Five years since I’ve had the best food in the world.
The restaurant looks the same: the same line of 50 people waiting to get in. I get in line, the smells bringing me back: appetite and nostalgia winding a tight braid inside me.
“The special, please,” I say as a waitress comes up the line, taking advance orders. No time for looking at a menu.
I wonder how many have eaten here in the last five years. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
I spot the owner as I reach the door. She looks up. “Where have you been?”
This is actually a true story. When we were in Korea, we lived in the city of Jeonju. In the old market, there is a restaurant called Nammun Pisundae (남문피순대). It is famous all over Korea and has been in business for decades. There is seriously a line outside of at least 50-100 people at every single meal time and it is always busy. They really only serve one thing: a spicy soup of blood sausage and pig organs. You might not think that sounds great but that’s because you haven’t tried it. It is seriously my favorite food in the world, specifically from that restaurant.
I got a chance to go back to Korea in 2019 and made a point to go to Jeonju to see old friends and to eat at this restaurant. Even after all that time, the owner recognized me right away and asked where I’d been. I explained I’d moved to the US 5 years before. To be fair, there probably aren’t many non-Koreans who were regulars there.
(You might wonder about the title: what an Oran Man is or who Ida is. This is a transliteration of the Korean expression meaning “long time, no see”).
Anything could be cured with theater, Alice believed. In her first week as activity director for Nome, Alaska, she organized a Theater in the Park program to get people out of their houses and cure seasonal depression. She even flew in actors from down south. Their first production was the musical South Pacific to make everyone feel warm inside.
The performance got mixed reviews. On one hand, three of the actors froze to death mid-song and the rest got hypothermia. But the audience was fine and many commented it was the most interesting thing to happen in Nome in years.
Big things are happening in the land of green walls! For all my Friday Fictioneers friends out there and anyone else who might not know, I have started a website for children’s stories called the Green-Walled Treehouse. As part of it, I have a place for kids 0-18 to submit story ideas and I will write a story for them based on it. If you know anyone interested, have them email me at greenwalledtreehouse@gmail.com.
I also just published a children’s book about my travels last year in Southeast Asia. It’s called Stanley and Amber in Southeast Asia (it started out as a Flat Stanley project for my niece). You can read more about it here, as well as download a free copy.
I stumble up the stairs, joy and horror warring in my mind. I spot the stroller box, and a burst of manic laughter escapes me. If only we’d known.
One ultrasound would have shown us what was growing inside Danielle, but with losing my insurance and COVID . . . As long as everyone was healthy, we said.
How naïve.
I reach the nursery. My mind flips to calculator, but the numbers aren’t adding up.
I collapse into the rocking chair while the word that now will forever define my life careens around my mind.
Me and the fellers are unwinding when one of them new auto-harvesters drives by. The ones that took our jobs and left us homeless by the highway.
“Ay, ya arshdriver!” Kenny shouts, flipping the double bird as it roars by. I flip it off too just as a piece sticking out chops off my right middle digit, clean as a butcher. It goes flying into the fire where Robbie’s cooking roadkill.
It’s nothing but ash now. Bad enough the bastards take my job, but now I can’t even flip the double bird in protest? It’s enough to make you misty-eyed.
Walk to the grey city at the edge of the long-dry sea, past the corpses of ancient architecture.
Go to the center where it all ended, the gothic hall where that otherworldly bomb landed, obliterating everyone, leaving everything.
Sit anywhere you like—you’re the only audience today. Maybe ever.
Listen to the orchestra playing in their bubble of time, like music trapped in amber. They endlessly loop the 122 minutes before the bomb, unaware of the dead world outside. Odd how that happened.
Close your eyes.
Relax.
If you fall asleep, you can hear it all again in two hours.
Happy New Year everyone. Globally speaking, this has been a pretty terrible year and a lot of people are still suffering quite a bit. We can only pray that 2021 is better and do what we can to make it so. I have hope.
The wind caressed the dress shirt from its rooftop drying rack. It rose into the air, a well-dressed ghost preparing for a New Year’s Eve party. A cross breeze sent it dancing with invisible partners.
Sung-Ho sat listlessly on the curb. Suicide? Why, with no life insurance? Burn down the building? Insurance companies could tell. Start over?
How?
He felt Eun-Ha’s hands on his shoulders. “We’ll get the money somehow,” she whispered.
The shirt fluttered down. Sung-Ho caught it before it hit the ground.
“See?” his wife said. “2021 will bring hope. Even God is sending us his dry-cleaning now.”
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! Thank you to everyone who has read any of my stories over the past year. I am looking forward to big things in the coming year.
By the way, this story takes place before COVID times. 🙂
Mixed Signals
I’d spent a week preparing for the Christmas party. We even got an eggnog fountain.
Little Ellie-Mae wanted to put a sign at the end of the driveway, so people knew where to turn. “Eggnog for all!” it would say.
Twenty minutes later, she was back. She’d made the letters too big. “Can it just say EGGNOG?”
Sure.
Ten minutes later, she returned. “How many G’s does ‘eggnog’ have?”
Three.
“Oh. I only put one in.”
EGNO? ENOG?
When no one showed up, I walked down to the road to look for cars.
“For the last time, we don’t need artists. We need laborers. If everyone did what they wanted, what would we eat? Where would we live?”
“There are millions of us! Why can’t I be different?”
“But why you?”
“Because I’m asking.”
She let him try. In a month the hill was covered in a rainbow of swirls and circles. The word spread. In a jungle of 400 trillion ants, he was the only one with a name.
The Artist.
. . .When you don’t, you’re all they see.
* * *
In 1835, French naturalist George Valentin came across a nest of Argentine ants in the Corrientes province of Argentina. It was three feet high and covered in symmetrical patterns of berries and twigs, including one design that many claim to be the figure of an ant. It was destroyed in a flood the next year. To date, it remains the only example of ant artwork ever found. Source*.
*Okay, so this didn’t actually happen. But it makes a good story.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and happy end of November to everyone else. This is definitely not a Thanksgiving story: I just wrote the story I saw in the picture. However, I’m very thankful for everyone who reads my stories. Thank you.
As Monty Python said, “And now for something completely different.”
The crutches are my mask. One glance and people have this poor crippled girl all figured out.
“The hell are you?” I come closer and the man’s demeanor flips.
“Hey, you lost?” He’s all Mr. Rogers suddenly. “This is a bad neighborhood.”
I wait until he’s close enough that when I swing the crutch up, the spring-loaded spike destroys his throat. He falls in a bubbling heap. Nighty-night, mugger.
He’s got $300 and a pack of cigarettes on him. I smoke two as I sit on his corpse to rest my aching leg.
Who says cripples can’t be superheroes?
A rare explanation: I realize that the term “cripple” is viewed as offensive by some. That is not at all my intention, so my apologies if you felt uncomfortable. I chose it only to fit with the tone of the story.After all, the point of the story is not to judge someone by their outward appearance.
