And the River Drags Her Down

1.

Despite her best efforts, the rat was dead.

Soojin knew it by the way Milkis didn’t leap toward the cage door the moment she entered the room. Normally, the sound of her pawing the newspaper shavings or scuttling down the ramps was an omnipresent music. But this evening there was only perfect, unwelcome silence.

She found Milkis in one of the hammocks hanging from the top tier of the cage, body curled like an apostrophe. She had not been dead long. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, and her pink nose was still damp to the touch. At least she had died painlessly, unlike last time, when her mammary tumors grew as large as almonds from her underbelly.

Soojin pulled the rat into her palm. Milkis was not a beautiful animal: unusually large for her species, with white fur grown patchy from skin conditions, eyes wet and protruding like pomegranate seeds. But she was cherished, and would be back soon.

After donning latex gloves, Soojin laid the rat on a lined plastic tray and cut the tail off with a dissection scalpel swiped from biology class. It yielded beneath the blade easier than expected. A small, wet snap, not so different from cutting through the spine of a cutlassfish. Then she was transferring the severed length to a ziplock bag. This was what she would use to call Milkis back. The rest of the body must not be returned to the ground.

Though they had not had a chance to get large, the growths were in the rat’s belly again, waiting to turn malignant. Burying a sick body revived the ailments. Best to work with a healthy cut or from scratch, which is to say bone. But the tail was im-maculate. It would work well.

Soojin swaddled the body in tissue and placed it into a shoebox for the pet ceme-tery’s hearth. The blood where it was severed spread crimson ringlets through the white, and she swallowed hard against the familiar sickness rising in her throat. The crude surgery finished, she held her quivering hands together, digging her nails into the wrist of her scalpel hand, waiting for the sharp pain to steady her.

At only seventeen, Soojin Han was no stranger to death. She had seen Milkis expire and rise countless times, but this would be her first time resurrecting anything alone. Her sister, Mirae, though only a year older, had been the bold one who could calmly stomach anything and so had always taken the bloodier tasks upon herself. Close your eyes, Mirae would say, and by the time Soojin opened them again, the grim division would be done. The healthiest body part neatly excised from the rest, ready to be fed to earth and fire, respectively.

Last fall, Mirae drowned in Black Pine River, which wended its way through their small town and beyond it. Soojin still glimpsed her sister everywhere: Mirae at the sink, humming as she rinsed suds off dishes. Mirae in the golden-hour light, brush-ing her hair by the window, screen popped out, feeding strands to the wind. Mirae, named after the Korean word for future, which she would never possess. The in-tervening ten months between her death and now had mitigated nothing. Soojin still felt picked at by grief’s carrion birds.

A tap on the wall startled her. Her father stood by the door, eyeing her warily.

“Knock-knock,” he said, aiming for levity and missing. How anyone could make knock-knock sound like a grave missive, Soojin would never know. He cleared his throat but did not cross the threshold, opting instead to lean on the doorframe, arms folded across his chest. His awkward body language irritated her.

It hadn’t always been this way. Just a year ago, Soojin, Mirae, and their father would lounge in front of the TV, laughing at game shows. They would cajole him into midnight drives to the gas station for shitty taquitos and Coke slushies. Their small family unit had felt tight and impenetrable. But after Mirae’s death, every-thing changed.

“Leaving tonight?” Soojin asked. Her father’s face was gaunt, darkened with une-ven patches of stubble like dapples on a horsehide.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “The house is stocked up. If you need anything, call. I’ll be home every weekend.”

Their home was in Jade Acre, a tiny resort town afflicted with too much beauty, nestled between miles of woods and towering bluffs, the sea such an uncanny shade of blue it was like diving into the iris of an eye. The summers were long and sultry and asphyxiated with tourists brandishing money like green artillery.

For a few months, all was generous: the fruit-bearing trees, the nesting birds, the shallow bays where tourists paid heftily to dive by day for three endangered red abalones and illegally snuck in by night for more. But in the off months, the town became dreary and isolated, taxed by rain that beat the landscape into mulch. A waterlogged softness grew into everything, and the townsfolk rarely left.

Father was one of the rare leavers. Every year, once the tourist months ended, along with the modest stream of income from the family’s bed-and-breakfast, Fa-ther packed his bags and drove three hours east to the city of Bragg Hills to work for his cousin’s construction company. The long commute too difficult to manage, their father stayed with his cousin during the week and made his way back to Jade Acre on the weekends.

It wasn’t ideal. You either made enough during tourist months or spent the rest of the year scraping. When Soojin’s mother was alive, she had wanted to leave Jade Acre for that reason. Han’s Bed & Breakfast was unsustainable. Every year they put away a little less. But Father had dug in his heels.

How can we sell the house our girls grew up in? Wasn’t this our dream?

When Mother died seven years ago in a car wreck, the possibility of leaving died with her. No one wanted to leave the home where the memories of Mother still lived, and now of Mirae, too. Soojin felt them lingering everywhere in the house. Her loves, curled in the window alcove and inside each doorframe like endless questions.

“Will you be okay, Soo?” her father asked. This would be the first time she’d be left completely alone. After Mother passed, when Soojin was ten and Mirae was elev-en, the sisters still had each other. They adapted to being latchkey kids--even grew to enjoy it at times. The freedom to sleep when they wanted, eat what they wished, and feign adulthood as they imagined it. But this time Soojin would have no one.

“Dad, I’m not a kid,” she said. “I’ll be fine. And besides, I won’t be alone.” She showed him what she held.

“It’s that time again already?” he asked, recoiling slightly from the severed tail.

Her father worried his lip, rubbing at his jaw in a way that told Soojin he was de-bating something in his head. But whatever it was, he quietly dismissed it. Instead he repeated what he’d told his two daughters so many times before.

“Make sure no one sees you.”



The magic would become a family heirloom, passed down through the blood of their women. But at the beginning, there was wreckage and a famine-struck vil-lage.

It was a cursed season of a cursed year. All winter, hailstorms battered the land and would not go. An unnatural freeze shocked the earth well into summer, singed the finally germinating seeds with frost. Then, when the cold abated at last, a spate of earthquakes rippled through their suffering peninsula, destroying whatev-er crop the weather had failed to cull.

With no harvest, the villagers slaughtered their livestock down to the last emaciat-ed sow, sparing nothing of them, not even the bones.

Or so they thought.

Under the cover of night, lit by the light of an anemic moon, a girl snuck from her home and ran toward the dried-up well on the outskirts of her village. In time, she would become an ancestor, but for now, she was only a girl made animal by hun-ger, tipping her ear against the well’s mouth until she heard a faint scuffling from within.

When she was certain she was alone, she pulled the rope that dangled into the dark and, instead of a water bucket, withdrew a rusted cage. Inside it was a hen, pecking at the clippings of grass and desiccated insects laid out for it.

Shh, the girl said as she unlatched the cage. She needn’t have warned it. The bird had been hatched frail and docile; it never so much as cooed.

She stroked its meager body, the smooth patches of baldness left from the feath-ers it had torn away to pass time in its solitude. The girl had hidden the hen from the slaughter and secretly kept it alive in hopes it might lay eggs. Anything to reli-ably feed and sustain her family. It never did.

The girl told it she was sorry, though she wasn’t. The killing was swift and the de-vouring was swifter. The girl and her surviving family tore through the bird’s body in ecstatic, guilty secrecy.

The next day, for the first time in months, the girl woke satiated, still sucking on a bone she’d tucked between her cheek and teeth. Fed and hopeful, she went to the fields and buried it in the soil, meaning for its nutritious marrow to feed the fal-low. Instead she saw a beak emerge from the earth, stammering for air. The ground remained sterile of crops, but she pulled a live hen from the dirt, where it scratched and pecked at nothing.

She ran screaming into her home for her mother. Too desperate for wonder, they swiftly slaughtered the bird and ate the bird, then sent its breastbone back into the dirt without fanfare. The gift taxed the girl heavily. Her hands trembled with exer-tion. Blood slid from her nose. She buried the bone while smiling.

Again. And again. Wing bone and spit. Like this her family thrived as the rest of her village hungered, grew gaunt, then sickly, then dead. The villagers whispered of demons in their family. Their secret hen died a hundred deaths.



Autumn’s onset was coming early this year, the deciduous trees ever so slowly be-ginning to fringe themselves gold. Soojin hated fall. It was the season when Mirae had left to attend a house party and never returned. Her body was found a few days later in the next town, snagged on some rocks for a kid from a neighboring high school to find. In the photos the boy snapped before calling the authorities, her sister’s features were bloated and anonymous in the way of all drownings left to the water too long; the autumn branches reflected around her head like a thrashed crown.

The turning of seasons would never again be beautiful to her. She tore her eyes from the treetops and planted her gaze firmly on the road.

As Soojin crested the hill, Peaceful Paws Pet Cemetery rose to meet her. In the gloaming, the building’s pale paint shimmered as if to vanish. Behind the intake of-fice sprawled a field where small stones marked the resting place of well-loved pets. Soojin could see the cemetery owner’s son, Mark Moon, down on one knee, tending to the pot of geraniums by the office entrance. Sunset caught in his hair, picking up the streaks of auburn in his otherwise black mane. He hummed off-key as he worked, and despite the racket of gravel beneath her feet, he didn’t hear her coming. Not even when she stopped right behind him, her long shadow stretching across the wall directly in his line of vision. She knelt.

“Hey,” she said. He jerked, and the pruning scissors missed the dead leaf he’d been aiming for and instead took off a cluster of flowers.

“Damn.” Mark dropped the shears and picked up the lopped geraniums.

Aside from the flowers she’d startled him into cutting, the geraniums were bloom-ing excellently, even in this unusually cold September. She wasn’t surprised. She’d known Mark for as long as she could remember, and not once had she ever seen any living thing fail by his hand. She wondered if growing up surrounded by so much death had taught him to appease it, allowing small concessions to hold it longer at bay.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said. “Sorry about your flowers.”

Mark looked up, only now registering her presence. Though he was built tall and lithe, his face had not yet outrun the puppylike countenance of his childhood: his brown eyes were still a little too wide for his face. He had that brand of boyish charm that disarmed peers and vacationing wine-moms alike, especially when he smiled the way he did now.

“Don’t worry about it.” He stood, brushing soil off his hands before offering one to Soojin. He pulled her to her feet, and when he withdrew, he left a damp grit on her palms that she wiped without bothering to be discreet.

“So, what’s up?” Mark asked, though he likely knew. Every couple of years, Soojin and Mirae would visit him with shoeboxes of dead things. Rats, usually--sometimes birds. Small lives that took no longer than twenty minutes to bring completely to ash. She opened the box, and he reached in, moving the tissue paper to see Milkis lying inside. His expression remained remarkably even. Not that Soojin expected him to balk at a corpse.

Mark had helped his parents with their business since he was fourteen, doing eve-rything from manning the phones to ordering bespoke cat caskets. But most often he helped with cremations. Soojin figured it technically wasn’t legal for him to do this work, but the town’s adults winked and let it slide the way they winked and let slide many transgressions: kids working or driving before they legally could, teen-agers sneaking water bottles of rum into the town’s one-screen movie theater or smoking at the pebble beach on nights when the weather was generous.

“Sure, I got you.” Mark took the box and opened the door. “My parents aren’t in, so it’s on the house.” If he found it at all strange that she cremated her pet rats ra-ther than just burying them in the garden like most others, he didn’t mention it. “Come in.”

Inside, Soojin was greeted by the familiar smell of lavender and antiseptic. As usu-al, the fireplace was cheerily burning away in the corner and the front desk was adorned with fresh-cut herbs. At a glance, no one would assume this quaint room with pale yellow wallpaper was a pet funeral home. But the displayed urns em-bossed with things like All paws go to heaven and Woof! in gilded lettering gave it away.

“This looks like the one you brought a couple years ago,” Mark said, peering at Milkis again. The red crescents of her half-lidded eyes had gone foggy. “And a couple years before that.”