Cindy Juyoung Ok
Romantic Comedy
The mass stabbing had long impended—we
knew before they told us. Maybe something
about body language. Their plans were taut,
clean. We knew well we would be dead soon.
Being contained was one thing, but the end
of the breath would be notable, new. All this
in the woods, cages enforced invisibly. Holding
my hair up, I thought, if everything is inevitable,
then nothing is. If I had this power to deny these
facts of death, I had the power of god. I knew
I would beg. I was a beggar. The man in charge,
full of charm and rage, was adored by helpers,
mostly women. In the dream, they were homely
and I wasn’t. Well, I wanted to live. Waiting,
we looked down at our fingernails and shuffled
in small concentric circles. I went to meet with
him in a small office crowded with some of us
on one side. Them and their knives on the other.
I was there to prevent unnecessary death in
general. But also, I told you, I wanted to live.
In this hope, imagined myself an individual.
The others a mass. Even my family—they were
a part of the everyone I wanted to save, my sister
appearing as a baby. As I had heard always in
my mother’s voice: They would throw our babies up and
catch them on their swords, you know. Likely a sort of
elaboration. Still, I had to make the man laugh.
I was to acknowledge his sense of self. It was
helpful to list features that sounded specific
but could apply widely. The game was not sexual,
or complicated. I held social power and I hated
it, all that was fixed. In the end he gave me
evacuation in addition to survival. And he asked
nothing. I saw he was suffering and I hoped
he would not, though that was outside my locus
of concern. I left, took a nap, still in the woods.
Others filed back into the cities. When I woke,
the grounds were a vacation space, adorned. Elderly
couples played cards on wooden benches.
The tide was low beneath a deck painted green.
It was maybe an island now, in a bay. I walked
barefoot on a dirt path, where some from my original
group crowded around a red grocery cart. They
stared at the pile in it, at work on a new question.
What do you do with all the blades once the mass
stabber has been appeased? We considered ocean,
towels. Taped boxes with handwritten warnings
not to open. There was this idea that sharpness
could not be unloaded. That in this last step,
we might easily multiply harm. Briefly, we
considered burial. The conversation was not
audible, but transmitted among the various
variants of myself, like in all my dreams.
A negotiation of logic, finally, a proof.