Since I've been out sick, I've been trying to be productive all the same. It's time to start getting the Jecheon book in order. I need to build a portfolio and put together an outline so that I have something to show potential editors.
First thing's first, though, I need to start clearing out the cobwebs in my ol' brain. Jezebel, a women's interest site that I follow, is having a very general short fiction contest. They're calling for stories 500 words or less with a female protagonist. The deadline is Friday and the prize is a pile of books penned by awesome lady writers.
I figured this was a good opportunity to stick my big toe into the water. So, I took a post from Everybody Jecheon Tonight and turned it into a micro story. Here's the first draft, criticisms and comments, chuseyo (please). I'm also not sold on the title, so let me know your thoughts.
Welcome Dinner
We followed Julia out to the car. Like her, it was stately, expensive and a little intimidating. The black sedan was straight to the point and though she had probably owned it for months, the interior looked and smelled as if she had bought it earlier that day. She motioned for us to take the back seats as she slid into the driver’s. I sat. The awkward roil in my stomach was something that I was growing accustomed to in the three days that I had been in Korea.
“Where are we eating dinner again?” I felt like Julia had given more details to Ian than to me.
“I don’t know. “ He leaned forward. “Julia, where are we going to eat?”
“Uh,” then she said something I didn’t understand. I tried to work it out in my head. ‘Bead-um’ is what I had heard her say. I spent the next several minutes running through every food or type of food that started with the letter B. While I was playing my own personal alphabet game, Ian was productively narrowing it down. “Rice, vegetable, fish, rolls,” Julia was continuing to Ian.
“Does she remember that we’re vegetarians?” I was letting Ian take all the falls tonight. He tentatively reminded her.
“Oh, yes. Okay. You eat fish?”
“No, no fish, chicken, beef or anything like that. We do eat eggs and milk, though.” His body was tight with discomfort. He was able to talk to her, however. After the last eight hours spent making and remaking lesson plans for her approval, which I still hadn’t won, I could hardly look at her. She exhausted me. I looked out the window and let the neon shop signs overwhelm my train of though. I counted glowing red crosses atop churches. Eleven if you count the ones just past those hills. I thought Koreans were Buddhists.
“Your parents are vegetarians?” Julia and Ian’s conversation had continued.
“Mine aren’t. They eat a lot of meat, actually. Casey’s mom is, though.”
“Oh, really? It’s good to do. You are nice children, obedient.”
We drove a few minutes more in silence. She began to mumble to herself in Korean and drive more slowly down the street. I leaned toward her a little, worried she was trying to talk to us. She wasn’t. She was lost. She dialed her phone and made a U-Turn. I squinted at the headlights of the oncoming cars as we changed directions on the four lane street. After less than a minute of what we could only infer as a frustrating conversation by the way it was punctuated by sighs, she made another U-Turn and we pulled into a nearly empty parking lot. “Vietnamese Cuisine” was written in small, blocky type on the bottom of the brightly lit rectangular sign.
