Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  My mother told me in whispers that he had promised to wed me in exchange for guidance. He had bargained for his life and found the exchange sweeter than he had dreamed possible. A king’s hand for the witch’s daughter; a goal not to be dreamt of, and yet my mother had done it. Perhaps she was Satan’s whore after all.

  That night, when I went to him with water and sweet wine, the blossoms fell as he loosened my plaits. He paid my bride price as he removed my gown and we both knew it — and if the dark hid my eyes and his, so much the better for both.

  When morning came, I donned my gown and stepped out into the cool grey mist at his side. He put his cloak around me and lifted me up onto his horse, taking the reins and leading it through the enveloping fog. My mother walked ahead to unwind the path she had carefully obscured, the warp and weft of the spell falling like burnt threads in her wake. An hour later, we slowly emerged from the woods back onto the common path.

  I looked at him, my king and my betrothed, as we entered lands he knew once more. A horn sounded in the growing light and he shook his head, blinking away the strange ensnarement. A pair of his courtiers shouted from across the clearing, calling his name.

  “Your Highness,” one of the men said, “where were you? We have searched these woods since last evening to no avail.”

  “Yes,” said the other, his voice unsteady with fatigue. “There was no trace of you, my king. It was as though the forest had swallowed you whole.”

  The king looked at both of them, and then up to me. His courtiers acknowledged me only then, only when he had forced them to see the lowborn girl who sat on the king’s horse. “This lady,” he said, and then stopped, only to begin again with a faltering voice. “This lady and her mother sheltered me for the night, and I am indebted to her. Pay honor to my future bride.”

  The courtiers stood a moment, shocked into rude silence, before they gave me their best courtly bows. As they did, my lover’s eyes met mine briefly. The knowledge of what he had done — what we had done — lurked darkly there. I held his gaze until he looked away, then calmly nodded to the courtiers. “You are most kind,” I said. “I will be honored to be your lady queen.”

  I could tell you of our betrothal. You have perhaps heard of the fortunes spent on entertainments, of the gardens pillaged for their blooms, of the herds slaughtered for the bellies of the people. My mother lived in her cottage no longer but was moved into a grand home in the country, with servants to attend her as befits the mother of the queen. My best gown was replaced by finery I had never seen nor known of before, yet still I kept it in a chest in my apartments, out of sight of courtiers and maids. When we wed, nations across the land sent emissaries to drink to our union. Lords gave toasts to my beauty and virtue and ladies spoke of my lord’s devotion to his new queen and sighed after their own beaus, whether they were wed to them or no.

  More than these things, though, people whispered. Voices speaking ever so softly said the king wept still for his former queen at night, staring at the faces of his sleeping children to see an echo of hers. His new bride had bewitched him, or perhaps he wed her not for love but for a promise he had to keep. Louder voices, usually in their cups, said the new queen had an unnatural beauty that caused animals to shy from her presence, or that she never spoke with the priests who offered services and benedictions for her continued health, or that she was cold to those beloved children, those threats to her own happiness. Perhaps there was even talk of cruelty, of the maid who was whipped until blood ran for touching the wrong chest. I know the speed with which these words sped through the halls and into the villages. I know how cruel those people can be.

  In the end, though, no one denies that once he left his children, it was to my chamber that he came. He dismissed the maidservants, blew out the candles, and there in the dark he gave in to his hunger. I let him maintain that small dignity. A king may go to his knees if there are none to witness it, not even himself, and whatever it was that drew him to my chamber would not allow him to stand before me.

  Whether it was my mother’s gifts to me or the echoes of that first enchantment, I could not say. It was he who groaned for his release each night, though, he who called out the names I taught him as his seed spilled into my womb. That much no one can or will deny. If he stood mute toward me the rest of the day, no matter; the truth of the nights was shield enough.

  It has been six months now, and my courses have stopped. New life moves within me. I will bear his child, but it is not enough; I will also deliver his heir. His old queen’s issue stands before my own, but that can be negated with time and effort. I have scarcely seen the children since the wedding ... a half dozen boys, I believe, and one small girl. To be honest, I have had no desire to see them. I am not their mother and will not pretend to be such a role.

  Still, I know where in the castle they live. I found them a fortnight past and watched them at play, the sun glinting off their fair hair like sunbeams on water. My lord king was there as well, watching. We saw each other; he froze there like a bird before a serpent, watching me watch them. I wonder if he suspects I am with child.

  No matter. I can be patient. There is a great deal of preparation to do regardless; enchantments of the sort I have in mind take time.

  They were beautiful, really. The children, I mean. So fair and graceful as they flew about the yard. Almost like swans ...

  Those Who Leave

  Michael Choi

  My first memory is of the ocean.

  The water was so cold. I cried and clung to my mother’s neck.

  Never be afraid of the sea, she said. We are haenyeo, daughters of the ocean. In the water, we are home.

  Her warm lips pressed against my forehead.

  I lifted my fingers from her neck. Her strong hands held me tightly in the water.

  Kick, she said.

  And my mother let me go.

  #

  My mother woke me before dawn on my eleventh birthday. Her hands smelled like the sea. As she did on all of my birthdays, she told me the legend of the Moon goddess.

  “Every day, when the sun rises, the Moon goddess swims deep into the ocean and waits for the night sky to return. And if the goddess appears to a haenyeo on the day of a new moon, our year will be blessed.”

  “Have you ever seen her, Oma?” I knew the answer, but I asked the question with every telling, wanting to live in her tale as long as I could.

  My mother leaned towards me, as if sharing a secret. “Mi Sun, when I was around your age, a terrible monsoon blew in from the west, the worst any haenyeo in our village could remember, ripping apart roofs and flooding the shore. When the storm finally calmed, the sea was barren, lifeless. For weeks, our nets were empty. Starving, I decided to swim far out into the ocean to hunt by the south wall. I dove down into the deep blue, and there, I heard the Moon goddess sing. Her song glimmered like sunlight through the water, her voice covering me. For the rest of our year, our nets were full, and the currents gentle.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the Moon goddess’ song, wishing with all my heart to hear her on that morning’s hunt. There was to be a new moon that night. But I knew better than to speak my birthday wish aloud.

  My mother sighed sadly. “But that was when the ocean was still healthy and strong ... a long time ago.”

  She lifted her old gathering net from where it hung on the wall and handed it to me. “I was your age when my mother gave me my first net. This is yours now, my daughter. You are strong enough to carry your own catch.”

  I held her net close with both hands, as if it was woven of strands of fragile glass.

  “Come, it’s almost dawn,” she said.

  The edge of the horizon was just beginning to brighten as we left our small wooden home. A thin fog lingered over the sea like a mourning ghost, diffusing the distant lights from the mainland into a soft haze. I followed my mother to the rocky cove outside our village. I loved our dives on the northeast slope. It was one of our frequent hunting
grounds, one of the few places on the island still ripe with shellfish. The wall was steep and the current always swift; few haenyeo attempted to hunt there, but my mother brought me with her, proudly proclaiming to other haenyeo divers in the village that I was already as strong a swimmer as she.

  We walked across the seaweed-capped rocks, and I tried to match my mother’s strides, much like I imitated her swimming stroke underwater. As the sun rose, I followed her into the water, feeling the sea foam tickle my chin. Our bodies rose and fell with the rhythm of the incoming tide. After we swam out past the break, I took six quick breaths followed by a long one, filling my lungs as my mother had taught me. Together, as if we were one body, we kicked down below the surface of the water.

  I swam into the deep blue, listening for the Moon goddess’ song.

  #

  I glanced at the time and cursed. I had missed another exam.

  My mother hated the north end of our island, viewing the fancy resorts and department stores there as she would a festering wound. Once I was old enough to drive, I took the daily trips alone, stopping to sell our catch to the fishmonger at the port on my way to high school.

  Our harvests had grown much thinner, and we often had to dive into the afternoon to fill our nets. In the past year, my class ranking had dropped from the top of my class to fifth as a result of all my missed exams. But more than my ranking, I hated being late because I wouldn’t have time to rinse my body and would stink through my classes, not that the smell of shellfish ever truly left my skin.

  I parked near the ferry dock and stepped out from the truck. The sound of tourists on the beach mixed with the thumping beat of pop music, so loud I could feel it in my sternum.

  I had bought my mother a new poly-plastic net a month before, but she stubbornly refused to use it. I gathered our old nets and emptied them into a bucket. Our morning catch barely filled half of it. I bit my bottom lip and calculated what groceries we could do without.

  The fishmonger smiled broadly when I entered his shop. He was a gruff, round man with permanent sweat rings beneath his armpits, but for all his ruggedness, his face was almost youthful.

  “Baby Mermaid! What did you bring me today?”

  Ever since I could remember, he had called me Baby Mermaid; it made me proud — I was eighteen, half the age of the next youngest haenyeo in our village. Through the generations, most of the younger women had left and taken jobs on the mainland.

  I bowed. “The usual catch. Abalone, urchins, some conch, and a few fat oysters.”

  “Good, good. Let’s hope for pearls.”

  While he sorted the catch onto two scales, I took my slate from my schoolbag. Over the past two years, I had secretly saved enough money to buy it, peddling polished abalone shell necklaces to classmates at school. I read under my covers late at night, only after I was certain my mother was asleep on her mat across our room. She hated anything new, seeing new as the enemy of tradition. Our house didn’t have a computer or television. She even refused to use de-fogging diving solution in our masks, keeping to the traditional method of rubbing crumbled herbs on the glass instead. This is our way. It has been our way for hundreds of years.

  I touched my slate, and the crystal surface brightened with the image of a pod of orcas swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

  The fishmonger glanced over. “What are you reading about there? Whales, yes?”

  “It’s a book about a scientist. She studied whales before they were all extinct,” I said.

  “Another science book? Always reading, you are. Me? I was never any good at those little words.”

  The fishmonger opened the last of the oysters and shook his head. “No pearls today, Baby Mermaid.” He weighed the meat and reached into the pocket of his apron. “It’s a bit lighter than yesterday.”

  “Thank you.” I politely accepted the thin fold of bills.

  “Did you hear the news about Su Jin?” the fishmonger asked.

  “No. What news?” Su Jin was a haenyeo girl from my village, several years older than me.

  “Her uncle told me that she was accepted to medical school in Seoul.”

  Su Jin, a doctor. Most everyone who left our village to work on the mainland cleaned or cooked at resorts. Su Jin had graduated at the top of her class, not fifth. I would have to work harder.

  Back at the truck, I saw that a ferry had docked at the port. Shortly after I was born, my father had left Marado Island on a shiny ferry like that one and never returned. Though I didn’t remember his face, I always searched for him among the tourists, convinced that I would somehow be able to recognize him if he ever returned home.

  There are two kinds of people on our island. Those who stay and those who leave, my mother told me that whenever I asked about him. Your father left.

  On the raised platform beside the dock, a tour guide spoke to a group of visitors as they waited to board the ferry to leave the island. I’d heard the guide’s talk so many times that I could lead the tour myself.

  As I stepped close to the group, I smoothed my long salty hair with my fingers and straightened my shirt. I loved to watch the visitors from the mainland. I was captivated by everything about them — their bright modern clothes, which seemed to me so fancy and proper, their fascinating hairstyles, colorfully painted and styled as stiff as plastic, never bending in the sea breeze.

  Several divers posed with the tourists holding their nets and masks. My mother didn’t count them as true haenyeo, though most of them had once lived in our village. To her, they were now no more than trained animals, props for the tour companies to sell trinkets and souvenirs, putting on shows for the visitors for money, fetching shellfish planted in the shallow water the night before.

  “Before we leave Marado island, have your photo taken with a real haenyeo, a Mermaid of Korea,” the tour guide said. “As if frozen in time, their fishing methods have remained unchanged since the 1600s. Once numbering in the twenty thousands, there are less than three dozen of the diving women left in Korea now. Have your picture taken with a true haenyeo while you can before their way of life is gone forever.”

  I stood among the tourists, as if waiting to board the ferry. I couldn’t stop staring at the girl beside me. I wanted to touch her hair — it was firmly styled but looked so soft, dyed blue and white, like a summer sky. She wore a glass band around her eyes. I had seen more tourists wearing these bands recently. She tapped the side with her fingertip, and it glowed with each touch. I tried to imagine being able to capture memories in glass like that, to hold onto things unchanged, forever.

  The girl turned and our eyes met. I tensed as if caught stealing. For a moment, she looked as if she was going to speak, but then, in one motion, the girl looked from my unkempt hair down past my clothing to my weathered shoes.

  She tapped the side of her band, then turned and boarded the ferry.

  #

  “I was accepted to a university.”

  My mother sat so still that I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. Steam rose from her bowl of seaweed stew. After a long moment, she swallowed a spoonful of broth.

  I sat on the floor across from her at the table. A gust of wind blew in through the open window. I pushed my hair away from my eyes.

  “Oma, did you hear what I said? I was accepted to a university. It’s in California. In America.”

  I had tried to tell her for months, but I could never push the words past my lips. I had sent my application as a dream. I knew we couldn’t afford the cost, and I couldn’t leave my mother — we had never been apart for more than a day. I don’t know why I had even mailed it. Maybe just to imagine a different life for a brief moment, if only on paper. But then an official letter arrived at our house. When I read the word scholarship, a drop of blood fell from my nose onto the paper.

  My mother put her spoon down and rested her hands on the table. “The outside world is not like ours, Mi Sun.”

  I know.

  I was surprised with how quiet her voice sounde
d. She always spoke so loudly, nearly shouting, her eardrums damaged from years of pressure underwater. Instead she sounded tired, her voice wind worn and weary.

  “I want to become a scientist. I want to save the ocean, to help our village. I want to help you.”

  “This is what you want?”

  “This is what I want.”

  “Then leave.” She exhaled slowly.

  “Oma, look at me.”

  But she wouldn’t. I took her hand. It felt cold. I listened to the sound of waves blend with the hum of an airplane overhead.

  “I’ll come back to see you often. I’ll come back home soon.”

  She rose, her hand pulling away from mine.

  “No, you won’t.”

  #

  I rubbed more sculpting paste in my palms and finished styling my hair, wrapping it around my head in a swirl, a fashion popular on the west coast. I added two streaks of dark blue dye and left it to set.

  “Oma, can you hear me? Are you there?” I touched the glass control panel on the wall beside me.

  “I am here,” my mother said.

  The room volume was set to its maximum level, but I had to strain to hear her over the noisy connection.

  “Oma, I can’t hear you. Did you get the satellite caller I sent you last month?”

  “I did.”

  “Why don’t you use it?”

  “I don’t know how to use it.”

  “There’s nothing to know. You don’t even have to charge the battery. Just leave it in the sun and —”

  “When are you coming home?” she asked.

  I heard Thomas pacing in the hallway. Even though we’d lived together for over a year, I had firmly instructed him to never come in the room when I was speaking with my mother. Long ago, I had promised him I would tell her about us, but I never could. But I think she knew. Somehow, she always did.