Wood Chips

Soft

Your father has a bottle of Jack Daniel's in one hand and an axe in another. He looks at the bottle, shakes it, gulps down the rest of the whiskey and hurls the bottle across the lawn. It floats and bounces and slides over the crab grass, leaving a trail of light green. He's eyeing the large maple, your favorite climbing tree. He's yelling at your mother in Korean, spewing unintelligible phrases at her, unintelligible to you since you can't understand Korean, but his words make her flinch. She replies in English, "Please come back inside."

"Shang," your father says. "Stupid, dumb, idiot bitch."

You try to keep perfectly still and blend into the bushes.

Your father lost another job two days ago, the one at the boat repair shop in Freeport, Long Island. He says they are all racists, that they discriminate against him because his English is bad and he has a graduate degree in Engineering. "They think they so smart," he told you at dinner tonight, slurring his words. "They think they know everything. But I have a Master's! I know electrical engineering!"

He has a Master's degree in electrical engineering yet was fired from a rinky-dink boat repair shop? At the dinner table you glanced at your mother, wanting her to point this out, but she had that frozen, glassy look. You couldn't expect anything from her in that state.

"No one gives me chance," your father said. "No one!" He slammed his palm onto the table, shaking the glasses, and both you and your mother jumped.

Now he's cursing in Korean and pointing to the maple tree. Your mother is in the doorway, rigid. You are trying to disappear. He brought out the axe after he had searched for you throughout the house, yelling your name, and finally found you hiding up in the tree. You had broken his compression gauge by accident a few days ago but he hadn't noticed it until this afternoon. When you heard him yell your name from the garage, you turned off the TV, hurried out into the front yard, and climbed the tree. It took him forty-five minutes to find you, and he ordered you to come down. You admitted you had broken his gauge while playing with it. Instead of punishing you on the spot he looked at the tree. He said, "You too soft. You hide up in tree and pretend you don't hear and you don't know how hard it is."

That was when he went back into the garage and came out with the axe.

He repeats to you now, "You just don't know how hard it is."

"I know," you say without thinking. Then you cringe. Shut up, you tell yourself. Shut your stupid, dumb, idiot mouth.

"Oh, you know? You know?" your father says, throwing his head back and laughing, then coughing. "Yuhbuh, did you hear him? He knows! He knows how hard it is out there!"

Your mother says something quietly in Korean.

Your father's expression suddenly shifts, darkens. His eyes gleam. He says something low and gutteral in Korean to your mother, who steps back. He turns to you. You keep still. "You listen to me," he says. "I try to make you tougher. I try to make you stronger. You have to be stronger because they hate you out there. You hear me? They hate you."

No, you think. They hate drunks.

He flinches, as if he has read your mind. He turns to the tree.

The Tree

The maple tree stands in the corner of the front yard, and during the summers is so dense with large leaves that high up among the smaller branches you can sit and sway and examine your skin tinted green. Small flickers of sunlight pierce the canopy above. The leaves smell of fresh rain. You have a perfect reclining branch, your legs hanging below, your back and neck supported. You have even fallen asleep up there, waking up startled and gripping a branch in panic. You felt small...