Promises, Post 5

Tentative title number 2: The Blood Is the Most Delicious

It's still a lot about that. In America, our positions will change. I will be the one introducing our life, saying, there it is across the room, saying, appearances can be deceiving, or, it's really nice once you get to know it, or, it was prettier before.

Cathreen spent years in Australia, and I hope that is similar enough. She says she was sent there by her parents because her "freedom-life" didn't match the strict listen-and-repeat of Korean schools. I love her independent spirit but wish at least one of us was less stubborn.

Though I have no job, Cathreen still manages to buy me shoes, and we still go out to expensive restaurants. We take her sister and our nephew to a place in the next city over, where we eat beef that is supposedly safe from mad cow disease, a scare that last year convinced Koreans to distrust both America and their own government. The entire Korean cabinet resigned, but the protests were not enough to drive out the president, like they were in Thailand.

The butcher chops up the cow outside and brings it in to us, and we cook it ourselves and taste the blood in our mouths. I like it rare--the blood is the most delicious.

We take pictures in the temple nearby, sitting our nephew on sacred relics.

Later that afternoon, I have to convince Cathreen to continue seeing the doctor; we rush to get there before it closes. Hospitals scare her. They press on her hand until it hurts and as she winces I try to translate in my head what to say to ask them to stop, to be careful, to quit that shit, seriously.

The stress makes an old car-accident injury in her shoulder act up, restricting her movement. The doctor lies her down on the steel bed and whips her neck around and I watch in shock until her neck cracks and he looks pleased with himself. But it seems to have worked: she trusts him. I'm still a little in shock when she asks him to do the same to me, and soon after, I feel and hear my neck crack as well, and for a few hours, I have none of the stress in my neck I hadn't known until then that I'd had.

After the love motel, I moved into housing beneath the owner of the academy's house. Cathreen, being Korean, was paranoid about being seen there, cavorting with a co-worker. The shower fell on the toilet. There were mold stains on the ceiling. I almost missed the red lights.