Free Drifting House by Krys Lee

waste words.”
    New Mother’s heel tapped harder under the table. It got so the silverware rattled. The conversation continued to swirl around and past her. She picked at a mound of glass noodles, her face absurd, mournful. When the men happy with
soju
began toastingone another, she pushed back her chair so quickly, it caught the tablecloth and sent her silverware crashing to the floor. She weaved out of the hall, her face volcanic with misery. Abeoji laughed.
    “Just like a woman,” he said.
    She was probably looking for a piano somewhere in the hotel. You couldn’t really blame ­her—the room was filled with the past, and Mother’s ghost seemed everywhere. It was too much, even for me.
    “I can’t compete with a dead person.” New Mother slapped at her palm. Within minutes of coming home she had begun listing her grievances.
    “Be quiet, woman.”
    My father shoved the piano bench at her. When it hit the side of her knee, she fell.
    He said, “You’ve humiliated me enough.”
    “Let’s get some rest,” I said.
    She rose shaking, her bad leg floundering behind her. She took the picture of my mother off the wall and held it like a shield.
    “That’s not for you to touch,” I said. I grabbed for it, but she hugged it to her chest.
    My father punched the piano keys, all dissonant notes.
    “Getting you to listen is like reading the Bible to a cow,” he said.
    “A new start’s overdue for everyone.”
    “It’s been a year, only one year, since your best friend died.”
    “I’m a woman. A woman.”
    “You told her you wanted marriage as life insurance, nothingmore from me. Put the picture where it belongs, you ­middle-aged virgin.”
    She began to cry. I stood between my father and her, wanting to walk out, wanting to be anywhere but here, but her fear kept me suspended. I knew that fear well.
    “I’ll break the picture.” She held it high in the air. My mother, still young, still healthy, gazed hopefully out of the frame. “I swear I’ll break it.”
    “She pitied you.” His voice thrummed with pleasure.
    New Mother hurled the picture across the room.
    The frame crashed to the floor, and glass struck out everywhere. With the last shards still tinkling, I scrambled to my knees and started picking up torn pieces of the picture. I didn’t care if I was a boy; there was a piece of my mother’s arm in my right hand, a shred of her nose in my left, and I was crying for my mother.
    My father seized New Mother by her hair and hauled her to the floor.
    Still, she didn’t beg to be forgiven. Instead she said, “No one knows who you are, but God knows!”
    I was still angry and didn’t step between them when he dragged her out the door.
    My mother’s image was too broken up. There was nothing left of her now. She was gone. What was left in the house was the meager life that the years had given her, the smell of a man who had terrified her into becoming invisible. There were my sisters who had married men they knew they could dominate if needed, andme, unable to speak to people because anything that felt true about me was a secret.
    Then I left the house.
    I ran until I caught sight of them, and followed them from a ways back, calling to my father. But near the Han River walkway, I lost the two in the fog. I checked the parking lot, my hands feeling out before me. The rain swallowed the silence. The pleasure boat was docked, the paddleboats empty. One minute the rain thinned, then a sheet of rain fell so thick it erased my hands.
    It must have been ten yards ahead on the riverside walk. I was straining to see when I spotted my father thrusting New Mother into the river water. Closer, enormous ­bubbles—her ragged ­breathing—rose up from the water. When he yanked her back up, New Mother’s breasts sagged out of her unknotted
choguri,
the skirt of her
hanbok
stuck to her heavy thighs. Her moan was like the sound of whales spuming. When he clawed off her hands, her body keeled over as he released