Bedevilled — 2016

Bok-nam’s face collapsed. Not with anger. With a final, devastating disappointment. “You were always like that,” she whispered. “Even when we were girls. You watched them throw rocks at me. You said nothing.”

Bok-nam was no longer the bright-eyed girl who’d shown her how to crack sea urchins with a rock. Now, at 38, she looked 60. Her face was a landscape of bruises—yellow, purple, fresh. She lived with her husband, Jong-sik, and his three unmarried brothers in a compound of grey concrete. They treated her like a pack animal. She hauled seaweed, gutted fish, carried water up the cliff stairs while the men drank soju and played go-stop . bedevilled 2016

Instead, she walked to the pig shed. She found the small, sad mound. And she dug. Bok-nam’s face collapsed

She did not make the call.

A corruption scandal at her bank had made her a pariah. She wasn't guilty, but guilt was a currency the mainland spent freely. The island’s elder, Grandfather Kim, had given her his dead wife’s cottage. “Two months,” he’d grunted, toothless gums brown from tobacco. “Then you go back to your noise.” “You were always like that,” she whispered