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.
Midday, standing on the gray, vinyl floor of his small kitchen in Chicago’s West Side, Ozzie took a can of sardines from the cabinet and pried open the top. His flannel robe hung loose, exposing gnarled blue veins running down his legs. He stood motionless as he stared into the tin.
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.
Four girls in five years, wow, did you plan that? Do they all have the same father? Are you going to try for a boy? Have you figured out where babies come from?
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.
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