Tag: life

Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Popular & established authors, SHORT short stories, South Korea

A Fridge Named Deprivation

!Epic Tomorrows

By Hyoungshim Choi

Knock, knock, knock. Exactly three times. This is what you have to do to get the fridge to ready itself for conversation. It must have been white originally. But now it’s an outdated model, like an old woman, covered in blotches like liver spots and freckles. With its yellowish tint it resembles a yokel from the country, totally devoid of sophistication. Flush against the stained wallpaper, it looks like a built-in wardrobe that’s been part of this shabby gosiwon (1) from the start.

First, I scan my surroundings. No one’s about. I place both of my hands on the middle of the fridge’s door. It’s a little cold. That means it’s running quite well. Following this ritual, I open the door a crack and shut it again. Then, I greet the fridge a tad overdramatically.

–Hey, babe!

Whir, whir, whir. The fridge hums three times in a staccato rhythm. That’s the signal that it’s ready. A smile quietly forms on my face. As I wait for it to ease open, I reach up and touch my chin. My stubble feels coarse.

–Got chased for the rent again today, huh?

The fridge clicks open and immediately sours my mood with its sudden opening remark.

–Says who?

–I’m a refrigerator. Do you think I haven’t noticed you stocking up on beer when you have money and opening and closing the door empty-handed when you don’t? It’s not like I just met you.

–So what?

My blunt tone shuts it up for a moment.

–By the way, don’t you think there are more ants in the communal kitchen these days?

I change the subject. Instead of replying, the fridge emits a single whir.

–I don’t know where they’re coming from. Strangely enough, it feels like more and more are spawning out of nowhere.

–Ants need a home, too, I guess.

The fridge’s words make me think of room 201. That room has been vacant for a little while now. I heard that the guy was six months behind with the rent. Then one day he was not to be seen, and a few days ago the superintendent came and took his belongings away. Not that there was much to clear out––just enough to fill two large boxes and a few black garbage bags.

–Where do you think the guy from 201 went?

I ask. The fridge hesitates.

–He probably found another place.

–A guy who couldn’t even afford rent?

–There might be a place where he doesn’t have to pay rent anymore.

I stare at the fridge, dumbfounded.

–And where is such a place?

The fridge doesn’t reply. I nearly lose my grip on the handle.

–Oh… Oh…

The fridge door threatens to shut. With all its strength, the fridge lets out a whir. Startled, I grab the door as it’s closing. For as long as we’re talking, I have to keep a respectful hold of this guy’s doorhandle.

–Be careful. If you keep doing that I won’t speak to you again.

The fridge pretends to sulk.

–Whatever. This is because it’s getting hard to hold you since you’re growing fatter by the day. What are you keeping so much of inside?

–Hmph! Have you contributed anything to my expanding waistline? What do you think you’re doing, moving the occasional couple of beer cans in and out of me?

The fridge huffs out a sharp blast of cold air. Finding the spectacle ridiculous, I laugh and take out the last can of beer.

–Actually, I need to find somewhere, too. Not a gosiwon like this, where even one person feels cramped lying down.

–Why?

–My girlfriend said she has nowhere to go.

The fridge is quiet for a moment.

–Then come to me. One can just live here.

I laugh.

–How’s a human supposed to live in a fridge!

It doesn’t reply.

At that moment, I hear the thud of approaching footsteps. The fridge suddenly turns cold. We close our mouths nearly at the same time, it’s difficult to tell who is first. I quickly grab my beer and close the door. I give the fridge a discreet nod in parting. As if to say it got it, the fridge buzzes three times again: whir, whir, whir.

It’s a shame, I feel, that my chat with the fridge was so suddenly cut short. Nonetheless, I head to my room as if nothing happened. I briefly exchange glances with the man emerging from the narrow corridor. His sweat-soaked shirt smells like cheap cologne. I quickly open the door to my room, which is in front of the communal kitchen. Behind me, I can hear the sound of the man opening the fridge.

I lay down on the bed and close my eyes. At that very moment, my phone rings.

–Baby, what about the house you said you were gonna look for?

Without so much as a hello, my girlfriend brings up the house first thing. Her voice pronouncing the word “house” through the receiver is a jagged point that stabs me straight through the heart. I feel my body curl up strangely.

–Do you really have to call me at this hour just to ask about the house?

–I really have nowhere to go now.

At those words, I close my eyes for a moment.

–Once I find work again I’ll chip in with the rent. For now, you should do the looking.

I know it. She’s not asking for some sort of luxury apartment. Even a single room would be fine; she just doesn’t want to be kicked out of places anymore. But I don’t even have that money, enough money to get that one room.

–I’ll ask my mom tomorrow if she can help out a bit.

At my reply, she lets out a sigh and hangs up without a goodbye.

The next morning, as I leave the gosiwon for my part-time job, where I work twice a week, I call my mom.

–What?

She asks sharply, annoyed. I falter a few times before finally speaking.

–Mom, the thing is…

But I fail to bring myself to speak about the house. Mom says she got burned by hot soup while working at the restaurant, so for the time being she’ll have to take some time off. I roll the word “house” around in my mouth and then finally swallow it.

I hang up and light a cigarette. At that moment, my girlfriend calls. I don’t answer. The phone keeps on ringing. It keeps on ringing. At some point, it begins to sound like “house, house, house”. I cover my ears, feeling like I’ll be driven mad by it. With every ring, it feels as if my body is being pulled bit by bit. As if my arms are shortening and my legs thinning. Finally, I decline the call. I stub out my cigarette and hurry off to work.

On my way home from work, in front of the gosiwon, I run into the situation I’ve been wanting to avoid. Over the past few days, my girlfriend has grown noticeably gaunt.

–Why didn’t you answer my calls?

She is absolutely seething.

–I couldn’t even bring it up with my mom.

–Why?

–She got hurt.

–So?

–Please just give me a little more time.

One corner of her mouth twists.

–How much longer do I have to wait?

I can’t reply. She looks up at the gosiwon. Then, she lets out such a heavy sigh that the ground seems to give way. I can’t utter a single word.

–But there are so many houses in the world…

Her gaze moves to the large apartment complex across the road. The word “house” lands heavily on my shoulders, with a thud. Simultaneously, my heart tightens. House–I flinch and recoil at the word.

–Why can’t you find just one lousy house!

She shouts tearfully. House–this time, the word makes my toes curl up in my shoes.

–That damn wretched house, house, house!

Her voice engulfs me like a hurricane, and, like ripping off a roof, wipes out the insides of my head. I become useless, a hollow house with no roof. My knees buckle. She stops talking.

–My God, babe…

She looks down at me.

–You just… shrank!

I open my mouth to reply. As I do, she takes a step back. She speaks in a trembling voice.

–Have I lost my mind over this house problem? Why have you suddenly got small?

With those words, I get smaller once again. Seeing this, she takes a few more steps back. She then shrieks and runs away down an alley. Click-clack, click-clack… Her footsteps resound strangely. House, house, house… It seems like I’m the one who’s lost his mind. As her footsteps recede into the distance, I shrink even further. I reach out my hand and try to call her. But my fingers have already become as small as a young child’s. I want to erase the word “house” from my head. But it keeps playing in an endless loop. Before I get any smaller, I start scrambling up the gosiwon stairs. With every step I climb, my body gets markedly smaller. By the time I manage to get to the top, I’ve shrunk to the size of an ant.

Panting, I head to the communal kitchen. I stand in front of the fridge. I knock exactly three times. Knock, knock, knock. A moment later, the fridge hums three times: whir, whir, whir. I’m relieved.

–You’re back.

A voice greets me, seemingly welcoming, as the fridge opens slightly.

–I… I’ve suddenly got really small.

–Glad you’re here.

–Huh?

I told you before, if you need a home you can come to me.

I look up at the fridge.

–Is this a home?

The fridge doesn’t reply. Instead, it opens its door wide. Spread out before me is a massive city of cylindrical beer-can towers and sliced-bread buildings.

–Come on in.

Hesitating briefly at the fridge’s words, I then start to climb the steep steps within a gap in the worn rubber door seal. Cold air envelops my entire body. When I reach the top of the stairs, I’m out of breath. As I’m about to catch my breath, a bunch of people begin murmuring behind a tower of beer cans.

–Did someone new just arrive?

I’m so startled I’m almost frozen to the spot. Right then, someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn around to see a familiar face smiling at me.

–You…

It’s the guy who used to live in room 201. He smiles as he steps aside. Under the bright lights inside, a group of people are waving at me. Just then, the door slams shut, and the fridge gives out a small, soft whistle-like sound, whirr…

1. Gosiwon: A form of inexpensive housing in South Korea, typically consisting of tiny single rooms with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Originally intended for students preparing for competitive examinations, gosiwons are now widely used as low-cost accommodation by students, workers, and others living alone.

Popular & established authors, SHORT short stories, South Korea

The Memory Pawnshop (Everyone Remembered Him Except Me)

!Epic Tomorrows

By Hyoungshim Choi; Hyoungshim Choi is one of the most popular authors on COTW. After this piece, try her excellent short story, Tongue.

In the shop tucked away in the corner of the alley, there hung a heavy atmosphere. A grey-haired man stared intently at an old set of scales, placed on a display stand. The reading, steeply rising, eventually came to a stop. 

—You hit the jackpot with this one. 

The eyes of the man in the jeweler’s loupes gleamed keenly. 

—Please give me a good price for it.

I mumbled, as if pleading. The man carefully removed the device that was connected to my head. You’d have thought this device for stimulating the brain might have gotten some upgrade by now, but he was sticking to the old ways. However, he was a veteran with a great many clients, reliable. He knew indeed how to distinguish valuable memories and extract them without damaging them. He was famous in particular for implanting memories neatly and noiselessly. While the man priced my memory, I, after hesitating several times, found the courage to open my mouth. 

—I’m here today to propose a very special deal.

This place where precious memories are bought and sold is called the soul’s pawnshop. I’m a regular here. Mainly as a seller. The memories I sell are to do with romance. Some people might call it love, but I just call it romance. So people call those who do this kind of work, like me, the prostitutes of the soul. As the name suggests, it’s not a particularly well-regarded job.  

I’ve been doing this for almost 5 years now. The first time I sold a memory was when I had just left the childhood care facility. Since I had nothing, I decided to sell off the memories of what I wouldn’t exactly call my first love. When I sold one of these memories for the first time, I experienced a miracle where my body felt lighter. Perhaps selling that memory had taken some of my darker childhood memories with it. Those memories had been woven into the background of my first love. It’s somewhat regrettable that the memories cannot be removed completely even when they are supposed to be, since some traces are left behind that might be considered as afterimages. In any case, I got into this work because of the lightness of heart I got from sloughing my dark memories, and because I was attracted to the fact my experiences went for a pretty high price to the wealthy.

Memories sold in this manner are sometimes used for basic construction of virtual reality, and if there are people who want to make these memories more vividly their own, then the memories are transplanted after undergoing some slight processing. The kind of people who buy the memories of people like me, I was told, are the ones who are unwilling to experience things in this busy world by putting their own mind and body under stress but who still would like to indirectly have those experiences. Of course, there is no reason to undergo all the sorts of hardships that people like me have to, people who have no place to stay, no parents, and no proper social protection. Plus, they are busy competing to survive in this high-tech world, nor can they afford to use up their mental and physical energy struggling to have and maintain romantic relationships. People who have been closely managed from the time that they were a fertilized egg and have to live their best lives are different from those like me who were conceived and born naturally and have to deal with all sorts of pain and diseases. That is to say, I am of the lowest caste in this society. 

—How was the person you went out with this time?

Anna, sitting next to me in the waiting room, asked me while we were waiting for our memories to be transferred to the computer simulation. Anna looked at me with her face all swollen up. She must’ve come here to sell the memory she acquired from staging some tear-jerking melodrama.

—He was okay. Very much so.

I choked up as I responded.

—What does he do?

Anna asked, still wiping away her eyes.

—Space explorer. He went all the way inside a black hole and managed to escape, just about.

—Sounds fun. How did you meet?

—At a space communication club. I became friendly with a man who lives on Planet Titan, and he invited me over to his.

—That’s cool. Then why did you break up?

I could not give an answer. I always used to think of Anna as a silly goose, immersed in self-pity and overly sentimental. But this time around, I was the one crying. In an attempt not to cry I ground my teeth, but the sound of my choking up still escaped. Anna looked at me astounded, then, without words, she wiped my eyes with her sleeves.

As I sat there, the memory surfaced with painful clarity. Once again I was aboard the shuttle, staring through the window at the familiar black sky and starlight. The afterimage of Ian, disappearing into the darkness beyond, was still vivid. Looking at the blue Earth slowly nearing, I touched the empty seat next to mine.

The last night on Planet Titan, he handed me two tickets to Earth. With the words that he wanted me to be with me forever. Except for the check-in process being strangely slow at Titan Space Station, everything went smoothly. That is, before Ian pressed the emergency evacuation button with the terrorist in his arms. For a long time after the spaceship departed from Planet Titan, Ian and I could not sleep at all because of our expectations for a new life. As the passengers went into hibernation for the long journey to Earth, a terrorist tried to force his way into the cockpit. We were just about to go into hibernation. I had absolutely no clue that it was going to be like this when Ian quietly rose and wrapped his arm around the terrorist.

They put him as missing. The terrorist had already broken the security camera in the cabin before he tried to force his way into the cockpit. I, the only witness, testified at the top of my lungs to his heroic sacrifice, but nobody gave ear to what I had to say.

My memories with him—these, I really did not want to sell. I wanted to remember him for long (for a long time / forever) and I wanted to miss him until the day I died. But I had to sell my memories, so at least I could make other people remember him for long (for a long time / forever)

First, I made up my mind to sell all of my memories that might be worth any money except for the scene where Ian, nestled within the emergency evacuation capsule with the terrorist in his arms, disappears into the starlight. Recollections of my mother, faceless and remembered only as warmth deep down in my memories, all the way up to him proposing to me. They were worth pretty good money, for they were ones I had intended not to sell and to cherish for a long time. But then, I placed a very special order with the owner of the soul pawnshop. I asked him to simultaneously insert the scene into the memories of a great number of people—the scene where Ian escapes into space with the terrorist in his arms to save the lives of hundreds of passengers. We agreed that I would pay for this with the money I earned from my memories.

Lying on the memory-harvesting machine, I felt my left arm. On it, I had tattooed Ian’s name. For I wanted to be left with it, only this, even though all of his memories would be erased. Soon enough, the machine lit up. I closed my eyes.

—You may come out now. 

The machine stopped and I woke up. As always, my head was hazy. A finalized bill was waiting for me at the cashier. As I was about to step out of the pawnshop having picked up the papers, the owner said wistfully that the new memory-transplant program is astonishingly good. I just smiled at him, not understanding what he meant. My eyes teared up as I was pushing the glass door, strange. The owner’s countenance bidding me goodbye was dark. The door closed behind me and the sight of the street caught my eyes. The sun was shining brightly. The sky was as clear and clean as it’s ever been. A strange man was smiling on the big news billboard erected at the end of the street. His face seemed somehow familiar.

—We all shall remember his noble sacrifice for a long time.

The news anchor was struggling to keep under his control the emotions surging within him. I thoughtlessly put my hands into my pockets and walked up to the end of the street. Anna, recognizing me at the far end, smiled brightly. Tears, whose meaning I could not understand, kept flowing from my eyes.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Ecology of the absurd, England, Exclusive to COTW

Building Silent Haven: Chapter Three

!Epic Tomorrows

Featured image: ‘Aerial View’ 1996, acrylic on board

In 2000 I found a studio, housed within and named after an old Chocolate Factory, where the plan was to house 100 artists. It was a walk across the park from my flat and near to the allotment! I was creating my little natural world in London! I was the first artist in and my work became freer. I painted, sculpted, crafted, and made clothes, mostly from recycled materials.

‘Red Still Life’ 2000, oil on canvas

I came across a leaflet for a residency at Dorland Mountain Arts colony in California, applied for it and was accepted. Somehow, I made the money to go and so I made drawings of an ambitious painting I wanted to do there. I tentatively bought a huge roll of canvas thinking that I could cut it down when I arrived if it was too big.

In March 2001 I arrived at Dorland and I was shown to where I would be staying for the next month. Wow! The Retreat was sensational. It sat nestled on a remote hillside with fabulous views all around. It was a massive building with a canvas roof and windows which showed the moon coming up at night. The wood burner was the only source of heating and I had never lit a fire in my life. I soon learned and became an expert.


The Retreat

Robert, a permanent resident showed me inside the house and when he got back to the front door, he said “oh, and there is this…” He lifted a pole at the side of the front door and the whole front wooden wall opened out onto a concrete balcony. The amazing thing was, there was a massive drawing board attached to this wall and it was exactly the size of my canvas! Needless to say I didn’t cut it down and I spent the whole month painting outside.

Front wall, living space, and communal dining room

‘Past Life Present’ 2001, oil on canvas

My work had got bigger and bigger over the years, from tiny black and white graphics to this, a massive, colourful oil painting on canvas. It is about a vision I had of me and my relationships to people in a past life as Native Americans. The other people in the painting are from my present life.

I met a beautiful man called Ben at Dorland, who made amazing sculptures in wood. We hung out together throughout the month. I realised later in the month that I had fallen in love with him, but he had a girlfriend so I never told him. Keeping my feelings to myself was hard. When I left Dorland, I got onto the Greyhound bus and began to feel ill. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I was getting up to ask the driver to take me to a hospital when I instinctively pulled out a piece of paper and pencil and started writing. I wrote a 46-verse love poem about Ben on the bus and when I had finished, the pain in my heart had gone.

Dorland was an amazing break from my madness and gave me the motivation and energy for the beginning of a new life.

Ben

FLASH!, Many feminisms, Popular & established authors, USA

Bonanza keep digging

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Bonanza was a scary girl, all backwards in her thinking. Five years old and she didn’t like anyone. No-one liked her either. She often wondered which came first, did she like no-one and then did no-one like her, or was it the other way around?
       “Shut up and keep digging,” cried her mother, while Bonanza was busy burying the bony remains of her ten last, best and only friends. “Shut up and keep digging,” mouthed Bonanza in a sour, mocking voice, hoping her mother didn’t hear but secretly wishing she would. Bonanza was digging and stacking, digging and stacking, and burying her little toy dolls, one on top of another, digging and stacking and burying them all in the backyard.
       “There goes Frances,” she said, one by one patting them on the soft tops of their heads. “Little Limp Suzette, Astrid, Lingafore, Penitence, Rye Bread, Amber Ocean with the Amazing Marble Brown Eyes, Lori Fred the Beast, Marmalade.” And then there was The Ancient One, who kept bobbing her loose plastic head back and forth, stacked flat on her back on top of Marmalade, in the ruddy brown dirt. “Stay still,” said Bonanza through stinging tears.
       These were the days of no return. Her mother was right. If she couldn’t be a friendly, polite girl, then she would be liked by no-one. And so it was that her mother, with resounding voice, descended heavily down the porch stairs, thick ankled, to the backyard to supervise Bonanza’s burial of the word F-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p.
       All the summer light grew dim, darker, until Bonanza was just a small speck of dust beating away at the backyard air, then, her self, buried. Fell in with the rest of them. Fell right flat on top of The Ancient One.
DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, South Korea

Do Not Be Ill, If Spring Must Come After All (아프지 마라, 기어이 올 봄이라면)

!Epic Tomorrows

By Pak Jong-hee

A gentle breeze brushes past, carrying a scent that feels like an old memory. This pungent, slightly fishy aroma that fills my nostrils is the breath of mugwort, rising in clusters as it leans against the spring sunlight. In a corner of the park, on a sun-drenched mound, I see a woman crouched low, picking mugwort. Each time a tender shoot—hardly larger than a baby’s fingertip —is placed in her basket, a warmth like the earth’s own body temperature quietly spreads to my feet.

The woman speaks to me in an excited voice, saying the sky is flawlessly clear today. Looking up, I see that the hue of the sky is indeed different from before. Where the achromatic winter has retreated, has the delicate texture of the pale green grass ever been this vivid? Yet, the brighter the world becomes, the more Spring has always been a precarious guest to me. It is as if I can hear the moans of living things breaking through the stubborn ice of winter.

Spring never arrives for free. The backs of the new shoots tearing through the frozen earth are hunched, and the gestures of the trees squeezing out every drop of their essence to bloom are nothing short of desperate. Whenever I see petals trembling under the lash of a late-frost gale, my heart grows anxious, thinking that such brilliance might actually be a final, frantic struggle bartered for death.

This sense of peril stems from the duality of Spring. On the surface, a hymn of vitality seems to resound, but beneath it, withered grasses and ancient trees—baring their gaunt skeletons—lie scattered like the wreckage of winter. Upon that threshold where warmth and cold intersect, fragile lives cross the boundary between life and death several times a day. To me, Spring has always been a season of pity. Like the late-winter cold that strikes just when you think you’ve arrived, it resembles the seasons of trial that visited me without warning at every turning point in my life.

Spring was just beginning to show its face even at the place where my mother left this world. Perhaps because the void of loss was so deep, I suffered from a severe, aching malaise every Spring. Living with a dry cough throughout the winter, I could only manage to stand up again when the cherry blossoms burst into pink buds, as if tearing their own bodies open. To me, Spring was not a season of vitality but a cold current that I had to swim against with my whole body, year after year.

Looking back, my childhood was also a succession of chilly Springs where I couldn’t even take a single clean breath. Time spent in a village beside a cement factory. Every morning when we opened the door, a thick layer of dust, white as snow, had settled in the yard. The lids of the clay jars, polished to a shine by my mother’s hands, would soon hold their breath under a shroud of gray powder, which would harden like stone after a few days.

Dusting off the particles that settled on each other’s hair was our family’s simplest and warmest kindness in those days. Yet, the fine powder that seeped through that kindness was quietly taking root deep within my mother’s lungs. As a child, I did not know. I did not realize that those hours spent living beneath the factory chimneys were gnawing away at my mother’s breath.

The dry cough that began in her forties became chronic, eventually pinning her to a hospital bed under the name ‘pulmonary edema.’ By the time the environmental lawsuits began, Mother had already passed away. All that remained for me was a Spring illness that resembled her cough and a single scar in my heart that flared up every change of season.

I quietly watch the fingertips of the woman picking mugwort. I try to imagine how long those tender shoots must have endured before pushing up through the hard earth. The vitality of mugwort, erupting through frozen ground, is by no means docile. It is a force of struggle, ultimately heaving the very crust of the earth upward. Like the mugwort that perfects its fragrance even while swaying in the biting wind, perhaps our lives only gain a subtle radiance after passing through the tunnels of ordeal.

The woman suddenly holds out a bag of mugwort toward me as I stand still. With a soft smile, she tells me that if I boil a bowl of soup with some soybean paste, it will be better than any medicine. That smile is as gentle yet sturdy as the pale green shoots that rose after steadfastly enduring all manner of cold.

Returning home with the bag, I fill the kitchen sink with water. As I wash the mugwort several times, bits of dirt and dried leaves float up, and the clear water soon turns a faint green. Dissolving soybean paste in a pot and adding a handful of mugwort, a pungent aroma slowly rises amidst the savory scent. The moment a spoonful of soup enters my mouth, a bitter yet sweet taste lingers on the tip of my tongue.

A sense I had long forgotten awakens. Amidst the rising steam, the memory of sitting on the edge of the wooden porch as a child, blowing on the mugwort soup my mother had boiled for me, comes vividly back to life. Back then, not knowing what this fragrance had endured to rise, I probably just rejoiced that spring had come.

Silently, I set down my spoon and wrap both hands around the bowl where the warmth remains. Then, I step outside again. The wind brushing against my skin is still spicy and cold. But now I know. One must endure this precarious wind for flowers to bloom, and only after passing through this cold does the mugwort truly complete its fragrance.

I lower my mask for a moment and breathe in the air deeply. Leaning my heart into the pungent breath of Spring that seeps deep into my lungs, I whisper softly:

“Do not be ill. If spring must come after all, shouldn’t you cross this season safely?”

If I am still in pain, then this radiant Spring is ultimately nothing more than a season of pain. Today, the green shoots swaying in the breeze appear exceptionally clear. Each of those pale green textures is swaying quietly, yet firmly, as if remembering the freezing seasons they have passed through. Standing before that vitality, I reverently inhale all the pain and endurance dwelling within this fragrance of Spring and this breath of green.