Author Bio

AN CHANG JOON

KULESHOV EFFECT

It happened while Jung-ha was dressing for work. A soft and muffled crack, followed by a swollen belly of a silence that loomed, distended and horrible. Her pulse thundered in her ears, offbeat and tinny, as if her heart had been swapped out with a faulty metronome. She felt her arms falling slack, hand still clutching the hairdryer as it blew air onto her leg. She walked into kitchen, already knowing what she would see. There was a dark stain on the carpet, growing wider by the minute. Above the stained carpet was something that had once been a teacup. It had split down the middle. Jung-ha knew where the cup had been; she always remembered where she put her cups.
       She mopped up the tea but did not sweep the floor. There was no need. When a cup fell this way, it always split into halves. Neat.
       So instead, she held the two halves in each palm to examine the break. The crack was a line, unnatural in its straightness. Something that existed solely as a mathematical concept.
       It was the day after In-chan’s jesa, the Korean anniversary of someone’s death.
       It’s better this way, she thought.
       After all, if a bad thing had to happen, wasn’t it better that it took place around the anniversary of some other awful thing? Some sort of assurance that this was the day when all awful things happened? There was, after all, an advantage to knowing. Jung-ha had read somewhere that Japanese death row inmates were not told about their date of execution. The logic being that their victims did not know when they died, so why should they? She used to think that it was poetic justice. But now, it felt like unnecessary cruelty. She’d want to know. Everyone deserved to know.
       She gently ran her finger down the split and thought about pressing harder. She pictured her skin straining taut against the porcelain for a moment before it gave and parted with a gout of blood. The vertigo came, familiar and unbearable.
       She put the pieces back down and swept her half-eaten breakfast into the garbage disposal.
       “There’s no point crying about it,” she sternly told herself. “What’s done is done.”
       The cup, after all, had fallen. A strange day would follow. This was the rule.

* There was a time when Jung-ha’s memory worked properly, a point in her life when she remembered and forgot like everyone else.
       But something about what happened had perforated her brain. Holes opened up. Some were small and miniscule. Others yawning and wide as the dead black between the stars. And through them, her memories seeped out.
       What she did remember was fixed, unmoving. What sank through that sieve, however, was gone for good. Court dates. Names of co-workers. Movies she watched a month ago. A year ago. She did not discriminate in what she lost.
       “Where’s the gochu-jeon,” Mi-ri, Jung-ha’s aunt, had said yesterday. She scrutinized the plates on the jesa table. “Wasn’t that In-chan’s favorite?”
       “It’s—” Jung-ha said as she looked around. Her shoulders sagged in disbelief. “I can’t have forgotten it.”
       She had.
       “Shit,” she said. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Shit, shit, shit.”
       Jung-ha looked at Mi-ri. She briefly wondered what her aunt saw, what Jung-ha must’ve looked like to her. She wished for a mirror. What was the appropriate expression for this occasion? Apologetic? Sad?
       She thought about explaining how In-chan had only really liked gochu-jeon because it was his father’s favorite. She knew that it would just make things worse, but she wanted to explain anyway.
       Mi-ri’s face crumpled. For a moment, Jung-ha saw her mother there. Mi-ri struggled to rein in her emotions, the same way her sister used to. Her aunt turned and walked briskly towards her bag.
       “Don’t worry. I’ve brought some.”
       After the jesa, they moved the food to the kitchen counter and ate a rushed meal. Mi-ri picked up a piece of galbi with her chopstick, considered it for a moment, and gingerly placed it over Jung-ha’s bowl of rice. Jung-ha shook her head mutely.
        “Still?” she asked, disappointed.
       Jung-ha crammed some namul in her mouth in lieu of an answer. She chewed slowly. The food was cold, having sat out on the jesa table for over an hour. It tasted bland. Food offered to the dead could not be seasoned with anything besides salt. Strong seasonings chase away spirits, her mother had once told her. She wondered if their dead were so frail, as to be kept at bay by minced garlic.
       In-chan wouldn’t want to be here, garlic or not, Jung-ha thought. The sesame oil made her lips slippery. She could feel a lump forming in her throat. She pushed it down with another spoonful of rice.
       Before all this, back when Sang and Jung-ha were still married and she could still eat red meat—back when her lungs worked, and she used to make small talk with her co-workers—she and Sang used to watch documentaries.
       Sang had picked the film that day. He nodded off almost immediately, but Jung-ha did not resent him for it. Ever since In-chan was born, Sang had worked double-time to pay the hospital bills.
       The documentary was some small indie film about artisans and blacksmiths. Jung-ha has lost the rest of the film, but there was a scene that stuck. In a small workshop, a man restored a rusted cleaver until it shone. There was something beautiful to the way the cleaning solution ate away at the grime. Rust and steel—the two objects seemed one at first. Then they separated. She marveled at the way two things that seemed indistinguishable were made distinct.
       Her memories were the same. Indistinguishable until time ate a part of it away to nothing. Whatever was left in her hands was sharp. Deadly.
      
* By the time she cleaned up the broken cup and set off to work, she was late. Jung-ha rushed into the classroom, late and wheezing. Her chest burned. She resented her ruined lungs, the sole witness to all that had occurred between her, her son, and her ex-husband.
       The lecture was a bust. The muted sound of the cup shattering played over and over in her ears. From somewhere very far away, she heard her voice as it droned on about post-war Modernist poets.
       “Life is very long,” it said. “Here we go round the prickly pear. Prickly pear prickly pear.”
       Her mother had raised prickly pears, back when Jung-ha was in middle school. She remembered them crowding the hallway. Between early spring and summer, little red flowers bloomed atop. It had amazed her, how such bright colors spilled out from the ugly muted green. When the flowers hardened into fruit, her mother tore the fleshy bulbs and made jam. It had stained their teeth red.
       It was also in that narrow hallway that Jung-ha first heard a cup fall. Her hallway had always frightened her as a child. The intermittent lights from the windows turned most of it into a chiaroscuro. Lining the walls were shelves and frames, with the latter mostly consisting of dead ancestors and relatives. They gazed out into the darkness of the hallway, their printed eyes austere and unseeing. The shelves, on the other hand, were solely for her mother, who hoarded trophies, commemorations, and awards like a magpie.
        Even now, she could recite the first few items in the hallway.

1. A very old and fragile looking photograph (the sort that would’ve required a darkroom).
2. Two second-place awards in a piano competition (awarded to one Hwi-hee Moon-hee).
3. A pressed and dried wedding bouquet (small & impressive).
4. A black-and-white photograph of her grandfather (the one they used for his funeral).
5. Another pressed and dried wedding bouquet (bigger this time)

That sudden sensation of falling, the kind that sometimes hit you on the verge of sleep, jolted her out of her daze. Jung-ha looked around to see that she had blanked out mid-lecture. From somewhere near the back, she heard a student scoff and leave.
       “So sorry about that,” she said. Her face burned with embarrassment. “Where was I?”

* She tried everything from grief counseling (expensive) to guided LSD trips (disastrous). But no matter what she did, she could not remember. She even resorted to a hypnotherapist. But after the session, he only shook his head apologetically.
       “What,” Jung-ha asked. “It didn’t work?”
       “I mean, that depends how you define “work”. You remembered a lot, but not what you actually wanted to remember.”
       He handed her one of those video cassettes and told her that it was a recording. She watched the video transcription exactly once, some few months after they had convicted Sang—after none of it mattered anymore. She had been temporarily staying with Mi-ri at the time.
       Jung-ha got good and drunk and sat in her aunt’s living room with the glow of her old TV filling her face.
       “Where are you?” the man in the video tape asked.
       “I’m in the kitchen.”
       “Who else is in the kitchen?”
       “It’s just me. In-chan’s playing in his room.”
       “What are you doing?” asked the man, his voice soothing. “Are you cooking
       something?”
       “I’m chopping meat. I’m making curry, I think.”
       “Where is In-chan now?”
       From the TV screen, Jung-ha began to toss and turn.
       The cup,” she mumbled. “The cup broke. But how did it fall? I didn’t touch it.”
       “Jung-ha, I want you to focus. Do you remember locking the balcony door?”
       “It always falls this way. Uninterrupted,” Jung-ha said. “I’m trying to pick up the pieces.”
       “Jung-ha—”
       “I think I’ve cut myself. It hurts.”
       “Jung-ha,” the man asked. “Did you leave the balcony door open?”
       “Ow. It hurts. Ow, ow, ow.”
       At some point, Jung-ha distantly realized that she was moaning. The grainy version of herself in the television was doing the same. Which one of the two had first started, she could not tell.
       “The meat is so red,” Jung-ha mumbled. “My fingers are too. It’s all red. Bright ruby red.”
       Jung-ha never made it to the end of the videotape. She lurched to the toilet and threw up violently. From the living room, the videotape continued to play—the doctor’s questions, never changing in pitch and tone and hers, growing more and more incoherent.
       Did you know that the balcony door was unlocked? Why didn’t you close it? Did you know your son was going to fall?
       Did you let him?

* At lunchtime, Jung-ha made a beeline for the corner of the teacher’s lounge where she could sit, undisturbed. Her stomach rumbled, but she had no appetite. There was a tap on her shoulders.
       “How’s it going, Jung-ha?” Joon asked.
       Joon was the only one in the department who still talked to her on a regular basis. Jung-ha doubted it was out of genuine goodwill. At best, it was rubbernecking. More than likely, he was rubbing elbows with the hagwon’s principle. They’d love to have any reason to fire her. She did not resent him for it. He was only doing what he felt like he needed to do, the same way everyone did.
       “Hey, Joon.” Jung-ha answered. “How are your lectures going?”
       “Oh, you know. It’s much of the same. There’s a kid in my fourth period class—not sure what his deal is, exactly. A bit slow. Might be born with it? He’s not autistic, I think. Maybe cerebral palsy? Sorry,” he said, raising his hands in mocking placation. “I know we’re supposed to tiptoe around this stuff—but all I’m saying is that you’re wasting your money by enrolling this kid in a hagwon. Not to mention wasting my time and it disrupts the class.”
       Jung-ha took her lunchbox and bashed Joon’s head in with it. She smashed his face with it until the stainless steel was sticky with spattered blood. Long after his feet stopped kicking, she mechanically lifted the lunchbox and brought it down, over and over again.
       “Jung-ha?” Joon asked, jostling her out of her daydream. “You still with us?”
       “Hey, yeah, so sorry about that,” she answered, eyes out of focus and wild. “Listen, I’d love to chat, but I probably have to go eat my lunch now and prep for the next class.”
       “Oh, okay. What’s on the menu today?”
       “It’s just some—”
       Jung-ha tried to speak but was overcome by a fit of hacking. She hunched over, wheezing, and coughing while Joon awkwardly averted his eyes.
       After a moment, she spoke. “So sorry about that. Anyhow, it’s just leftovers. In-chan’s jesa was yesterday.”
       “Oh, I had no idea.”
       Joon stammered a useless apology before scurrying off. Jung-ha watched him go. Her hands shook.
      
*Lots of things changed after her husband tried to kill her, and then not much changed at all.
       She gave up meat; her kidneys couldn’t take it. The hagwon tried to fire her. Her presence made the parents gossip. She sued for wrongful termination and got them to settle. She refused their payout and instead asked for her job back.
       Jung-ha continued to reach poetry from 8-12 and early American novels from 1-5. She still drove a Honda Odyssey. It was a family car, too big for her now. She kept it anyway.

* The other documentary that Jung-ha really remembered was about some Russian filmmaker. His claim to fame was the idea that the same shot of an expressionless actor became something else when paired with different footage. A steaming bowl of soup. A woman stretched out on a divan. A dead child. The man magically became hungry or aroused or sad, depending on what came next. His point was that context meant everything. That when two things were put together, meaning was divined.
       An egg breaking over a pan was breakfast. The same egg shattering against the floor was a waste. The fall in a rollercoaster was enjoyable because it was in right context, a carefully crafted and monitored form of descent. Other falls were decidedly less pleasurable.
       All those years ago, when Junga-heard the quiet tinkling sound echoing around her mother’s dark hallway, it took everything she had to not scream. Jung-ha had heard things break before; who hadn’t? But the same crack of the porcelain became something else in the hallway, in that tunnel where dead and forgotten things lurked on the walls.
       When Jung-ha eventually found the courage to step forward, she found what had been a teacup, just below a framed diploma. The cup looked expensive. She did not tell her mother—not then and not after what happened at school. Her ex-husband was the only person who ever heard this story.
       “So, the cup sits on the shelf. It’s jade-green.”
       “Right.”  
       “And there is no gust of wind. No tremor. It is so still that you could be convinced that the cup was a part of that shelf. And then the cup falls.”
       “Why?” Sang asked. “How?”
       It just does. Nothing propels it. It’s on the shelf, until it isn’t.”
       He looked skeptical, but his eyebrows were furrowed, and she could tell that he was absorbed by the story.
       “Then it breaks?”
        “No,” she answered. “Break is the wrong word for it. It—”
       She paused, searching for the right words.
       “It comes apart. Two even halves.”
       “And you know that’s how it happened?” he asked.
       “Well, no. This is my imagination.”
       She told him the rest, how in her imagination, the cup caught the light once as it tumbled end over end towards the floor. How it must’ve gleamed before it was bisected.
       “Like a weary lighthouse.”
       “That’s kind of beautiful,” he said.
       “Is it?” Jung-ha asked, taken aback. “I hadn’t meant it that way.”
       “Yeah, I don’t know. Almost sounded like you were describing something dying.”
       “Look who’s waxing poetic now,” she teased, laughing.
       He had been wrong, of course. But she did not know it back then. A person wasn’t a teacup. A person did not come undone in the same way that a teacup did. The former was a chaotic and drawn-out affair. A hail of forms to sign and hushed whispers from your co-workers. It dragged out for years, long after one’s child fell to his death off the balcony. The cup was eloquent, beautiful in its simplicity. There was a point where it was, beyond any doubt, a cup. And then it was not.
       Did it become something else at that point? If Jung-ha had to guess, it was all context again. A shard of porcelain became a dagger in the wrong hands, with the wrong intentions. What was her intention? What was Sang’s? Was there a point to knowing?
       *After work, Jung-ha walked over to a restaurant for a meeting with concerned parents. They were probably just looking for a place to vent, disgruntled that the extracurricular classes had not adequately improved their children’s test scores.
       It was a Tuesday, but the restaurant was nearly full. Cubicle workers sat with their ties loosened, faces already red from soju. The parents were running late. A man sitting on the next table brayed with laughter, the sound piercing. A violent impulse throbbed. Jung-ha wanted to do something insane, something horrible like taking the man’s face and pressing it into the grill. She wanted to do something that wouldn’t help anyone or anything—in fact, she wanted to do something that would make everything worse. Is this how Sang felt? she wondered.
      
*There was a second part to the cup story, one that she kept to herself. Partially because no one would believe her. It also felt too private. It revealed too much, although what it revealed, she did not know.
       That day, when the cup fell for the very first time, her school had served dead birds for lunch. There was an odd silence in the cafeteria. Utensils quietly clicked against the plastic trays. Jung-ha diligently waited in line, staring at the back of another student’s head.
       Behind the lunch counter was a worker who Jung-ha had never seen. There was a redness to his face that she associated with sunburns and aging drunks who ranted and raved in the subways. His hand was equally ruddy. He motioned her closer, and she skittishly stuck out her lunch tray.
       He smiled as he ladled a spoonful of meat over the rice. Something about the way the meat fluidly slid over the rice was haunting.
        “Do you know what this is?” he asked.
       She shook her head. Her throat felt very small.
       “Flesh.”
       It was her second year of international school; her English wasn’t all that good. But even still, that word sounded off to her.
       “Excuse me?” she asked. “I don’t think I heard—”
       The flesh of a dead bird,” he answered.
       She wanted to ask further, but a teacher came and ushered her along. Even after sitting down, she could feel the man’s gaze, intent and wild. His lips were rapidly twitching, mouthing the same word again and again.
       Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat eaaaaaaaaat eateateateateateateateateat.
       Sensing her hesitation, his face twisted into a grimace of anger. He began to walk towards her, his gait strange and stilted. It reminded Jung-ha of pigeons, the way they dragged their bloated bodies to peck at scraps. She hurriedly began shoving forkfuls into her mouth, afraid of what the man might do. The meat was stringy and overcooked. Jung-ha stomach churned.
       Twenty minutes later, she was kneeling in a toilet cubicle and retching her guts out. Amidst her heaving, she heard the bathroom door open.
       “You’re throwing it up, aren’t you?” a voice asked. “That bird gave up its flight for you.”
       What does that even mean, Jung-ha wanted to ask. But violent vertigo seized her again; she puked some more instead. A thunderous slam rocked the cubicle. She realized with start of terror that the man was beating his fists against the thin wall of the cubicle.
       “Do you fucking hear me,” he shouted. “That bird became undone for you.”
       The man was having trouble speaking, it seemed, so overcome with anger. Strange squawking noises punctuated his words. Jung-ha buried her head between her knees and screamed. The last thing she saw was a large pair of avian feet, desperately clawing at the gap between the floor and the cubicle. But when the teachers eventually found her, she was unconscious and alone in the bathroom.
       Later, she retraced her steps in her mother’s hallway. She aimed her flashlight at a shelf to see that the cup was missing. The pieces, likewise, were gone.
       What cup? was the only thing her mother said when Jung-ha asked about it.
      
*The parents eventually arrived. Three mothers and a father. They sat in a circle around the dinner table and picked at the food.
       “So, Ms. Hwi,” one of them, the clear leader of the group, spoke. “We don’t mean to be overbearing.”
       But you are about to be anyway, Jung-ha thought.
       “Some of the other parents have said that there is a student with, well, I’m not sure what’s the right way to say this, but they have a condition?”
       Jung-ha’s heart sank. From somewhere deep down, the same old anger stirred, but she was tired now.
       “Yeah, cerebral palsy,” Jung-ha answered dully. “Affects about two to three children out of a thousand.”
       It surprised her that she still remembered the statistics.
       Yes, okay, so you are aware,” the parent answered.
       Relief washed over her face and Jung-ha hated her for it. She wanted to grab the parent by the collar and shake her. What the hell do you know, she wanted to scream. And then the floor dropped out of her anger. Guilt clenched her throat shut and whispered in her ears.
       Like you didn't cry when you first found out about how your son was born, it said. Like you never looked at other kids with envy or got the monthly medical bill and resented In-chan for it.
       Jung-ha neither screamed nor shouted. She stared at her plate instead.
       The fish stared back, its opaque, dead eyes looking into nothing.

*Jung-ha was in getting her PhD when the cup fell for the second time.
       That same day, her mother vanished.
      
*Jung-ha drove in a daze. She thought of birds and cups. A small, terrified figure flailing its arms as it plummeted towards the ground. There was a wet thud against the windshield and Jung-ha screamed and wrenched the steering wheel. The vehicle crossed into the pedestrian walkway, narrowly missed a passerby, and crashed into the railing. On the windshield was something that had once been a bird.
       “What the fuck,” the person screamed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
       “I’m sorry,” Jung-ha whispered, over and over and again. “I’m so sorry.”
       Before she could get out of the car, another bird plummeted into it, then another. In no time, the falling birds beat a thrumming tattoo, flesh tearing against glass and steel. Jung-ha began to laugh. Quietly at first, then louder and louder until she doubled up and pounded her fist into the driving wheel. Fat teardrops of mirth ran down her face.
       “What’s happening?” the man stammered. “Why are you laughing?
       “I spent,” she said, laughing and wheezing, “the entire day so terrified of what would happen. So afraid. Because when a cup fell that way, strange things always happened.”
       Birds continued to fall out of the sky and crash themselves around her. She could barely hear herself over the thundering rain of feather and beak. The man backed away from Jung-ha’s car, then began running away in earnest.
       “And here it is, the strange event,” she said to herself. “So why am I disappointed?”
       Maybe a part of her had looked forward to something strange happening. Something that wasn’t this, this monotonous aftermath her entire life has become.
       By the time the rain of birds petered out, the angry pedestrian was a distant dot. She got out of the car, sidestepping the dead birds. She sat on the edge of the bridge with her legs dangling through the railing. One of her shoes fell off, the dark water of the river below swallowing it in moments. With a shrug, she took off her other shoe and lobbed it over the railing.

*Whether it had been guilt, frayed nerves, or a change of heart, Jung- ha had no way of knowing. All she knew was that Sang had confessed to what he did almost immediately. It was what saved her life.
       By the time EMS arrived, she had nearly choked to death on her own vomit. What came out of her mouth was an oily shade of blue and stank to high hell. It was later that Jung-ha learned the medical slang for someone who came in with gramoxone poisoning was a smurf, on account of the blue coloration of their skin and vomit.
       You did what you thought you had to do, was the last thing Sang had ever said her. I did what I thought I had to do.
       It was touch-and-go for several days, but she pulled through. She didn’t remember much of those few days. Despite everything, at least when it came to this, she was grateful that her memory had failed her. Later, a harried looking doctor walked in to inform Jung-ha that her lungs and kidneys would never really recover.
       “A teaspoon of this stuff is enough to kill most people,” he said. “Frankly, it’s a miracle that you survived at all.”
       She lay in her hospital bed and took his words in. A machine beeped overhead. The tube in her mouth tasted of plastic.
       On the day she was discharged from the hospital, a nurse congratulated her. By the time security peeled Jung-ha off her, Jung-ha had fractured the nurse’s jaw.
      
*“Hello?” her aunt Mi-ri answered. “Jung-ha?”
       “Hi Mi-ri imo,” Jung-ha said. “I crashed the car.”
       “Oh my god. Are you okay? Do you need help?”
       “Yeah, it’s fine. Insurance is on their way.”
       There was a pause, then Jung-ha spoke again. “Why do you think that Sang did that?”
       There was a shocked silence over the phone.
       “Jung-ha?” Mi-ri asked.
       “Sang. You know, my husband. Or ex-husband, I guess. He said he did what he had to do, as did I.”
       “Jung-ha,” Mi-ri said again, concern creeping into her voice now.
       “Maybe he thought I—” Jung-ha’s voice broke. She could not bring herself to say it. She laughed, and the sound was wet and wheezy.
       “I don’t know. What had I meant? I mean we couldn’t afford In-chan’s hospital bills, that much was true. Maybe it was better that In-chan was gone. Maybe I wanted that to happen. Maybe I let him wander to the balcony, knowing that it was unlocked.”
       “Jung-ha, listen.”
       “No imo, you listen. The bottom line is, after everything that’s happened, after In-chan, after Sang, the poisoning—everything. My only real regret about it all that I looked down.”
       The desire to gag and cough wrestled for control over Jung-ha’s body. She grit her teeth, denying both.
       “I can't remember In-chan's face anymore. That’s the one thing that still makes me sad. I think of my son and the only thing that comes to my mind is the aftermath. Me looking down at what was left of him on the concrete.”
       A silence ensued. Just when she began to wonder if Mi-ri had hung up, her aunt spoke.
       “When we were both children, our father had a factory.”
       She paused as if waiting for an answer.
       “I didn’t know,” Jung-ha said.
       “It was a textile factory that his father built shortly after we got our independence back.”
       There was another pause, longer this time.
       “Sometimes, your mother and I thought that the factory was his real child, more so than us,” she said. “He’d go out to that factory at the crack of dawn and come back, stinking of all the ink that they used to dye the textile with.”
       “Imo, where are you going with this?”
       “It burned,” she said. “All of it. Down to the ground. It destroyed him. He took to drinking afterward, and then the divorce came not long after that.”
       Mi-ri sighed.
       “Last we heard; he was working in construction to make ends meet and they dropped a concrete pillar on him. Gone like that. Not even enough left to bury.”
       There was another long pause.
       “Actually,” Mi-ri said. “I burned that factory to the ground.”
       Mi-ri talked about how she and her sister had taken to sneaking cigarettes from her father, how they’d smoke it in the alley behind the factory.
       “It was November,” she said. “I remember the sky being so blue, the kind that makes you a little dizzy to look up. Windy day too. Perfect for a fire.”
       “Imo, you couldn’t have known.”
        “No, it’s okay. I feel better thinking that way, to think that I burned it all down. It’s a weight off, I think.”
       “What do you mean?”
       “I mean, I beat the hell out of myself over it for years. I’d think to myself, ‘Mi-ri, why didn’t you just make sure that cigarette was out? Why couldn’t you just have looked twice?’”
       The sun had now set. The river below was a strange, malignant growth, some twisting parasite that had attached itself to the city.
       “But the alternative seemed worse. To think that all this awful happened out of sheer chance. That there was no reason for any of this to happen. That was too much, you know?”

*Insurance came. They offered a ride back home but Jung-ha turned it down. She instead got up and began to walk towards the end of the bridge, still barefoot.
       “Hey,” one of the insurance workers called out after her. “Are you alright?”
       She waved without looking and walked. It was a part of the city that Jung-ha had never been to, but she kept walking. Her lungs gave out long before her feet did, and she breathlessly sat at a bus station. She got into the first bus that arrived. She did not check the route; she didn’t ask the driver where it was going either. It didn’t matter. It had to stop somewhere.