ix.
GIVING IN TO HUNGER DOESN'T MEAN DEVOURING JUST ANYTHING
October 2023. The woman was so pretty that Yūn had questioned what even came before and what even comes next after death. In fact, Yūn, at first, wanted to not mind at all the things that she did with her unpredictable hand, unpredictable face, and unpredictable utters and let her continue what ever that she had intended to do: from time to time she plainly looked at Yūn, if not, a brief scrutiny (to which Yūn supposed that maybe it is the new norm?—she couldn't remember others of the selfsame behavior as the woman—so it couldn't be; it made her ultimately uncomfortable). The time she figured out that not all things each had their paces was when the girl had this silken delight in her eyes which Yūn had never seen before with anyone when she asked 'You mean I get to draw you?'. Delicacy has never been this bold, this naked, stripping itself of every consciousness there is but definitely not the self-regard to fall flat which fed the reason to just go and pursue! Because being drawn by art is properly seldom for just about anyone.
At the same time, a beautiful moment can only last for a good while. The most gorgeous things happen like that. Just the same, there is a silent luxury, a little milk and honey in thinking of wanting to see the woman again even with all this black and horror. It only takes a phone call from your little sibling whom never called before to try and be extra alive for the next hours.
Out of everything to slip my mind, Yūn couldn't help but cudgel her brain, Why haven't I asked of her name?
It is as if the heat from everywhere had settled in the eyes to stop it from stilling on the train departure boards and Yūn is doing only so much to keep calm, composing her mind of only the clock and its ticks and the little girl she so much loves, holding the phone as foreboding worry insinuates itself; her right arm and nape began feeling like that of a plucked bird's skin. The ugliness of every little thing fills each and every one of her nerves. This time, she thinks, it is feeding good, this ugliness and this worry. Yūn, come home now. Please come home now. Upset luck had somehow picked this day to make the wonted platform she'd normally use unavailable and is now waiting for the stop from another that's going to take her home. This lady here . . . in our home, she calls herself our mother. She hears Little Su's voice and it stays in her ears like disembodied whispers that are enough to confine anything with flesh and consciousness; the reprise of the first fear she's ever heard back when a stray dog snarled and bared its teeth at the little girl who've only wanted to feed it had itself laced again on her voice but now with more pronounced, deep-rooted terror. She bites the skin off her lips as if sanity is in the metallic taste of blood that she is to taste.
After boarding the train, Yūn stares on her phone's wallpaper. Both of them, Yūn and Little Su, smile in the picture, the two sharing unilateral dimples. The train starts rumbling. I need to go home. She needs to see me. I need to go home. I must see her now.
Yūn is standing behind the door to their unit. Her lips were dried with blood and it stung. Biting her lips to keep the sting, she unlocks and twists the doorknob.
"Yūn?" says the girl from the living room.
"I'm here. Where are you, Little Su?" Yūn asks, looking at the dimmed lights to restrict her voice of any strain. She hears breathing but not of a little girl.
"I'm here—"
"Little Su," says the voice of a woman whom she used to so well. "Your sister made you a cute nickname.
Would you mind, love, if I also call you that?"
When Yūn closes in on the view of the living room, it falls on the sight of Little Su sitting on the lap of the woman. The girl evidently wants to stand up and go to the sister, but the woman's hand is caressing her head, tracing her braids, with the other hand lying on the girl's shoulder. She had thought about the ugliness of everything that had almost crumpled her skin like paper, only to find that it is all now in the room with them.
"Yūn," softly calls the girl.
Her words try to survive past the mouth as her eyes stay on the woman, finally asking, "Why?"
"Why what, my daughter?" questions the woman back with seemingly concerned look on her face, but Yūn is decided that it is only ugliness that keeps her face brazen.
"You're at the wrong unit, Ma'am," the sister exhales, "We're of no mother."
"Is that so?"
"Yūn," calls Little Su again.
The girl got up off the woman's lap and rushed to the sister. Their hug was as though their first and last.
"Are you okay, Little Su?"
"Why're you only back now?"
"I am sorry," lowly the sister says, "You were right; it had rained today. Just a little drizzle. But I'm here now, aren't I?" with both her hands now on the girl's shoulder, she manages a smile while telling the girl to get inside her room and open only if it is her sister.
Before Little Su closes the door, she swallows and asks,
"Is that our mother, really"
Yūn only shakes her head.
Upon hearing the door locked, she goes back in the living room to face the woman sitting on their sofa—with all the thoughts in her head outwardly bare from forehead to chin yet obscured by her smile so inglorious it makes Yūn itch of the woman's permanent, unsound absence. Rage, sometimes, has this endurance to grotesque quiet it starves the host of knowing why.
"You need to get out of here, Ma'am," Yūn says, her words adamant with respect.
"'Ma'am'?" the woman repeats, followed by a soft scoff. "Look," she crosses her legs. "You don't have to be
glad that I'm back—"
"We're not expecting anyone, Ma'am. You are scaring my sister," Yūn began walking towards the woman. "With all due respect, you are in the wrong
unit. I've no reason to be glad of a stranger's
return." the words sounded properly firm and lordly.
Sharp breaths came in and out of the woman. The color of the dress she's wearing is the same from the night when she took that uber, leaving their place. The golden bangles that bore her arms and golden hoops hung in her ears made slow and beautiful jingling sounds as she respired and kept her posture firm and riveted with solemnity. Yūn sees her distorted reflection from the high-gloss coating on the wine cherry-red stilettos that edges the woman's feet, convincing herself that she will lose her guard in seconds the longer she looked at it.
"I am here and I am back," her voice became sharper, locking eye contact. "And I am planning on
having dinner with my kids."
"You have children?" Yūn fired her with blunt, little satire.
The woman was slightly taken aback. "Of course," she smiles, "because I'm at their place right now, fresh and
back. And the dinner," she stands up. "it doesn't
have to be now."
"The dinner doesn't have to happen."
"I will have dinner with you and Suna."
"It's not in our likes to eat with people we do not
know."
The emphasis of the last four words stuns the sister's tongue, the same sensation you get when sipping on a boiling hot coffee or when a hot metal fork lands in, completely making the tissue weak and numb. Yūn does not know when or how she will stop this; both the acting and knowing. Knowing who the woman exactly is and acting as though she is merely a stranger, who apparently had figured out the hiding spot of the spare key to their unit located inside the tree hollow not far from the unit's building. She wants to breathe. In the deepest roots and honors of her anger were the gush of questions wanting to live and thrust out above the soil, feeling more and more helpless, low, and dry. That thinking about the woman and what feelings she has and the thoughts that grate her scrapes Yūn of stateliness and pride—which she could be needless of, because she looks at her hair and face and her hands she sees the same woman who did not spare a last, single look at unmistakably leaving them twice. Her head foregrounded a sudden supercut of all the things the woman had said and done and all the things she had dismissed, had sneered at, had scorned and laughed at, all of which is the woman herself. Pity does not grow, not even on soil, not even with sunlight.
"Are you done?" the woman snaps her back into reality.
"Are you?"
"We don't–" the woman smacks her lips. Yūn watches the woman; her facial expressions devastated by the hunt of the proper words to get across. The woman looks directly, evening her breathing. "I'm back.
I'm back on a random Sunday and you're upset
about it and I know. We can't do anything about
your anger but I am back. I can leave right now
and never see you two again, maybe. But I do not–
Of course I don't want that. But really, you have to
hear what I've got to say. I won't– I can tell you
what you need to know if that makes things any
better—"
"No, it does not." Yūn corrects her.
Furrowing her brows, the woman tries to get back to her line of thinking. "but you pulling out this . . . " her hands conveying blathers, "this thing you're doing right
now? As if I didn't pull you out of my vagina? I
am your mother." she stresses on her words upon the distortion of her face, immediately retiring it back. "I
know, I know I haven't been a mother to you girls
for the last seven—"
"Eight years." again she was cut off.
"E-eight years. Don't cut me off for chrissakes!" she breathed, her tone hinted withdrawal at the end. "Eight
years. But I've got reason, Yūn. I had to leave and
make money. Of course, I've needed to!"
The woman's breathing fills the room with so much trauma, so much wanting. Yūn's eyes are docile, as if to relieve the threat that beleaguers both of their emotional hold of things. But she knew that sentiments, however sincere, however lovely, will not contrive to everything's lasting nature all the time. That sometimes there were things too important they couldn't answer and reach to anything at all.
"Little Su?" Yūn calls to her sister, her eyes still with the woman's.
"Yes?" the girl answers through the door of her room.
"Have you eaten dinner?"
Amusement thrived in the woman's eyes, her mouth slightly gaping.
"Yes,"
"Great. I'm going to head out for thirty minutes and I'll be back, 'kay?"
"Okay,"
"Keep your door locked. After we're gone, you
know you'll have to brush your teeth. Then you
can sleep, Little Su. That sounds about right?"
"Right,"
The woman broods, her eyes now sullen with displeasure for having thought that the dinner will happen sooner than she had expected.
"I'm right behind you." Yūn tells the woman, beckoning the door.
Despite the ugliness of everything, after the very many faces of grotesque quiet, Yūn gives in to hunger. And she knows it did not mean devouring just anything.
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