ONE:
June 10, 2017

Jisoo half dragged and half lifted her luggage bag over the rocky path leading up to the sagging hanok that she called home. The mid-June heat was in full swing. She had been out of the air-conditioned taxi for not even a full minute, but her shirt was already clinging to the sweat on the small of her back. 

It had been hot in Los Angeles, too, but not this humid. This sticky heat was a special feature of summers back in her hometown. 

She climbed up the stairs and let her luggage bag wheels drop to the stone base of the house. Then, she wiped her palms and tried the door. 

Jisoo had to lean all her weight against the door to slide it open. The bamboo hadn’t been sanded in years, and the wood creaked and protested against any movement. After several attempts to let herself in with no success, Jisoo decided it was time to roll up her sleeves and really go to town. She dug her fingers into the handle and gave it one last tug with all of her strength.

The door slid clear out of its frame.

“!” The heavy door would have crushed her if she wasn’t fast enough to catch it.

Jisoo caught her balance before she fell off the stone base, and then she leaned the door against the side of the house. She looked down at the door frame and inspected the damage. The damned house was falling apart. 

“Hello?” Jisoo called as she stepped across the threshold and into the house. The fact that her slippers hadn’t seemed to have moved so much as an inch since she left them there five years ago was mildly depressing. She kicked her shoes off and stuffed her feet into them.

“Hello? Mom? Harabeoji?” Jisoo pulled her luggage into the house and then leaned it against the wall. “Anyone? Sorry about the door.”

Was anyone home? 

Jisoo looked around the living room. Almost nothing seemed out of place. A pinewood coffee table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by flattened green cushions pounded down by years of kneelers. A row of potted hydrangeas stood alert on low bookshelves against the wall, framing a 30 inch flatscreen television. A sleek, black upright piano rested against one side of the room. On the wall, there was a hazy portrait of herself as a chubby baby. An open door gave Jisoo a view into the hallway—

Where an elderly man in hanbok was wielding a shotgun.

“Holy sh—!” Jisoo cursed and then screamed at the top of her lungs as the old man suddenly started running and pointing the shotgun toward her. She fell to her knees and held her arms up, screaming.

“Intruder! Intruder!” shouted the old man. “Intruder! Intruder!”

“What! No, this is my house!” Jisoo screamed.

“Intruder!” he shook the barrel of the shotgun in Jisoo’s face as she screamed her lungs out. 

“Harabeoji!” a woman came sprinting out of another hallway and snatched the shotgun out of the old man’s hands. “What’s the matter with you? That’s Jisoo, Harabeoji, don’t you recognize your own granddaughter?”

“Jisoo?” said the old man. He turned back to Jisoo, who was still crouched on her knees with her arms in a defensive position. 

He took one long, hard stare at her face and then said: “Ah. Jisoo. It’s you.”

Jisoo scoffed.

“Harabeoji!” she shouted, standing up. “What in the world is wrong with you?”

“Eh, I thought you might be a burglar,” he said, shrugging and then turning to walk back down the hallway. Jisoo scoffed. 

“Well, I’m not,” Jisoo said, pressing a hand to her chest. Her heart was still pounding from the encounter. She thought she saw her life literally flash before her eyes when she saw that pointed at her. “Mom, what the hell? I’m not even home for a whole minute and Harabeoji is trying to kill me!”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” her mother said, reaching out to pat down Jisoo’s hair. “He can’t kill anything with this stupid thing, it’s a blank.”

“A blank?”

“Well, I suppose it was real at some point,” her mother said, still holding the shotgun. “We were cleaning out the shed, found this little memento from Harabeoji’s war days. All its nooks and crannies are sealed off, so you can’t even load it. Totally obsolete.”

Jisoo sighed. Some welcome this turned out to be.

“Anyway,” her mother leaned the shotgun down against the wall and then wrapped her daughter up in a hug. Jisoo let her mother throw her arms around her and kiss her cheek and scream excitedly about how happy she was that she was coming home. In spite of the circumstances, that is. 

“Oh, how I’ve missed you! My baby girl!” actual tears were spilling from her eyes. Jisoo brought her arms up and rubbed her mother’s back.

“Missed you, too, Mom,” Jisoo said. 

“Oh, and Harabeoji is happy to see you, too,” she said. “Just forget the whole shotgun thing, you know your grandpa loves you.”

“Right,” Jisoo said. 

Her mother grabbed her luggage bag and started to roll it into the hallway. She had a habit of dragging her feet whenever she shuffled across the hardwood flooring of their house, and that hadn’t changed either. Jisoo’s mother explained that they had started to store some filing boxes in her childhood bedroom, but otherwise everything was just as she left it.