SONGPYEON

by Anthony Luebbert

On a street in Singapore I found the house where I grew up. I let myself in.

Inside I found a Korean couple eating bean cakes. In the kitchen every cabinet was as I remembered it--same knobs, same molding--but each was filled with chopsticks, little baskets, and things I didn't recognize. It smelled like vinegar.

A little girl came up to me when I peeked under the sink.

"Who are you?" she asked in a voice that dipped and rose again.

"I'm Tony. I used to live here. Is this your house?"

"Yes. Those are my parents," she said. "They don't know why you're here."

I suspected the parents didn't speak English like their daughter. I nodded.

"Yes." I said. "Tell them I grew up here. That I only want to look. Tell them I am from the US and it's quite weird to find my home here."

She looked at me with her narrow eyes and I couldn't tell if she had understood. She had her hair in pigtails that looked just like my little sister's.

She said, "I'll be back."

The girl went to her parents and spoke to them. They looked from their bean cakes to her but they did not look at me even though she pointed.

When the girl came back to me she said, "Come," and walked back out of the kitchen. I followed her past her parents and into what used to be my room. It was decorated, not in Return of the Jedi posters and Chicago Cubs bed sheets, but in puppies and kittens.

"Are you a teacher or a student?" she asked, as if the world was divided into just those categories.

"A teacher," I said. And I was.

"Is this your name?" she said. She opened her closet door and showed me the spot where I had carved my name into a wooden shelf thirty years before.

"Yes." I told her, "Yes."

Originally published on featherproof books’s TripleQuick Fiction iPhone app.