14-7-1 Contest

Chapter Four

She ended up helping her cousin into a cab, where he shouted a muffled address at the disgruntled driver and puked twice out the window. When they finally arrived in front of his apartment complex, the driver charged her three times the price on the little ticker and she, in her unfamiliar element, could do nothing but stutter Korean phrases and pay, peeling the bills from her already meager wallet.

The cousin was still annoying, although the vomiting had sobered him up. He now stumbled unsteadily into the deserted lobby and clicked the Up button a million and a half times until the elevator, a lumbering, creaking contraption, finally presented its empty insides to them. There were forty-eight floors; the cousin pressed 37. Jinhee shivered as the elevator continued to screech upward on rusty cables, eerily reminded of the Tower of Terror ride at Disney World.

When they reached the 37th floor, Jinhee realized that she, in her dreaminess and confusion, had left most of her luggage in her cousin's car, which was still presumably at the parking garage. She had only the small carry-on bag which contained, among other things, some balled up clothing, her passport and papers, and her grandmother. She tried to explain this to her cousin, to no avail, in halting, broken Korean. He merely waved a hand and told her to shut up before forging ahead. The hallways were dimly lit, probably to disguise the badly stained carpet. About halfway down the hall, they stopped in front of a nondescript black door inscribed with the number 21. The cousin took out his keys from his pocket and fumbled for three minutes before Jinhee snatched the keys from him and opened the doors herself.

The cousin pushed past her and headed straight for a room she assumed to be the bathroom. She herself groped along the walls until her hand stumbled upon the light switch. The room was bare: she remembered from childhood memories a huge, queen-sized bed in the middle of the living room and a pair of wardrobes. But the living area was nearly empty. A dirty rug covered a small portion of the tiled floor. A wooden bar separated the living area from the kitchen area. The refrigerator hummed loudly and gave off the strong smell of fermented kimchee. She noticed with relief a blanket and pillow on the worn sofa. She would at least have a place to sleep.

She heard vomiting from the bathroom and shuddered; she wouldn't be washing up tonight. She made her way to the sofa and sat down, closing her eyes. There was nothing that could be done. Her luggage was lost in her cousin's car; she would not take the chance of taking a taxi and risking getting lost in the giant metropolis that was Seoul. The car would be there the following morning.

She felt a sudden wave of loneliness and rummaged through her bag until she felt the soft heaviness of her grandmother's remains nestled comfortably within. Why had her grandmother wanted to come back here, to Korea? What was wrong with America, anyway?

"There are plenty of mountains in the States, grandmother," she murmured.

She wished again for her parents, her father reading the Korean paper in his la-z-boy, her mother peeling garlic with swift fingers, the comforting scent of tea and cilantro.

She heard the shower turn on, and the gurgling sound of water running through ancient pipes surrounded her. She thought she heard a faint grumbling voice, and turned toward the direction of the door opposite the bathroom, which she remembered to be the bedroom.

She had always thought it strange that a four person family could live in a one-bedroom apartment; even stranger when she considered her three person family lived in a four bedroom house. Then she remembered that her aunt and uncle had passed away, and that now it was only the cousins.

She thought it was strange that they lived together: her two cousins, the boy and the girl. There was something obscene about it. Even stranger, she realized, that they shared bedrooms their entire life, even before the tragic accident that had claimed the lives of nearly her entire extended family.

Her grandmother, too, was dead, but she could imagine what the old woman would say: I told you. They died young, didn’t they?

***

She awoke early next morning to the overwhelming sound of traffic and her cousins shouting at each other. The girl cousin was still in her pajamas, her hair a Einstein-esque mess. She was waving the phone in the boy's face. She pressed the button on the answering machine sitting on the kitchen table, and a fuzzy, automated voice came out.

Jinhee struggled to comprehend the rapid Korean, but she got the gist:

Towed ... no overnight parking ... Three hundred dollar fee ...

Both her cousins were distraught. The boy buried his head in his arms. The girl continued to yell. Jinhee suddenly felt sick. Her stuff. Her belongings. Gone.


Word Count: 830
Total Word Count: 490 + 826 + 748 + 830 = 2,914