Suphil Lee Park
pedigree
Linʼs mother picks up gardening after her purebred cat dies. Thatʼs also when Lin starts to get wrist-thick books on plants for holidays. Many find it out of her motherʼs character because when Linʼs grandparents passed away, just weeks apart, she single-handedly curated the joint funeral, aired out the countryside house she inherited, and auctioned off everything that had once filled the space—including the mother-of-pearl furniture pieces the grandmother had brought into the family as part of her dowry, all with the kind of aplomb that many relatives found disturbing. Once they moved in, the house did get furnished with metallic chairs and bed frames, but slowly and economically.
Lin thinks of her motherʼs dedication to seeds and pruning as a natural course of action. It makes sense that a grieving person turns to whatʼs sure to sprout up and fill with life a sterile landscape, should spring return, as it always does. And a cat doesnʼt seem all that weirder to grieve over than a music box pencil sharpener or a one-eyed wooden doll, which Lin lost and for which she felt inexplicable sorrow and loneliness, as during growth spurts. Lin has never loved her motherʼs irritable Persian enough to share her grief, but has come to like flipping through the horticulture books.
So, around the time rare postcards from her father in America have managed to pile up right by the door, Linʼs already in the habit of reading, or rather, letting pictures of flowers flash before her eyes like her days in the countryside. Around that time, Linʼs mother befriends a widow her age next door. Naturally, Lin befriends the widowʼs only daughter, Taehwa. The widow looks as if born and held hostage, in an ankle-long linen dress and a straw hat. Called the mail bride by most villagers, she has a foreign name that contorts Linʼs tongue into a desperate C and speaks lisping Korean. The very first time they sip oolong tea together, Linʼs mother jokes, “My husbandʼs business tripʼs turned into a convenient long-term arrangement.” She adds breezily, “Like our life.”
Afterwards, during tea time, the mothers always send the girls out on errands, and the girls amble forty minutes back and forth along the stretches of barley fields, only to find, more often than not, that store owners donʼt have the items or they donʼt sell hard liquor, Dunhill, or bottle openers with jagged blades to little kids. The girls come back, sweaty and covered in dust, to the mothers barely touching tea. Then they sit together in the garden sprawling with peonies, hyacinths, and azaleas startled to life in what Linʼs mother calls a pattern of pure chance.
And it is by pure chance that one day, Lin and Taehwa come back without going downtown. Lin, who helped Taehwa limp back to the house after her sandaled foot kicked at a broken bottle, seats Taehwa under the acacia tree in her motherʼs garden. Their mothers are not in sight. Overcast, the afternoon seems to be waning into the evening earlier than it should. Lin unstraps Taehwaʼs sandal and gently grabs the bleeding foot for a better look. A tiny shard of glass buried in the arch but not too deep. Taehwa starts sobbing: “I donʼt want to lose a foot. ”
Lin frowns, not entirely confident. “Youʼre not gonna.”
Taehwa insists on not going into the house and leaving her alone. Lin holds Taehwaʼs foot tight. Crouches over the foot that smells of beach sand and clamshells and pinches the shard with her fingernails.
Lin whispers, “Did you know that acacia trees smell so strong at night, you die if you sleep under them?” She confuses acacia with magnolia, fact with myth.
The shard lifts from the skin at the first tug, and Taehwa lets out a short yelp. While Taehwa throws up, hugging herself, Lin wipes her bloody hand on the pant leg of her shorts and places the clean hand on Taehawʼs back. Her spine feels like a trembling trellis on which Linʼs hand is an unsure tendril.
They sit on the bench, exhausted. In the darkening garden, they seem to drift on the flotsam of acacia blooms that fell to the ground before the end of their season. The garden overwhelms them with its outrage of sweet rot, flowers in disarray, their notes in dizzying dissonance. Lin remembers how, in an orchard near her uncleʼs vineyard, her mother once gently pushed her up the ladder so she could scrutinize the golden splotches on ripe peaches. Bees were indifferent to her there, the orchard being so unquestionably theirs. The entirety of the treeʼs canopy felt like her head burst into something of its own mind. Lin wanted to reach out and touch the tender twig. She wanted to be held a moment longer.
Lin stands up. “Iʼll go find Mom.”
Acacia blooms flutter in all directions as she runs off.
The house is damp like the inside of a nectarine, even with the scented candles burning in corners. Lin strides across the living room, takes a quick look into the kitchen, and hurries into the houseʼs only bathroom.
Reaching for the toilet paper, Lin notices the bathroomʼs other door that opens into her motherʼs bedroom is ajar. But something stops her from heading straight for the door. Lin ventures a glance around. By the sink, a bundle of cowslips dripping water. Linʼs mother liked to call a bouquet a bunch of corpses. Along with inscrutable adjectives like spayed or neutered. When Lin sometimes fills a vase with flowers, her mother makes sure to wait out the whole withering process, from yellowing petals to disintegration. Besides the growing puddle from the cowslips, the bathroom floor is littered with clothes, among them a crumpled linen dress. Among them a straw hat bristly with lint. Among them a flimsy triangle of fabric, which Lin hesitantly picks up, just before the other door swings open, and the widow walks in, naked from head to toe. The woman and the girl freeze on the spot.
In the following moment of silence, the woman pushes her callused second finger up across her glistening lips. Quiet, please, not a word, just a second, youʼd better not… The gesture is open to interpretation, so open, and the face is supposed to inform the one whoʼs on the receiving end, but the girl cannot read the womanʼs face, or she does not want to. Lin backs out of the bathroom. She crosses the living room, but not toward the back door. Not into the garden. Not to Taehwa, whoʼs bleeding under the acacia tree.
Out the front door Lin bolts, both hands clasped into fists. Past the cookie-cutter brick houses, down the dirt road, toward the townʼs only video-rental store in decline that Lin and Taehwa frequent, Lin runs. One of the rental discount flyers, curling at the edges, sticks to the sole of her Converse, but she does not notice. Only after the flyer almost makes her slip does Lin bend over to remove it and realize what sheʼs been clutching in her fist all this time. Lace-trimmed, beige gossamer cotton, hipster. Blood rushes up her neck. She fists the panties into a tight ball. Near her foot the flyer reads, 1+1 only for this month!!! followed by a smiley half-open-mouthed face below the three exclamation points. Taehwa would fume over this flyer, Lin thinks, lightheaded; Taehwa rented the entire series of Gilmore Girls just last month, full price.
A long stretch of gardenia hedge begins a few yards away. Fewer than twenty gingerly steps bring Lin there. Once her fingers find the cool, oily leaves, she begins to sprint with the hedge to her right. All along, her right hand runs through the well-pruned side of the hedge. She doesnʼt feel the twinges of her fingers getting scratched. She doesnʼt discern the white glow of flowers at dusk, which, like fading lamplights, chases her along. Before the hedge tapers into a line of lower thickets, Lin unclasps her fingers, releases what theyʼve been holding in the depths of that dark green, and keeps running.
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), which won the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize, and the chapbook Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), which won the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Litro Online, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Follow her at https://suphil-lee-park.com.
photo by Sam Ahn