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Ethan could play baseball, Masung thought, as the edge of the dinner plate drove into his teeth. He was ten years old, his brother thirteen. It knocked Masung clear off his feet.
His incisors ached terribly, and he fell hard to the kitchen floor. He bashed his tail bone, where his brother had once said he had a tail, but their father—a good Christian man—had cut it off to sever Masung from the Devil.
Thick shards of ceramic crashed to the tile, and Masung’s lips dripped with something hot. He licked them, feeling the sharp sting over the gash that spread beyond the upper bow of his lip and down his chin on the right side. The cut gouged deep enough for him to tongue the flesh apart.
He locked eyes with Ethan, whose pale skin had flushed up to his ears as his hands shook almost violently. He stood in a wide stance between Masung and their mother, who was sobbing on the floor, the edge of her apron stained in the pool of spilled broth.
“Monster,” Ethan said, spitting out the word like he couldn’t stand the taste of it, and he tracked Masung with his eyes as he turned away. It was only when Masung stayed still, not even blinking, that he finally rushed to their mother’s side, deploying the most soothing of his moods. Mom, what happened? Are you okay?
Masung liked it when Ethan spoke Korean. Because it was mainly to their parents, Ethan always used a gentle voice, which Masung found pleasant to overhear. Even when it was directed at Masung though, Ethan’s words would come out quieter, straining the extra noise out through his teeth: masung-eui ah-i, he would say, just under his breath in a tone that would fog a window.
Ethan had learned the phrase from their parents, who had said it so much when Masung was little that Masung had confused it for his name.
Masung also liked how people’s voices swooped up at the end when they asked questions of one another. Most questions directed to Masung tended to fall flat, as though Masung himself had a gravity that sucked them down. Questions like, “What did you do to Mom?” and “Why are you even out here?” sounded less like questions and more like accusations.
“I ran out of water,” Masung replied, because he always replied when asked, even when he knew they didn’t want an answer. He said it plainly, because what had happened was plain, and cupped his hands awkwardly under his chin to keep his blood from messing the floor. “I tugged her skirt, and she dropped the pot.” If he looked down his nose, he could see the the glint of fluorescents in the bright red puddle in his palms.
From the dining table—it was an open kitchen—their father turned the page of his newspaper too hard—Masung heard it tear. Then, the paper rustled fiercely as he folded it back up and threw it down beside his chopsticks. Ethan didn’t hear, however, too busy shouting, “Get out! Get out of this house! Why won’t you just leave us alone?!”
“Because I belong here,” Masung replied, and their mother on the floor broke her voice on a sob, then wrung her hands and rocked back and forth as Masung’s father joined them in the kitchen.
“Why is he still here?” he said about Masung, but to Ethan, and Masung watched Ethan go stiff, then stalk over to grab Masung by the arm. He caught Masung in a bruising grip and hauled him to his feet, and Masung’s blood splashed to the tile when the careful bowl of his hands pulled part. Before Ethan could drag him out, however, their father started shouting down at their mother.
This is all your fault! he said, and Masung mouthed along with it. If you had just kept your legs shut—
It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me! The devil got a hold of me! It was the devil—
I can’t walk around this town because I’m so ashamed!
Oh our Father who art in heaven, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil…
Ethan noticed Masung mouthing the words unblinking, leaning forward in rapt, childish attention, and fury overtook his features in an ugly mask. Masung saw the blow coming but didn’t avoid it. It knocked him back to the floor, and he wondered if his brother’s hand hurt as much as his cheek. It probably didn’t hurt as much as his mouth though—this time, when he touched the tip of his tongue to his gums, he tasted blood there too.
“Ethan!” their father roared, and Ethan inhaled sharply, like he had to stash air away in the safe of his lungs before his shoulders locked up. “What are you doing? The cut is bad enough, you can’t bruise his face! He has school!”
“I’m sorry.”
If only it wasn’t here, their mother sobbed. Masung’s eyes scanned from person to person. Everyone was breathing at a different pace, his mother’s jagged and broken, his brother’s quick and shallow, their father’s even huffing and puffing as he closed his eyes and prayed for strength. Masung hardly breathed at all, too eager to hear everyone else.
“Get it ice and out of my sight!”
“Yes, sir.”
Ethan led the way, yanking Masung behind him, and not wanting to leave bloodstains on the hardwood, Masung balled up the front of his shirt and pressed it to his newly clefted mouth.
He was happy for the ice, because he had never gotten the water he asked for, and he could drink out the ice pack once it melted down to nothing.
The two prisoners continue to argue, shouting their voices raw—a pair of amateur assassins from a rival gang sent to kill Masung’s young charge. Their respective chairs are too heavy for their thrashing to topple them over.
“My fault? How is it my fault? If you hadn’t fucked it all up—!”
“If you had just stuck to the fucking plan in the first fucking place, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess!”
“Wow!” Masung remarks, and his coworker casts him a look. “I think that’s what they call a flashback!”
“God, you are so weird,” she mutters, and refuses to look at him again.
“Hey, you guys,” Masung says, approaching the two captives, and he claps each on the shoulder with either hand. “Could you do that again but maybe not swear this time? It’s kinda nostalgic for me.”
But both of the prisoners shut up after that, and Masung doesn’t hear a peep out of them again until the interrogations begin.
When Ethan opens the door, he goes pale and tries to slam it shut. Masung, expecting this, has his steel-toed boot in the doorway, and now in adulthood, he has four inches and fifteen pounds of muscle over his biological older brother, and he shoulders his way in with ease.
“Hi Mom, Dad. I brought presents,” Masung calls blithely over his mother’s gasps and his father’s demands of how he found this address, and Ethan’s shouts to get out of their house—nostalgic! Ethan is funny—he forgets to close the front door in his hurry to throw himself between Masung and the rest of the house, and the winter wind blows the snow in, scattering against the back of Masung’s fine wool coat.
Ethan’s hair is perfectly combed, and his necklace of the cross hangs down over a cable knit vest he wears over a button-up shirt, both in Christmas-sanctioned hues. “Wow! Hyung, I like your sweater.”
“Get out right now before I call the police!” he shouts as Masung bends down to undo his boots. He does so with one hand and, peering around Ethan to catch their mother’s eye, lifts the pile of carefully wrapped presents in his other.
“I’ll go leave these under the tree!”
He dodges Ethan’s grip, and as he passes by, a girl he doesn’t recognize comes up to Ethan’s other side and whispers fiercely, Oppa, who is this?
Nothing. No one.
You never told me you had a brother—
“It’s okay, Es. I’ll handle it. Hey!” Ethan rushes up and grabs Masung by the shoulder, and Masung stops only to be polite. He smiles over back at his brother, tilts his head questioningly.
“You need to leave,” his brother says. “You’re not welcome here.”
“Oh, that’s okay!” Masung replies. “I don’t mind!”
He bends at the knees to step out from under Ethan’s hold, and Ethan’s hand doesn’t follow—his brother’s summoned away by their mother’s sudden tearful outburst, not again, not again…
The living room of his family’s new home is furnished beautifully, with expensive carpets, and glowing garlands lining the high ceilings. A real, live fireplace crackles on one wall, and their dog—who had just been a puppy the last time Masung stopped by—has grown into a beautiful dog, cowering slinkily behind the piano.
“Mom, it’ll be okay,” Ethan says to their weeping mother, then, “I’ll explain everything later Esther, please!”
Masung sits on the luxurious sofa, kicking his feet. He notices the presents under the tree beside him, and leans over the armrest to reach for them. “Are any of these mine?” he asks, and his mother wails, and his father—older now, his voice doesn’t boom quite the same—shouts at him from the dinner table, and Ethan yells now too. Soon he’ll come and try to drag Masung by the hair and fail.
Honestly, he kind of missed this. There’s really no place like home.