“Every night, the moon rose from here, and fell, and shattered. And then built itself back up again.” Fiction by Paul Yoon.
He never did that again. He breathed now. He breathed and waited. The sun came up. The valley around him clarified. The rocks grew more brown and the fields green and the trees everywhere showed the start of fall. He was unaware how cold he was until he tried to move.
He thought of all the routes and the avenues that led to tomorrow and another tomorrow and another one. The day grew brighter. A wind arose. Still no one. If the tinker was close, he would hear the clank of his wagon first. He expected that someone would eventually come looking for the man. He thought about this every day, waited for this every day. The more he thought about it, the more the days kept to how they had been before the man appeared. A month went by. And then another. In the evenings, he walked down to where he had buried the man. Drinking wine, Tongsu talked to him.
When Tongsu slipped one day after a day of rain, twisting his ankle badly enough that he knew he couldn’t work for a while, he thought of the church van. This made him laugh. He liked her. He told them what to do, and he fed them, and, in the evening, he rolled out the moth-eaten wool blanket for them to sleep on; he built a fire and told them to sleep beside it for warmth.
Tongsu didn’t know what to say. And then the not knowing grew into a frustration that bloomed inside him—not unlike those nights at the settlement when a man beside him would not stop talking or weeping or panting—and he grabbed Unsik’s shirt collar and told him that it had nothing to do with him, what did he know about things like that.
He told Eunhae, who was beside him, to go inside and not come out until the man was gone. He said this in a tone the girl had never heard before, very different from when he had yelled at her brother—this time both urgent and controlled—and so she did as she was told, sliding the door closed and pulling down the shutters.Even from a distance, Tongsu knew that the man was not from here.
Then the stranger bowed to Tongsu and said to please forgive him, but he was looking for an uncle who had vanished some years ago and was last seen in these mountains.The stranger walked over to the animals and inspected them. “He never came home,” he said. “This would have been three years after the war. He would have come this way.”
He bowed a fourth time, not as deeply, and then without saying anything else, not even a goodbye, he walked around the house and over the ridge into the forest that would lead him down the other side of the mountain. Perhaps this was why Tongsu hit Unsik one day when a pig died. Or perhaps it was the grief of the pig dying that caused him to behave illogically and recklessly. He found the pig, which had apparently died peacefully in its sleep on the grass, and he went straight for Unsik. Tongsu struck him and pushed him against the side of the house, closed his fist, and punched him. Unsik, staggering, opened his eyes, his face filling with shock and confusion.
A week later, she ended up in the city of Daegu. The church that had taken her to the valley was based in that city and it connected her with a pharmacy where she worked the register three days a week. She found a room to rent at a women’s boarding house near the river. She developed insomnia. Every night, she climbed out onto the rooftop to smoke cigarettes and listen to a neighbor’s radio that was always too loud, tuned to an American G.I. station that played rock and roll.
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