Eat You Whole

A Short Story and the Writing Process Behind It

Introduction

“Eat You Whole”¹ is a short story that follows Honey Evans, a Black ex-pat in Seoul who will do anything to avoid moving back to America, but her relationship with her peculiar boss jeopardizes her chances of staying in Korea.

Although the story is only 5,900 words long, it took me nearly two years of revision to get it right. This week, I’m sharing the final, published version of the story for reference. Next week, I’ll break down the outlining, drafting, and revision process I used for this story. I’ll also include some details on what I’d do differently if I could go back and make changes.

If you have any craft questions, drop them in the comments below, and I’ll answer them in my next post.

The Story

            Honey was flat broke, but she couldn’t move back to the US. The weekend that she qualified for work on her student visa, she walked through Gyeongui Line Forest Park for her day of interviews in Sinchon. Behind the massive Hyundai Department Store, Honey wove through crooked alleys lined with bars and convenience stores. It was late morning, and this alley she knew to be neon-lit and littered with drunken college students at night was empty, abandoned almost. Under the gray, smogged sky, the windows of the bars and restaurants were dark, and there was nothing to be heard but the whiz of scooters on nearby side streets and the distant echoes of people on the main boulevard. This narrow alley, with its tall buildings, their mismatched architectural styles, and low hanging telephone wires, gave Honey a pang of claustrophobia. The sensation only worsened her frustration with her situation, with her dwindling bank account, with the fact that she no longer felt safe in America as a Black person.

            Honey compared the Naver Map street view with her surroundings. She zoomed in on the image on her phone. The restaurant she was looking for had a yellow sign with black neon letters that said Jia’s House. Honey scanned the jumbled signs affixed to the buildings around her like a poorly played game of Tetris until she saw the bumblebee-colored sign.

            Inside, Jia’s House had a chic, industrial interior with pop art comic strips lining the walls. Honey stepped further into the empty pub and called out, “Yeoboseyo?” She rounded a corner and saw a boy, no older than nineteen, wiping down a table. When he glanced up, she bowed. “Annyeonghaseyo?”

            He looked at her in the panicked way that most people who didn’t want to speak English with a foreigner did. “No,” he said in English, holding up his arms in an X. “Not open.”

            “I’m not a customer,” Honey said in Korean. “I’m here for an interview.” She checked the name of the interviewer in the email on her phone. “I think my interview is with Lee Juwon, the manager. Is he available?”

            The boy looked at Honey like she had just done a backflip. “Uh, one second.” He hurried into the kitchen. With only a short curtain separating the kitchen from the dining area, Honey could hear him not-so-quietly whisper, “Hyung, there’s a waygookin here for an interview.”

            “What? I’m not hiring a waygookin. Does she even speak Korean?” Honey heard the manager say.

            “Ne, her Korean is actually really good.”

            The two of them stepped out of the kitchen. Juwon, the manager, was a squat man with thick-rimmed glasses and a skeptical scowl permanently stuck to his face.

            Honey bowed again and said, “Annyeonghaseyo? My name is Evans Honey. I’m very excited to talk to you about the server position.”

            Juwon replied with an uncertain bow. “Wow, you do speak Korean well.”

            “Ne, I speak well, and I’m an even better waitress,” she said with a smile.

            Juwon let out a nervous laugh. “I’m sure you’re a great waitress, but—”

            The bell on the door behind Honey rang as it swung open. There, in the doorway, stood a woman carrying a crate of beer. She wore an oversized bomber jacket, a leather skirt, and knee-high Doc Martens. She pushed up the sunglasses on her face with her shoulder.

            At the sight of her, Juwon immediately bowed and said, “Annyeonghaseyo, Sajangnim.”

            Sajangnim? Honey looked back at the woman again. She couldn’t see her face behind the ostentatiously large designer sunglasses, but the woman did seem too young to own a restaurant, too young to be the Jia in Jia’s House.

            The server hurried over to her. “Sajangnim, let me carry that,” he said, trying to take the crate of beer, but she turned away from him.

            Eyes on Honey, she asked Juwon, “What’s going on?”

            “She’s here for an interview, but—”

            “But what?” Sajangnim said. She dropped the crate on a table and walked over to Honey and Juwon. “Start the interview. I’ll sit in.”

            When they sat down, Sajangnim didn’t take off her sunglasses, and Honey couldn’t read her face. It was hard to get a reading on her at all. From her loud streetwear to her perfectly tousled, permed hair, she was dressed more like a fashion ad than a restaurant owner. Juwon, on the other hand, wore his thoughts about Honey plainly on his face. Honey took a deep breath to quiet the tremor in her hands. She needed to find work soon to survive this semester and the summer to follow. She needed to work so that she wouldn’t have to go back to America. Not anytime soon. Not at all if she could help it.

            Sajangnim pulled a stick of gum out of her pocket, ripped it in half, and offered one piece to Honey. Even though chewing gum in an interview was inappropriate and Honey’s TMJ issues prevented her from chewing gum at all, she accepted the gum with both hands and held it in her lap. Sajangnim grinned, happily chewing on her piece. While the weight of grief and impending poverty sat on Honey’s shoulders like a heavy cloak, Honey forced herself to sit up straight because she had a chance if she could get Sajangnim on her side.

            Sajangnim gestured for Juwon to start the interview.

            Juwon awkwardly cleared his throat and asked a question from his clipboard, “Have you ever worked in a restaurant before?”

            Honey shook her head. “Anio, but I’ve worked in a coffee shop and department store. I feel like all service work is similar. You have to please the customer and make sure they have a good time so they come back again. And I know how to show people a good time.” From the corner of her eye, Honey saw Sajangnim smirk.

            “And you’re just looking to work part time?”

            “Ne, I’m a grad student. I just want to make some pocket money. And I love hansik, so working in a pub like this one seems like a good fit. Your specialty is kalbi jjim, right? That’s one of my favorite dishes.” Even though much of what she had said was true, the words felt like lies in her mouth. Her scholarship for the English Education program at Korea University did cover all of her basic housing needs; she really did only need money to eat and live, and she did only want to work part-time. But it was her tone that was the lie. She said the words so lightheartedly, so much like a student who just needed drinking money. She didn’t sound at all like an American who was scared of America, like she would do unseemly things just to avoid going back. Yes, America and its law enforcement had made it abundantly clear that her Black life wasn’t worth her own weight in mud, so she would not spend the rest of her life there. Her true passion in life was literary translation, but that alone didn’t make enough money to make a living. So, this was her plan to stay in Korea: get a master’s in English Education from a SKY university, then a job as an English professor, and work until she could apply for permanent residency. And here she was now, desperate for a part-time job so that she can finish that master’s and move on with her life.

            Juwon asked his next question, “I don’t mean to be so direct, but why should we hire you over a Korean person?”

            Honey was prepared for this question. “Two reasons,” she said, counting them off on her fingers. “One, we’re in Sinchon. There are three universities nearby. You probably get a lot of foreigners, and it helps to have a server fluent in English. And two, I’ll work any shift, even the ones that are hard to fill. As long as I’m not in class, I’ll take the shift.”

            Juwon opened his mouth to say something, but Sajangnim interrupted him, “She’s hired.”

            “Saja—”

            Sajangnim held up her hand, and that was all she needed to do to shut Juwon up. “Can you start tomorrow night?” she asked Honey.

            “Ne, of course.”

            “Your name is Honey, right? Like kkul?”

            “Ne.”

            “Tell me, Honey ssi. Are you sweet like kkul?”

            Honey’s face went hot as it always did when someone unexpectedly flirted with her. Having watched this woman throughout the interview, Honey could see that Sajangnim respected boldness, and so she said, “No, I’m sweeter.”

            Sajangnim covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. “Great, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

            On her way home, Honey cut through the park again. The early, springtime smog shrouded the surrounding apartment buildings with a thin, vaguely yellow veil, and the cherry blossom branches latticed above the path in the park budded with the promise of pink-washed petals. Somewhere between Daeheung and Gongdeok, Honey put the halved stick of gum into her mouth. It had been years since she had last chewed gum, and this stick, with its arctic cool, tasted sweeter than anything she could remember. As she walked home, she thought about Sajangnim chewing her half on her side of the city and how—like a craving, like a cat locked out of a room—she wanted to see Sajangnim’s face.

---

            The next day, Honey worked the night shift as a server. It was the first Friday after classes had started again, and the pub was packed. A steady din of drunken chatter and pop music hung above the dining area. Metal pots of eomuk tang and kalbi jjim bubbled on table-top hot plates, steeping the air with the salt of fish cakes and the hot pepper spice of gochugaru. The heat of the burners, of all the bodies around circular tables, of the pressure to be polite and charming in her second language left Honey’s face feeling flushed. During the whole shift, time moved past in a rush, like Honey was watching herself take orders and replace gas canisters in the grills from afar, like it wasn’t her own hands writing down the dishes or turning on the burners.

As predicted, there was a group of white students who ordered all of the dishes Honey recommended. At the end of their meal, when they raved about the food, Honey gave them loyalty cards and encouraged them to bring their other American friends.

She waved good-bye to the foreigners, and Sajangnim said from the register, “I guess we’ll be seeing more waygookins.” She looked at the scraps of food left on their table. “Wait, did you tell them to order the most expensive stuff?”

“Of course,” Honey said, bussing the table. “What did you expect?”

Sajangnim grinned. “Nothing less.”  

            At the end of the night, Honey stayed late to help Sajangnim close down. Floors mopped, dishes washed, and cash till locked, they both hung their aprons on the hooks in the kitchen. Their shoulders almost touching, Sajangnim turned to Honey. “Will you have a drink with me?” She opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of grapefruit soju.

            Sitting in the back of the restaurant, Honey watched Sajangnim flip the bottle upside down and right side up again until a tornado spun through the liquid inside. Here, at this table, Honey saw Sajangnim’s face up close for the first time. Just as Honey had suspected in the interview, Sajangnim looked like she was close to Honey’s age—twenty-eight. It was surprising that she had such a successful business at such a young age. But there was also something about her posture, her sad eyes, her tired air of being that aged her. Even though her flawlessly applied makeup intended to fool you otherwise, the space under her eyes seemed sunken, carved by a lack of sleep. Her eyes themselves were flat—not dead—but dying, like she had seen something so horrible, so life altering, so beyond the imagination of a person privileged with the absence of true pain. This look on Sajangnim’s face was so familiar to Honey because she had worn it herself in the year before she left America.

            Honey poured their shots. They clicked glasses and downed the sweet, citrusy liquor.

            “You seem very comfortable here,” Sajangnim said. “How long have you been in Korea?”

            “Seven months this time,” Honey said. “But I studied abroad at Yonsei for a year in college. And I did two summer programs in Busan.”

            “What are you studying now?”

            “English language education. I want to become a professor here.”

            “Here? Like in Korea?” Honey nodded. “Most Americans stay for a year or two then go back home. Why don’t you want to teach in America?”

            The answer came to Honey hushed as a library whisper: They killed her in her sleep. After Honey had seen the news in the US, this thought had bubbled up in quiet moments as she stood in line at the grocery store, as she walked across the South Lawn to her translation workshop, as she smoked on fire escapes with the clamor of party small talk behind her. Most days, this thought needled pain into Honey’s chest, a pinprick of misery in the knowledge that her country let people like her die in their sleep for being Black at the wrong time, in the wrong place—in the knowledge that there was no right time, right place, to exist while Black in America.

Honey looked down at the table, resisting the urge to pick at her cuticles until they bled. How did you say police brutality in Korean? Like she would actually tell this woman the truth anyway. Instead, Honey settled on this: “America is not a great place to be a Black person.”

This version of the truth sat between them as Honey filled their glasses again. “There was a protest here in Seoul, you know,” Sajangnim said. “In front of the US embassy.”

Honey did know. That Black Lives Matter protest, among other things, was one of the reasons she had moved back to Seoul. The main reason, though, was that during her year abroad, after she got past the discomfort of ajummas and ahjussis staring at her, Honey realized that here, in this country, people saw her more as a person. No one followed her around e-mart, assuming she was going to steal. No one hesitated before sitting next to her on the bus or subway. And most importantly, when she got to know people, she didn’t see the same implicit bias in their eyes like she did in America. For Honey, in America, being Black was like being a ghost. Like a ghost, to be Black was to be invisible—to be unseen and unheard—but once you were seen and heard, you were a disruption like no other. Like a ghost, Honey knew what it was like to question the validity of her own existence because others didn’t see her the way she saw herself. And like a ghost, she knew what it was like to be heard by only a few and never seen by others. Sure, here in Korea, people stared at her with morbid curiosity, but Honey found peace in that sort of disruption. More peace than she could have ever found in her grad program at Columbia where her blue-voting classmates stared at her like the math meme, trying to reconcile their own biases, their own internalized perceptions of Black people with the Black person they now saw before them. Here in Korea, there was more peace than she could have ever found when she worked in publishing, when her co-workers openly called her cold and intimidating because she just wanted to do her work and secure her bag, because she didn’t want to spend her lunch hour gossiping over tapas, because she didn’t want to perform the minstrel show of friendliness that put white people at ease. Yes, studying here in Korea, becoming a professor here, was an escape from the pressures of whiteness she had negotiated her entire fucking life.

Honey and Sajangnim took the shots, and Sajangnim went on, “I have to admit. I don’t really understand what’s happening over there. We get snippets of the news every so often here. But I am sorry that your country doesn’t make you feel safe.”

Honey’s eyes stung from grief or anger or the embarrassment of oversharing. She shrugged and said, “It’s okay. I’m here now and that’s what matters.” She smiled, but it was a strained, black hole smile that sucked up all her energy.

Sajangnim frowned and shook her head. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend everything is okay when it’s not. Pretending will drive you crazy. So, you don’t have to do that for me.”

Honey’s urge to pick at her nails, to tamp down every inky thing she had ever felt for the convenience of others waned. With the bullshit of pretense lifted, Honey sat up straight on her stool. When she looked at Sajangnim again, Honey understood that it wasn’t sadness that simmered in Sajangnim’s eyes, but the fatigue of experience.

Sajangnim gestured for more soju and asked, “Doesn’t your family miss you?”

“My mom passed away when I was in college, and my dad died when I was a kid.” Half of that statement was true. Ovarian cancer swallowed up her mother the summer before Honey started her sophomore year. But saying her dad had died was easier than explaining that he had ran off when Honey was six, all to start a new family—one he would never run away from—on the other side of the country. Sajangnim expressed her condolences, and Honey changed the subject. “What about your family, Sajangnim? Do they live in Seoul too?”

“My parents kicked me out when I was twenty-two. That was six years ago. I haven’t seen them since.” She went on to explain that when her family kicked her out, she had just finished university, and she spent those first few years after graduation working a crappy office job. She had always dreamed of opening a restaurant, but knew she needed to save up money first. Her older brother, who was an exec at their father’s company, would visit her in secret every few months even though their father had forbidden the rest of the family from speaking to her. On his visits, her brother would offer money that she would refuse, but after he left, she always found fat envelopes in her medicine cabinet or her kitchen cupboard or the drawer of her desk. Three years ago, when her brother went to leave money in the desk drawer while she was in the bathroom, he found her business plan for Jia’s House. When she stepped out into the kitchen of her closet-sized studio in Hapjeong, he was flipping through her business plan and told her he wanted to invest. Risking the ire of their father, he gave her the initial investment that she used to open Jia’s House.

Alone in the restaurant with Sajangnim, Honey shared parts of herself too, and this sharing made the grief in her chest shrink until it had the significance of a yawn. Honey worked at Jia’s House three nights a week, and this was how she spent the quiet hours of the night at the end of her shifts—getting shitfaced with Sajangnim. These nights, in between drinking games, they traded private stories with each other as if Sajangnim wasn’t Honey’s boss, as if they weren’t strangers, as if they had never been strangers. It was in this way that this woman stopped being Honey’s boss—the sajangnim of Jia’s House—and became simply Jia, a companion. Here, in the freshly mopped restaurant that gave Honey a means of survival in this new life abroad, Honey believed she had always known Jia. So often as Honey flicked the metal strip off a soju cap and had to drink as penalty, déjà vu rippled through her memory like a stone across pond water. In these moments, laughing with Jia—sometimes so hard that maekju sprayed from their noses—Honey felt as though she was not living, but remembering.

---

            Honey had been working at Jia’s house for two months when she got the call. That night was her night off, and Juwon had called her at two in the morning. She was still awake, translating poems for a contest when her phone buzzed against her desk, loud enough to startle her. Juwon’s name appeared on the screen, and she checked the time. It wasn’t unusual for him to call at nine or ten at night to ask for last minute coverage if someone were sick, but it was 2:13 AM, and the pub had just closed.

            Honey answered the phone with a knot in her stomach, “Yeoboseyo?”

            Juwon said something, but arguing voices in the background and the scuffle of overturned chairs drowned him out. Then, above the racket of struggle, rose Jia’s unmistakable scream, “Where is Honey?”

            The sound sent a bone chill through Honey. What had she done to send Jia into a rage? What could a person have possibly screwed up so badly to warrant a scream like that?

            “Sorry,” Juwon said. “Can you hear me?”

            “Yeah. What’s going on? Is Sajangnim okay?”

            The shouting and toppled chairs quieted, and Honey imagined him stepping out into the alley. “Look, I’ll be straight with you. Sajangnim gets like this sometimes. She drinks too much, comes in after close, and causes problems. I’m calling ‘cause she’s asking for you. But you really don’t have to come.”

            Asking? That sure as hell didn’t sound like asking. Even still, Honey put on her jacket over her pajamas and said, “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

---

            The cab dropped Honey off in Sinchon, and she jogged through the apocalyptically empty, neon-lit streets to the alley. Through the glass door of Jia’s House, Honey saw Jia in a short sequin dress, screaming at Juwon and one of the veteran servers. She had a stool in her hands, her arms poised to throw it.

Honey opened the door.

            “Where is Honey?” Jia slurred out the scream, the veins in her neck strained and pulsating. Her dark eye makeup had gone from a night look to two party-smudged bruises on her face.

            “Honey’s coming,” Juwon said, but it sounded more like a plea.

            The door closed behind Honey, and everyone’s attention snapped towards her. When Jia looked at Honey, her eyes widened in embarrassment, like Honey had brought in a mirror with her and Jia could see herself for what she was—red-eyed and raccoon-faced with a stool in her hands. Jia stood there, deer-frozen, surrounded by flipped tables and knocked over stools. Every piece of furniture in the restaurant had been turned over, sprawled out on their sides like cans in a recycling bin.

            “Oh . . .” Jia breathed, her voice rasped from all the shouting. “You’re here.”

            Honey nodded and spoke delicately, as if she were breathing over a dandelion and the stakes of losing a single seed were so, so high. “Of course I’m here.” She approached Jia the way you would a buck with its antlers caught in a fence. “Are you hurt?” she asked, gently lowering the stool and taking it from Jia.

            Jia sniffed and shook her head. Honey set the stool aside. “What happened?”

            “I had a bad day.” A tremble quivered through Jia’s voice. She burst into tears and sank to the floor.

            “You must have been startled,” Honey said. It was a phrase she had learned from a drama. Honey had never consoled someone while speaking Korean before, but the right phrase—cherry-picked from films and television shows—came to her with an ease that surprised her. She took Jia’s cold hand and smoothed her hair out of her face with the same surprising ease. “Do you wanna tell me what happened?”

            Jia wiped at her face. “I thought you were working today. You work on Wednesdays.”

            “You know I work Wednesday nights. It’s only been Wednesday for two hours.” Honey could see how a drunk person could make that mistake. Over Jia’s shoulder, Honey made eye contact with Juwon and the server and gestured for them to leave.

            As they quietly grabbed their coats and stepped out the door, Honey asked Jia about her day. Jia didn’t give her much other than an I fucking hate my family and an I don’t wanna talk about it. Still, Honey stayed with her, picking up all the tables and chairs and talking about all the things that Jia could talk about.

            Yes, Jia was an alcoholic, and alcohol sometimes made her mean and mad enough to throw chairs. Righting all of the fallen furniture, Honey understood that she had a choice to make next time they hung up their aprons and Jia asked to hang out with a bottle of soju in her hands. But, on those nights, when Jia clicked off the lights, hooked arms with Honey, and walked Honey home through the park with the feral cats and low-flying dragon flies, Honey could smell Jia’s perfume—a blend of citron and bluebells with a bite of Granny Smith apple—and that smell of her, the heat of her closeness, shed the dead skin of loneliness from Honey’s soul. Each night, from inside the glass lobby of her building, Honey waved to Jia as Jia ducked her head into an orange cab. Honey would watch this cab and its lazy blinker until it reached the end of the hushed street and disappeared around the corner. Even when the cab was out of sight, something—like a tether yanked taut—tugged Honey towards it, towards Jia. Like an addict herself, the thought of proximity to this woman made Honey’s heart sputter and her mind spiral around the image of her face, her one-dimpled cheek, of a home here with her.

            Now, sitting over coffee and cold water, that tether was as taut as ever, and Honey wasn’t sure if she could ever say no to this person. They sat like this until Jia sobered up enough to take a cab home. Honey walked her to the main street and handed over her purse when she got in the cab. Sunrise bleached the edge of the horizon, crowning Sinchon’s glass skyscrapers with a halo of light. Honey watched the cab pull away into the early morning traffic with guilt for her impending choices dawning in her chest.

Over the next few weeks—sometimes several times a week—Honey got a call from Juwon or Jia herself. Each time, she dropped everything to go to Jia, often forgoing her studies and homework assignments, sometimes even skipping class altogether to pull Jia out of herself.

---

            Honey received the notice on a Friday in June. She was on the subway, heading home from a class she had attended for the first time in weeks. An email push notification appeared on her phone with the subject line: “Academic Probation.” Honey scrolled through the email, heart thudding in her ears, her eye catching on words like poor academic performance and potential loss of scholarship. The train slowed its barrel into Samgakji Station, and a soothing, sterile voice announced the stop. Her breath caught in her chest, and her eyes lost focus on her phone. In her periphery, she watched the polished dress shoes of hwesawons and scuffed sneakers of haksaengs as they flowed on and off the train. Honey sat there next to a pregnant woman, unsure if she would be able to get up when the voice called out her stop. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. A return to America was on the horizon, looming like a shark fin in the distance.

            That evening, Honey went to work early to help Jia unload a shipment and take inventory. On her walk from the station, an ache swelled in Honey’s chest. She needed to talk about her scholarship with someone, but the only person she could talk to was the reason her scholarship was at risk in the first place. Honey turned into the alley. A squat, white truck was parked in front of the pub with its ramp lowered and back door drawn up. Honey could see the cases of soju and beer inside the truck, but there was no sign of Jia. She glanced up and down the alley until she saw Jia at the end of the road, sharply whispering into her phone. Jia hung up the phone and motioned like she was going to throw it but didn’t. She paced back and forth, neck strained and primed to scream, but she stopped in her tracks when she saw Honey. Jia walked over to the truck. She was wearing her sunglasses, so she must have been hungover and mean. Maybe too mean to listen to Honey.

            “Is everything okay?” Honey asked.

            “It’s fine,” Jia snapped. “Let’s just get this shit inside.” The words came to Honey like a slap. Jia grabbed a case of soju and carried it to the restaurant. At the door, she looked over her shoulder at Honey. “Are you just gonna stand there? Ppalli!”

            Honey hoisted up a case and followed Jia inside, barely bearing the weight of the alcohol in her hands.

            Later that night, when Jia cracked open a bottle, Honey didn’t stop her. She wanted to put herself out of her own mind, even if that meant enabling Jia to get lost in hers. Two soju bottles later, they headed to a club in Itaewon. At their table, Jia downed so much vodka that Honey stopped drinking because she knew she would have to get her boss home. Once Jia danced herself tired, Honey managed to get her in a cab, but realized she didn’t know where Jia lived. In the backseat, Honey shook Jia awake, saying, “Sajangnim, wake up. Where do you live?”

            Laughing, Jia slurred her words. “Sajangnim. Sajangnim,” she said in a mocking whine. “Why are you so formal? Don’t call me Sajangnim anymore. We’re the same age. Call me Jia.”

            Honey ignored her. “Where do you live?” she asked, but Jia was passed out again. Honey sighed and gave the cab driver her own address.

            Even though Jia was taller than her, Honey carried Jia on her back into the elevator, down the funeral-quiet hallway, and into her apartment. In the foyer, Jia woke up long enough for Honey to help her out of her shoes and into the bed. Honey tucked her in and turned to sleep on the couch, but Jia grabbed her by the wrist and said into the pillow, “Stay with me.” Jia flipped the covers back and pulled Honey towards her. Still wearing their clothes, they lay under the covers together. In the cramped double bed, Jia put her head on Honey’s chest, and Honey’s heart seized. She stayed as still as possible, knowing Jia could probably hear her heart beating as fast as a hummingbird’s, as fast as machine gun rounds. Silence sat heavy above them, and the weight of Jia’s head felt right, secure. They lay there long enough to breathe as one, and just when Honey thought Jia had fallen asleep, Jia whispered into the dark: “I’ll eat you whole, you know.”

            “What?”

            “It’s the hell in my head. That’s why I’m like this. I’m sorry I’m like this.”

            Honey said nothing—only stroked Jia’s hair with her hand. She had so many questions for this person lying in bed with her, but she didn’t fault Jia for being the way she was; she didn’t even want answers as justifications. No, what she wanted was to know Jia because to Honey, to be known, to be seen, was a panacea for so many ailments of the mind. For this reason, she wondered who Jia was fighting with on the phone. Was it her brother? Her father? Why did her father kick her out all those years ago? These questions turned Honey to her own life: what would her own family look like had her father stayed, had her mom not passed away? What would home look like for her? Home. Honey hadn’t felt home since she was nineteen, since she put her mother in the ground. This was how she so easily returned to Korea again and again, how she accepted with sufferance the ruin of the place she had grown up in, a place that was riddled with racism like a contagion left uncontained, how she could lay in bed with this person lightly snoring in her arms, and strangely be glad of the loss that had brought them together. Yes, she was glad of the fact that here, in this foreign place made familiar and domestic, she saw, now, stretched out before her, the possibility of a new home, of a found family in Jia’s House, in Jia herself. Yes, Honey would find a way to keep her scholarship and keep Jia out of the hell in her head. Better to be eaten than to be alone because here, in this moment, in this bed, with this person who was as broken by her past as Honey was by her present, all that doubt about her life and her home in it dissolved as Honey herself dissolved into sleep, her breathing matching the rise and fall of Jia’s.

            Honey woke up early to make hangover soup for Jia. Just when she added the broth to the beef stir frying in the Dutch oven, Jia shuffled out of Honey’s bedroom, hair wild with bedhead. It was a strange sight to see someone so meticulously put together in high-end streetwear so vulnerably disheveled. Jia squinted at the sun pouring in from the window that overlooked the park. “Is that haejangguk?” she asked.

            Honey turned back to the stove to add the cabbage to the pot. “Yeah, hopefully it tastes okay. I’ve only made it once before.”

            The floor behind honey creaked, and Honey looked over her shoulder to find Jia standing startlingly close to her. “Sajangnim?”

            “Didn’t I tell you to call me Jia?” she said, looking at Honey’s lips.

            “Sorry, Jia,” Honey said her name aloud for the first time, and it sat in the air of the closing space between them clear and crisp as a rung bell. They kissed, and the doubt sitting on Honey’s shoulders leavened again. Jia pulled away and poured herself a cup of coffee from the brewed pot on the counter. Honey turned back to the stove and stirred until the food was ready. She scooped the soup into ttukbaegi bowls and placed the bowls on a tray. When she turned around to serve them, Jia was sipping her coffee and looking out at the children riding their three-wheeled scooters in the park below. Yes, that doubt would return, and as inevitable as thunderclap after lightning strike, the future—good or bad—would befall Honey. But for the time being, however short that time may be, Honey was home.

1. This story was a runner-up in this contest and originally published in this anthology.