Oaks and Weeds

[warmboys]

Oaks and Weeds
Pilsook/Hyemi
PG
400 words

They held hands over the table, nails cut short and clean. Up close Hyemi looked like just a little girl, the way Pilsook remembered seeing her for the first time at the auditions through the television. The light had made a halo in her hair, and Pilsook had thought it was something that happened to some girls, like a fast metabolism and clear skin. A smile would have completed the angelic vision, but Hyemi hadn't smiled.

The girl in front of Pilsook now exhibited not even a shadow of that haughty pride. The side of her cheek resting against the wooden table, she sagged. Curled into herself like the snail shells Pilsook's mother sometimes bought at the marketplace, dark, round marbles with an opening from which Pilsook would pick out the body with a toothpick, because she couldn't suck them out properly like her parents. If one slipped from her stubby short-fingered grasp and sprung rebelliously onto the table, her mother would empty another spoonful in her bowl. By the time she was twelve she had it pared down to an art, foregoing toothpicks altogether. They remained pristine and unused in a small container by the soy sauce.

But some things, Pilsook knew, didn't get better with practice, if they weren't up to her.

Hyemi's fingers tucked under Pilsook's thumb were warm like she had been holding her own hand. Pilsook wondered what it was that broke her, if it was the same thing that threatened to break herself. But the difference was that Pilsook had grown accustomed to the threat. She learned at an early age to bend her back rather than hold it relentlessly upright, to sway with the occasional winds of malice rather than against. She knew to expect the worst but hope for the best. This time the hoping got the best of her, but from experience she remembered how to stand up again. Battered-down never lasted as long as it felt like it would. It was Hyemi that she worried about, Hyemi who struggled to keep the few things that still belonged to her, who had never looked this blank, this sad. Her eyes were shiny, but she wouldn't let the tears run. So Pilsook closed her eyes and cried for them both.