Fiction
All the Ways We Intertwine
Below, find an excerpt from my novelette, All the Ways We Intertwine, about Tim, a reserved Korean international, who attends his first Black Lives Matter protest with his hot-headed Korean American sister, Valerie.
On The Day Like Any Other, Tim watched in horror as his sister, Valerie, tugged at the drum strapped across her shoulder.
“Where are you trying to go?” he asked.
“The protest.”
The TV erupted in a crackle of gunfire, a boom, the hiss of gas, screaming.
“But they’re shooting.”
A newscaster somberly reported, “The ancestors are out in full force tonight, as evidenced by the mass of ghosts on both sides.”
Valerie adjusted her headband. “The protestors could use our support. What do you say?”
I say you look like a knock-off Korean Freedom Fighter, he thought. All of thirty-six years old and she still looked like a kid in her traditional performance dress. He stared at the janggoo hanging by her waist, a traditional drum shaped like an hourglass, time suspended. “I thought you said you can’t summon the ancestors.”
“I can boost the protestor’s drumbeat.”
Well, good, he thought. Summoning was a fickle art form.
“Why don’t you bring your fans?” she asked, peering over at his suitcase. “Can’t you summon the winds of change?”
He had. Once. On accident. While performing in the outdoor space behind the Seoul Arts Center. The crowd had screamed; chairs had shattered against the stone walls. Some had celebrated the return of a powerful magic (“A new generation of Freedom Fighters!”); most were uninterested in the obsolete art. His traditional fan dance troupe fired him.
“All the better,” some had whispered. “What type of man does fan dance?”
Tim turned his body to hide the suitcase behind him. “How’d you know about that?” he asked Valerie.
She shrugged. “Word gets around.”
He looked back at Valerie’s TV, brand new, wider than he was tall. Something about the elephantine proportions made him really feel like he was in America. Back in Seoul, he’d used his computer monitor.
He thought about the #FreeBritney docuseries that would be airing in a few minutes. He thought of all the things they’d been doing, all the things they could keep doing, from the safety of their own home: signing petitions, donating, posting on social media. He also saw, before his eyes, a horror reel of his worst fears: his five-foot-one sister on the ground, spazzing under a torrent of gunshots, curling under the pummel of batons, lifeless under a knee.
The sky ahead was dim but when he gazed back northwest, he caught the last embers of sunset glowing at its seam.
“Can I at least eat something?” Dinnertime had come and gone while he’d been rooted to the television. He opened the fridge: empty.
He rummaged about the empty cabinets until he found a ChocoPie. “Nuna,” he said, referring to his older sister by the appropriate honorific, a term of affection, “you have to eat better.”
“It’s too late for me. You can have it. It hasn’t expired yet, right?”
He cracked open the aluminum bag, pushed the ChocoPie out of the opening, and took a bite. The cheap chocolate coating and brittle yellow cake and marshmellow filling swirled together and melted on his tongue.
“You know they’re based on Moon Pies from Tennessee? They’re Korean American, like we are,” Valerie said.
He closed his eyes. “Tastes like childhood.” He suited up in a long-sleeved shirt and full-length sweatpants, at the height of a balmy DC summer, to minimize exposure to tear gas. Mandatory service back in Korea had meant to prepare him for Northern invaders, not civil warfare in America.
Outside the night was eerily quiet though their ears strained for the faint sound of booms.
Tim jumped. Valerie was drumming. “Maybe they’ll hear us,” she said.
“Our ancestors or the protestors?”
Rat-a-tat-tat. She continued uninterrupted. “I don’t know.”
He sighed and peered down Massachusetts Avenue, cutting southeast across DC. The sky ahead was dim but when he gazed back northwest, he caught the last embers of sunset glowing at its seam.
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