Another Night
Mina Yu
By the time the man reached Myeongdong on foot only one street cart sign was still lit. The old woman who worked in the cart was scrubbing her pans. Seeing this the man hunched into his overcoat and set out to walk past the cart.
“Hey, you,” the old woman said. “Jeolmeuni in the gray coat.”
The man stopped. “Hello,” he said.
“Come here,” said the woman. When the man’s half-shaved face hit the glow of the street cart sign she grinned with a steel tooth. “I thought it was you. Come, talk to me. I’ll make you some dumplings.”
“But you’re closing.”
“Bah.”
The old woman spread flour over her newly-washed cutting board. She hoisted up a bag of dough from her icebox and pinched off a piece the size of a pocket watch then rolled it into a ball between her wrinkled palms.
“Where are you coming from tonight, jeolmeuni?” she asked.
“The pharmacy,” the man said.
“Oh dear, are you sick? Or your daughter, is she sick?”
“Just a cold,” the man said.
“You or your daughter?” the old woman asked. “Or your wife?”
The man took a moment to reply. “My daughter,” he said.
“Oh, the poor darling.” The old woman put down a ball of dough and went to her icebox. She came back with a tangerine in her hand. “Give her this from me. They’re good and sweet this time of year.”
“I shouldn’t take this,” the man said. But the old woman passed the fruit into his hand and went on kneading. He slipped it into his pocket where it rattled against a bottle of pills.
The old woman set out the skins of the dumplings on her cutting board and began to fill each with a mixture of ground pork, glass noodles, chopped green onions, and soy and chili-garlic sauce.
“So how’s that book of yours coming along?” she asked.
“My book?”
“Yes, the one you told me about a few months ago,” the old woman said. “With the student philosopher that falls in love with a beautiful prostitute. And he takes her to Taiwan to sit by the Sun Moon Lake and talk about life.”
“Oh,” said the man. “I haven’t really been working on it.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“I just didn’t see the point in it,” the man said. “I’m not really much of a writer.”
“What a shame, I thought it would be very interesting,” the woman said. She picked up one of the dumpling skins with filling and swiped one edge with a little water before folding it over. She pressed against the skin around the filling with her thumb and index finger until the whole dumpling was sealed.
“I have a wife and a kid and a job at a company,” the man said. “It isn’t as if I have loads of time. And besides-” He stopped abruptly. His hands went into his pockets and his left hand searched for the pills but closed around the tangerine.
“Yes?” the old woman asked.
“I mean, I don’t know,” the man said. “The book was supposed to be about the meaning of life. Who am I to talk about the meaning of life?”
“Who is anybody to talk about the meaning of life?” the woman asked. She laughed, a harmless little cackle, and her steel tooth gleamed under the light of the street cart sign. “You’re still a boy, but you’ve got some years of living under your belt. I think that makes you plenty qualified.”
“Is that right?”
“No question about it,” the old woman said. “And if you ever have some time, I hope you write that book. I want to know what happens to the man and his girlfriend. And I’d like to hear what this jeolmeuni has to say about life.”
The man didn’t answer. He’d been picturing himself swallowing the pills one and two then all at once but for the first time in the conversation his eyes were not so hazy and he stared as the old woman finished molding the last of the dumplings with her hands and threw them onto a greased pan. “You’re very good at this,” he said.
The old woman cackled again. “Good thing, too, or I would go out of business.”
Once the dumplings were done frying the old woman put them on a paper plate on top of a cabbage leaf. The man dug around in his pockets for his wallet. “No, no, put your money away,” the old woman said. “Take the dumplings and go home, you silly boy.”
“You have to let me pay sometimes,” the man said.
“Bah. You can buy this halmeoni something nice some other day,” she said. “Take them, take them. And try one now, let me know how good they are.”
The man put a dumpling whole into his mouth. He chewed for a long moment and then swallowed. “Very good,” he said.
“Haven’t lost it,” the old woman said. She cleaned her hands on her apron. “You should come back tomorrow. My husband’s bringing me some shrimp from Noryangjin—I’ll make you some spicy shrimp dumplings, the best on the whole peninsula.”
“Thank you,” the man said. He took his plate of dumplings and left.
The man had a long walk home through streetlights and the noise of the Seoul cabs. He had thought of saving some of the dumplings for his daughter but had the last one in his mouth before he was halfway home. A little oil dripped down his chin and the bottle of pills rattled as he raised a sleeve to wipe it away. He heard them and stopped a moment to think.
No, some other time, not tonight, he thought. This can wait until tomorrow. I should get home to put the tangerine in the fridge, and, besides, the halmeoni told me she would make me spicy shrimp dumplings.
The man walked on through the cold night, the tips of his fingers still greasy.
The Odds of Rain
Mina Yu
The nature of the job necessitated the twisting hallways and the iris and fingerprint scans and the three security checks and the creaking elevator that seemed to fall into the belly of the earth. At first the man had found all of this strange, but, slowly, even the most unsettling parts of the routine began to feel normal. A month into the job he already knew that the security guard had two kids and the security code for each week was based on Recamán's Sequence and, being a creature of habit, would find himself even blinking against the scanner on autopilot.
His job was exceedingly simple. After having been divested of everything but his clothes and body, he was placed into a small room with one light and no windows and a constant whirring sound as stale air was pumped in through a vent overhead. He would sit in his metal chair at his metal desk and wait for a piece of paper, which would have a message on one half of the page and nothing on the other, to drop out of the slot on the wall before him. He’d take the little nub of a pencil provided him and decode the message. Then he would encrypt it into a different code on the blank half of the paper, tear off the original coded portion, and put the encrypted message into the slot on the wall to his left. Rinse and repeat.
Today he was of course doing the same, and as he scratched out letters almost without thinking he amused himself by thinking about Catullus, specifically his 16th carmina, the one that started Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo and he’d made jokes about with his friends when he was still a college student studying Latin and mathematics, of all things. He remembered wondering if there could maybe be a message hidden inside the meter—the jaunty hendecasyllables with which the ancient poet had written out a poem so depraved that translators refused to render it into English until the twentieth century. He wasn’t trying to be profound, then (he actually came up with a code that would make the first two lines of the poem spell out “dick”), but it didn’t seem too far-fetched to him that someone might hide something important behind something so flagrant no one would look for any depth.
It was because he was thinking these things that he didn’t notice what he had written out onto the page until he was halfway through encrypting it. When he did notice he felt as if all the blood in his body had suddenly been calcified.
Drop B115 on 53.3498° N, 6.2603° W at 0100 on 19 Nov 2019.
The designation of the thing being dropped was familiar. The man remembered doing research for a history project in class and finding a list of nuclear weapons and their names on Wikipedia.
He noticed his palms were beginning to soak the thin page and jerked his hands back. The date was two days away. A nuclear weapon, being dropped somewhere—where it was he didn’t know, but did it matter?—in two days. The man thought briefly that it had to be a test (after all, it wasn’t as if the country was at war) but knew it didn’t make sense that the message would be sent through him; a test would be handled privately by the military.
As he sat and trembled another piece of paper dropped onto his desk from the slot before him. He gathered a shaking breath and picked his pencil back up from where it had slipped out of his hand. He didn’t have a choice; they had made it clear—very, very clear—that if he ever deliberately prevented a message from sending correctly they would have him arrested for treason. And then, the man supposed, they would find someone else, some code-obsessed college student to sit in this room and do the exact same thing.
He would just have to believe that the government knew what they were doing, that somehow the bombing of the 53.3498° N, 6.2603° W place would help preserve democracy, or the common good, or the interests of the nation’s people. He would have to forget about that video he had to watch for a history class where buildings splintered apart like sandcastles pulverized by a wave and which had tallied up the number of people who died in Nagasaki in a bar graph decorated with skulls. Forget about the story he’d read in English about the coming of soft rains and silhouettes burned against a brick wall. After all, there was no way he knew better than whoever had made this decision. He would just have to treat this message like all the others. He would.
He would. His hand stopped moving across the page. When he saw what he had written he could hardly restrain himself from deranged laughter.
nox est
perpetua una dormienda da mi basia mille,
deinde centum, dein mille
altera
He flipped his pencil around to erase the Latin, but as he did his thoughts ran rampant. Say the world, and decision making, wasn’t so complicated. Say that all that mattered was that he didn’t want people to die like that, ever, for any reason. Say the odds didn’t matter, say it didn’t matter that his tiny, silent act of protest would probably only be an annoyance, say that nationalism was a lie, say that the only thing that counted were lines from an ancient invective poet that humanity would fall into an endless night, and so we must kiss, and kiss, and kiss again.
He wrote in a frenzy, kissed the page, and threw it down the slot. When he got off work that day he took a taxi home and lay down in his bed and waited to be taken away. Despite the forecasts there were no rainclouds outside his window and nothing at all inside his head.
about the writer
Mina Yu is an undergraduate student from Athens, Georgia who is currently studying chemistry, creative writing, and the Classics at Princeton University. Her work has been published in Half-Mystic, Atlanta, and Cicada and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Poet Laureate of Georgia.