around the terminal, and drink stalls took over vacant lots. The piano institute where she taught was also located in town. She opened its doors around noon. She got off the bus and walked past the bars that stayed closed until 2 P.M. She sometimes stepped in vomit, and the stench of urine in the back alleys was overpowering. Women with disheveled hair and faces bare of makeup streamed out onto the street in flipflops. At their side they carried plastic basins filled with shampoo, soap, and small cartons of milk for facials. The men came in the spring during pollination, and returned again late summer in time for the harvest, staying until early fall. Often, those waiting for their bus at the depot barely had enough for the fare home.

  That night the dogs hadn’t barked. Their ears were usually so keen they started wagging their tails as soon as they heard her father’s tractor in the distance. The workers who had returned from town would have been passed out drunk in the barrack. Let loose, the dogs circled the house all night. The man wouldn’t have been able to avoid them. Yet, he had climbed the drainpipe that led to the second floor and snuck into the girl’s room. There was no time for her to scream. He covered her mouth with a hot hand, and hauled her up from behind. The back of her head pressed against his collarbone. His heart, as if being throttled, hammered against her spine. He wavered for an instant, and she managed to break free, hurling whatever her hand grasped. He punched her in the stomach. Her mouth popped open in pain, and he quickly stuffed a towel inside. The pear blossoms turned the world outside the window a silvery white, but all she could see was the outline of his face. He was tall and strong, and she could not budge from under him. His firm thigh shoved her legs apart. Once, when she was in middle school, a stack of pear cartons had fallen on her. Just like now, she’d been stuck until the workers had moved them off her. But the man weighed more than five of those 15-kilogram cartons. She swung her arms, groping for anything that might be used as a weapon. He
r hand found the alarm clock. She heaved it at his face. The only thing she could attest to from that night was his weight.

  “Hey, College Boy,” a worker said, jutting his chin at someone across the table. “Go get some water.”

  A tall young man with slightly stooped shoulders rose to his feet. He went into the kitchen and carried out a 12-liter kettle with two hands, his wrists shaking under the weight. He poured water into the man’s empty bowl and straightened his back. He seemed the youngest of all the workers. There was a Band-Aid on his pale angled jaw. All of a sudden, he glanced toward the stair landing where she sat watching, and ended up pouring water onto the crotch of the worker, who jumped to his feet, swiping away the water. The men burst into laughter. Embarrassed, the young man laughed, too. He went back to his seat and resumed eating, his back to her. The man next to him guffawed and thumped his shoulder from time to time. The young man quickly emptied his bowl and was the first to head outside. The foreman whispered to her father, “Hard worker. Says he’s taking a break from some fancy college in Seoul. His hands are a bit slow, but he doesn’t cause trouble.”

  From her house, which sat atop a low hill, she watched him walk past the tree shadows toward the barrack. He stared at the ground the entire time, with one hand stuck in the back pocket of his jeans. She couldn’t see the back of his head because of his slumping, hunched shoulders, then lost sight of him altogether midway across the farm. She looked toward the barrack, but he didn’t appear. In fact, he could be hiding in the shadows somewhere, spying on her standing at the second-floor window. Her gaze followed the pear blossoms that had blown all the way to the main road. They no longer looked beautiful. They were like laundry suds floating in a creek.