World of Fire and Steel

I traced my father’s shadow on the rocks below us. Nodding up and down, it betrayed his fatigue. 

Arthur and I dove off the truck bed and played under the tree, poking our heads out between the branches as if we had the beautiful long hair of mermaids. There were only a few places for us to play in the junkyard. Certainly not near the four corners of the site where in the cool darkness, thick-coiled snakes slept on their eggs. 

And not near the furnace, which we were afraid of after Appa had arrived home one night with his chest torn up—not from a fight with the workers but from superheated steam that had shot out of a fired heat exchanger tube after he had thrown it, like a javelin, into the bed of the truck.

After the accident, he had applied ice from the Igloo onto his left pectoral and continued working for hours, at the end of which his breath had gone completely ragged and there was no more energy to move thirty-pound ingots, only strength enough to feed the workers and drop them off at their homes. Then, he had driven slowly back to Sugar Land, clenching his jaw with every bump in the road. 

“Hyeseung-a, fetch the Silvadene and gauze from Umma’s bathroom,” Umma had called out that night while Appa lay shirtless on the living room floor.

Leaving the magnolia behind, Arthur and I sneaked round to an ice bucket and took swigs of Big Red, the sweet liquid traveling up our noses before dribbling down the front of our throats in long scarlet trails.

“What’s on your shirt?” Appa pointed when we stepped back into the reach of the lantern. “Did you have some of my Big Red?”

“No!” Arthur and I screamed with teeth covered in pink syrup. 

“Appa,” I ventured, seeing his good mood. “You look like a junkyard dog!”

“Isaekki-ya!” he cursed me laughingly, and in that instant turned into himself again.

Usually, Appa would have had a smoke after dinner, but there was no time. The bowls were empty, and his breath, which never again smelled of cigarettes, flowered instead into clouds of garlic and bean paste, and it was time for the three of us to head home to Sugar Land. Appa said he had to go to McDonald’s for José, Mike, and the others. Arthur and I crawled into the van, where he would fall asleep the instant we were out of the gates of the park. 

Umma adjusted the pillow under the seat, her neck straining over the steering wheel. As I situated myself for the trip back, I looked out the window and beheld my father, the Vulcan in the darkness. Black and anonymous, he stood in powerful akimbo, looking toward us and then back, to his small world of fire and steel, as the van crackled away on the rocks.

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Copyright © 2024 Hyeseung Song, from Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Excerpt published by permission.

Image by Jonathan Borba.