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  • Withering Leaves
  • Kim Mella (bio)
    Translated by Victoria Caudle (bio)

There was a man. He performed miracles: changing water into wine, healing the lame and the blind, and walking on water. He brought dead children back to life, cured servants of sickness, unfurled a man's clawed hand, and stopped the twelve-year flow of blood from a woman's body. He ate in the streets, often fasted, and rose with the sun to pray. He would eat sheaves of grain cut from wheat fields, and berries picked from trees. Then, one day, he went to a tree to find berries to eat as he always did when he was hungry. However, its branches were thick with only leaves and no berries were to be found. Because it was not yet time for trees to bear fruit. But the man became angry, and he cursed the tree, and, as he did, the tree's trunk twisted and its leaves dried up. The man's followers were astonished by his powers. They didn't know that, not long after, he would be hung up to die on some wood. Would the man have known? He probably did. They left and the tree withered alone.

_______

—Oh! 'ello?

The woman on the other end of the line sounded surprised. She probably didn't expect Ángel to pick up. Ángel hadn't even known she would pick up. The number that popped up on her [End Page 95] phone screen wasn't saved in the address book, but if she fumbled through her memory a bit, she could figure out who it was.

Astonished, the woman on the other end muttered to herself,

—So, 'e duh know 'ow ta bick up da pone.

Ángel could tell from the woman's voice that saliva was pooling in her mouth. Her face easily came to mind. The little bumps around her mouth; her narrow yet long chin; the corners of her eyes that crinkled when she smiled; the smooth, flat outline of a face that went uninterrupted by any single protrusion; the way she would poke her tongue out of her rounded lips as she coughed. She was incapable of fully pronouncing Hangŭl consonants, and her tongue, incapable of rolling or skimming the roof of her mouth, was stiff and hard as if it were stuck to something.

—'Ow 'ave you been? she asked, raising her voice up a tone. The sound of swallowing followed soon after. It was a habit of hers to swallow mouthfuls of spit as she spoke. Another one of her quirks was the way she would choke on her own saliva mid-swallow, cough hard, and spray the person in front of her with globules of spit. To make up for her broken pronunciation, she would gesture furiously with both hands to try and get the meaning across, but her hands were curled inward and were of little help communicating.

—It's been a while. How have you been?

Ángel sat up in bed. Leaning on a cushion, she spread her hand out on her nightstand as the woman's peculiar pronunciation rang in her ear. Ángel half crushed the box of corn-flavored crackers she had left on top of the table and then crushed the other half.

The person calling was Che. An older student she had gotten to know through a club at university; instead of calling her by her given name, which was Hanna, Ángel called her "Che." All because she favored a brand of cigarettes called Che that had a picture of Che Guevara's face printed on the box. With one of those Luxembourg-made, additive-free, yellow filter-tipped [End Page 96] cigarettes between her lips, Che would take deep drags as if smoking was part and parcel of revolution. Whenever her gaunt chest expanded as she inhaled, she would often end up choking on the smoke and coughing, but she didn't give up those strong cigarettes. Maybe she never gave them up because Ángel called her Che? Once, she'd tried smoking a hard-to-get cigarette brand called Toraji named after the balloon flower. Having noticed that change, Ángel...

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