Once the Shore

Author:Paul Yoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2010-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Once a week, as was tradition, each of the families of the village prepared a meal and, after sunset, brought it out to the clearing where they gathered beside a bonfire and shared it. Haemi sat between her mother and Linden. Ohri raced around them. The children of the village approached Linden and offered him a sample of their dinner. He stood and bowed for every child who approached and Haemi teased him. “Stop it and eat,” she said, pulling on his shirt.

Her father, who had been wandering through the crowd, now offered Linden wine and sat beside him, slapping his shoulder. “Good, good,” he repeated. Ohri, with caution, went over to his father. “My son,” he announced. He passed the bottle to Linden and lifted the child and together they danced through the crowd, their bodies dark against the light of the fire. Haemi took the bottle from Linden and walked to the grass where she poured out its contents. The liquid pooled, reflecting stars, then vanished. She gave the bottle to her mother. “He won’t remember,” Haemi said. She spotted her father and her brother by the well and went over to them. “They’re starting,” she told her father. He looked at her, as if about to speak, his face bright and shadowed, but she took the boy and walked back to her mother and Linden.

Now that the performers no longer visited it was custom as well that at the end of the meal the villagers would tell stories themselves. They stood in front of the crowd, beside the fire, and spoke of legends that everyone was familiar with but listened to nonetheless.

These were stories of distant places on the island: the Bay of the Dead, called such because the caves on the shore were once the eyes of an ancient creature, the cliffs above them its skull; the waterfall where the kings were said to be buried, and the passage across the forest canopy, used by gods, to travel quickly from one village to the next.

On this night they listened to a villager speak of a farmer who, unable to sleep, hiked up a mountain. After he had been walking for an hour, he came upon a glacier lake where he saw a group of maidens descending from the heavens. With every full moon the gates in the sky opened and they came to bathe until dawn when they would have to return. Before their flight, however, the farmer stole the clothes of one of them and hid behind a bush. When it was time for them to return, one of the girls couldn’t find her blue dress and so was unable to ascend to her home.

The farmer, appearing out of the bush, consoled her and took her back to his cottage. In time they were married. She bore him children. As the years went on, the farmer, in his happiness, soon forgot about her dress, which he had hidden in a chest. But she never did.

And so one day she asked if she could try on the blue dress and he, unconcerned, consented.

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