The trees should have withered months ago, but everything is too green. I walk the dog past a magnolia on our morning route and find one last leaf still attached to its branch. I tell the dog to growl at it, as if she can intimidate the leaf into a timely death. As if this can fix an eighty-degree day in November, or last week’s brushfire in the middle of Prospect Park. The dog pisses on a mess of roots and blinks past me with whale eyes. I follow her gaze to the branches and see them: buds. Magnolia buds. Creamy white and six months early, premature mouths gulping the air.

The scent of my childhood is irises and dogshit. Metallic like wire and blood from splinters. A dry dust that coats the nostrils, leaves tissue black.
The childhood of my friends smells different. Sweet like candy and attentive parents. I notice their fences are just for animals like pigs and horses, and I wonder if they can smell the fear in me.
Jenny’s mom thinks I’m too polite and therefore insincere. I worry they can smell the

Tilted back in her recliner, Rachel’s mother has the look of a petulant child. Feet up, arms crossed. Pouting.
Rachel closes her eyes, exhales long. She swallows her impatience, her anger, and reminds her mother what the doctor said. “If your blood sugar’s too high, you won’t heal.”
Her mother makes a face. “A couple pieces of candy aren’t going to kill me,” she spits.

All you need to do is marry some decent boy and settle down, is what my father told me every time I asked about college. There are no decent boys in this town, is what I’d answer. Then he’d call me ungrateful. Then I’d slam the door to my room, the tiniest space in the house—more an oversized closet than a real bedroom

Eventually the house was going to fall into the sea—just pitch right over and tumble down the bluff. That was why it was cheap. Why they could afford it.
Their realtor said it was nothing to be concerned about. That was years away, he said. It probably wouldn’t happen at all.

The gourd appeared three days after my miscarriage. Its massive body, swollen and puckered with warty growths, stretched from one end of the butcher’s block to the other. Bulbous and green with a light-yellow underbelly, it sat there in the center of the room unbothered by its own mysterious appearance in the household.
Nothing about the 32-pound gourd made sense.

Here in the grotto, we whisper like sinners sipping on wine stolen from a stocked cabinet or an under-staffed supermarket with broken cameras—ours for the taking. Our secrets are coated in fermented, besotted grape juice, brains buzzing and swollen against our skulls, the rest of us just as desperate to be free.

Before curfew, Friend Bar is a G.I. hangout. After curfew, it belongs to us, the expats. We think of it as our private after-hours dive tucked away on the second floor of a broken-down building in a seedy part of Seoul. 

She’ll be dead that evening, but neither of them knows this. In her final moments, as the car flips over, she will not think of him but of her parents, of how she would give anything to spare them the pain they are about to experience.