Free Under the Same Sky by Joseph Kim Page B

produce unexpected food during a famine, everyone immediately becomes suspicious. Where have you been hiding it? Or what did you sell to get it, when we have nothing?
    Bong Sook, it turned out, had done something rash. She’d run out to the yard and dug up some of Grandma’s potatoes, the ones that were to sustain the family through the winter. Then she marched off to the market, exchanged the potatoes for some saccharin, and with part of the saccharin bought the two rice cakes.
    In other words, my gift had been stolen. Worse still, my birthday would cost us precious calories in the future.
    Grandma berated Bong Sook. It was the first time I’d ever seen my sister disobey her elders. But she was unrepentant. As Grandma yelled at her, and my mother watched with a wretched expression on her face, my sister stared at me. Her eyes said,
I’m happy I did it. I am.
     
    My mother, already depressed, had grown paranoid about the possibility of someone kidnapping Bong Sook and me. The cannibal story had burrowed itself deep in her brain. “Kwang Jin, if someone offers you candy, don’t go with them. Hear me? People will offer you food if you go with them to their houses, but I forbid you!” She repeated this every couple of days, and she wouldn’t allow us to go into town alone.
    I just looked at her and nodded. “OK, Mom,” I said. She needn’t have bothered. We were hearing scary stories from our relatives, who seemed to relish telling us the grisly tales. One was about the women in the market who sold their own children. They would arrive with four kids and sell one, usually the oldest. The money they earned they immediately spent on corn, which they stuffed into the mouths of their remaining children while screaming out “I’m sorry!” as the buyer led away the unfortunate boy or girl.
    I didn’t believe those stories then, though many people swore they were true (and I now believe such things did happen). I didn’t doubt people would sell their own children. My question was, who on earth would buy them?
    This was not the only story that turned out to be true. “Did you hear about the ax man?” my older cousin asked me. “Homeless children had been disappearing from the market—to where, nobody knew. Then one boy escaped and told people a local man was offering
Kkotjebi
food if they returned home with him. The children who went into his house never came out. So many of them! The local people broke into his house to investigate. Do you know what they saw?”
    I shook my head.
    “Heads. And feet. The heads had rags stuffed in their mouths. And in the corner they found an ax with blood and brains on it.”
    I tried to look nonchalant, like this was old news to me, but my body began to tremble. I was very scared. Bong Sook and I weren’t homeless yet, but we were just one step away. All it would take would be to lose my mother and we’d be out on the street. I already knew that my relatives were too stressed to be able to take us in.
    “Why only homeless kids?” I asked.
    My cousin made a face.
    “Because they have no parents to go look for them!”
     
    Some days, Bong Sook and I would lie on our mats and stare at the ceiling, daydreaming of meals we’d had: creamy corn pancakes, this or that kimchi, sizzling marinated pork. I enjoyed this immensely. I believed I could taste the corn pancakes more deeply and fully than when I’d actually eaten them, because I slowed each bite down so that it took two or three minutes to finish. But when the daydream was over, I felt hungrier than before.
    My aunt came home and made those very same corn pancakes, just like my mom’s. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough to go around. With a heavy heart, she gave the pancakes to her children in secret, not telling Bong Sook and me about them. But we could smell the corn as she pounded it into powder, and then as the pancakes were being steamed to perfection. What torture! And our cousins, being children, would come in