MINSEO KANG / 2 PROSE WORKS
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Back then, passing your house, flinging ourselves off our scooters with a sort of patented viciousness that you’d come up with in the living room after seeing too many videos of siege catapults. Fearless, in-tandem: crash, bam, pow!! And the stubble of the concrete rubs my leg. The feeling of it was unfamiliar, but it was prohibition, not protection, that had kept me off the ground thus far, as you’d held a blanket ban on injuries until that afternoon rolled around. We had it all figured out, see. Twin scrapes on our knees to tide us over for a few years, and then on your seventeenth birthday we will fall upon the same sidewalk with the same eleventh-hour vehemence and come strutting out the other side in blues and reds, roguish smiles on our powder faces. There’s two of everything, isn’t there? There’s two things you can’t ever forgive me for, and one is that I wasn’t there at the start of things. If I could have a wish, you said, I would say, To have been with you inside your mother, and I said, Why always your mother? I wasn’t listening, was I. If you’d been there at the start of things, and I hadn’t done the other thing you’ve never forgiven me for, which is that I lost my first tooth before you and so you had to take a stapler to your jaw instead of having ice cream that same afternoon, we wouldn’t have to be so stingy with the details. You said we could have been the same with no effort, no effort at all. I scooped up my skin from the bearded concrete and went to work peeling at the other parts. They will be matching glow-in-the-dark starbursts on your floor. You observed for a while, as you always do; then you marched us downriver, where I have been holding my head under the water, waiting for you to say the word.
INT. SECRET GOVERNMENT DISINFECTION FACILITY–DAY
“And I think of it as digging a well,” I said, “or building a pool. It’s got to be deep enough for people to want to linger.”
The doctor’s hands paused where they were fluttering gently over my collarbones, a pitiful attempt at touch; sure, that’s barely grazing. I shoved them further into my skin, infuriated. Each of the doctor’s fingers are made of an individual swarm of butterflies, flapping at the patient with all their strength. Little mouths chewing away the first dirty layer of skin like those fish that attach themselves to sharks, sanding down the host, making it anew.
“The ultimate goal, of course,” I said in a bored voice as the butterflies did nothing but fuzz the lines of my shoulders, “is for people to want to drown in it. I suppose in that way I’m quite like an angel. Have you ever seen one out in the fields, doctor, spinning its little web?”
He had picked up a hammer, but he struggled to hold it up in his thousand flimsy fingers as he tapped it against my shoulder blades. The whiteness of his coat was a thing that could be felt. Even when I turn my head away I can’t escape the blankness of it. Like thunder down to the root of me! “Extraordinary,” he says as he begins exfoliating, “extraordinary.”
I relaxed into the chair, whose weak plastic spine nearly folded beneath my own. Since I was so young I have felt too solid for this world. “It used to be a very great compliment to be called angel-like. Angel used to mean a different thing. Grandmother lived just long enough to tell me that.”
“The fact that this was inside you all this time.” Finally, finally, he has worked up the nerve to touch it, and I hate that more than anything. “And you’ve been holding it in for all these years. Has anyone told you you’re a hero? You’re a hero for this. They’ll give you a medal in front of the City Hall.”
More and more of us are growing wings. They’re overrated. After this, I’m going to the plastic surgeon to see what a real expert can do about mine, and then I’ll go back to what I love the most: watching the angels spin and spin and drown away in the community garden.
Minseo Kang studied English literature at University College London. Her poetry has been published in wildness. She can be found on Instagram at @kareilias.