https://comraderadmila.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/human.mp3

Human Interest Story

–Sandra Lim

Snow would have been breaking the drifts that day, on a mild

mood.

My father was boarding at the home of a missionary couple in

Seoul, getting by on books and the radio and cheap noodles.

His older brother hanged himself that winter in Pusan. They

would say afterward that it was a plain death, funded by bad

numbers, some selfishness, unusual cold.

Think of a needle dropped into the sea.

He had a pleasantly objective feeling about himself that morning,

as the early sky gently ripped into red. He thought about Business

English, the truth of money.

Across town, a diary opened. And there were the white, cooling

coals in barrels.

There was a pretty young wife and one serious boy and one very

quiet girl. They awakened one day to a new planet, where the

spaces between people appeared slightly widened.

Maybe you can’t penetrate events with reportage, but facts have a

sly, unanswerable texture that appears social.

To relieve ourselves of open-ended narrative, we read into the

winter stars all evening. There are just stars and stars and stars.

We know what it’s like to fall in love and be disassembled, but we

still want to pull death right off the bodies of one another.

These were spectacular nights, said my father. They were full of

philosophy and political theory, noisy reversals, French movies.

The romantic grace we comprehend sits with ease in the real

world; it is almost nothing.

Now he is carrion, stitched forever in the cramp of a trial.

No one can evict us from books! he used to say, running through

astonishment at full speed.

Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash