Flowers of Mold & Other Stories by Ha Seong-nan

Author:Ha Seong-nan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Flowers of Mold

From the fifth floor, the playground looks like a small pond. The heavy downpour from two days before has created muddy puddles that refuse to dry up. There are pools of rainwater everywhere—under the opposite end of the seesaw the woman straddles, even under the monkey bars the child hangs from.

The woman is shelling kidney beans. Every time she twists open the shells, speckled beans peep out, nestled neatly in a row. If a bean happens to pop out onto the sand, she quickly reaches for it, raising her bottom in the air. Then her end of the seesaw rises a little to find its balance point.

The child is catching his breath before swinging from the third bar to the fourth. If he wants to land on dry ground, he has no choice but to go all the way across. His pants are slipping down, and his shirt rides up to reveal a patch of pale skin.

The woman sits hunched over with her back toward the man. From his vantage point all he can see is her plastic container on the sand. Soon the container brims with beans.

“Are you planning to cook rice with beans tonight?” he asks, but his voice doesn’t reach her. “Who could forget that taste? The creamy texture? You mind if I have some?”

Standing by the balcony window, he keeps smacking his lips. He can picture the downy fuzz covering the bean shells to the very fibers that get stuck under her thumbnails. Luckily the woman hasn’t noticed him watching. She is deep in concentration, like a student solving a math problem. The child still hasn’t crossed the monkey bars. With his teeth clenched, he continues to hang from the bar.

From his back pocket, the man takes out a little notepad, curved from having been pressed against his rear end. Bits of food have dried between the pages, which stick together when he tries to turn them.

Bean shells, seesaw, monkey bars, boy, puddles.

The man writes down a few words that will help jog his memory. Later, the shells she chucks will become the only clue in identifying her garbage bag from the others. He doesn’t know which unit out of the ninety she lives in. Luckily there’s only one apartment building.

On the news that morning, the weather person gave the forecast in a yellow raincoat while holding up a yellow umbrella. A low pressure system was moving in and developing across the western coast and all of Gyeonggi Province. Scattered spring showers were expected the entire week. She added that this early summer heat wave in April was the result of El Niño. If the heat and humidity continue, the man’s work will become difficult.

He wakes to a woman’s shrieks. It’s a little past two in the morning. Glass shatters on the floor. Frantic footsteps echo throughout the apartment. A woman is screaming at the top of her lungs, but he can’t make out her words. His wardrobe and stereo system are placed against the wall, which is all that separates his room from 507.

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