Sago, Virginia, January 2006 by Minjung Kyun (18, South Korea)

She would wake up from the sound of her mother grinding coffee with sycamore mortar and pestle, her father already donning his twenty-year-old leather boots, tying its thick brown laces stained from mud, with his rough hands like the walls of the coal mine. He stands up high and big, his back straightened stiff like the redwoods. Her mother hands him his coffee in an old rustic metal bottle, crushed on the sides by small meteors from the mine. As he goes, she stares at his back, wider than a door. The smell of loam remains after he leaves as she stands there imagining herself in the mine. That is all she remembers of him. When the sun blows orange-pink at the sky, she sits on his muscular lap, as he whispers the story of the mothman she has already heard many times before. Sometimes they just stare at each other’s eyes and feel the air pass their breathing tunnels. The warm smell of brunswick stew runs down through the dining room to the living room. He doesn’t talk that much except when he whispers. That is all she remembers about him. He wanted to be an astronomer, tracing lurking stars behind the clouds of darkness and admiring the jaboticaba swallowing the sky, always taking her out to the fields of grass. But now, the golden sun foams on the grass as dandelions shiver from the wind, their fuzz scattering, some falling on his boots by the porch. 

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