by Ellen Oh
Charan struggled to her feet. She glanced at the oddly weightless goblin club in her hand. Then she ran home.
Her parents did not believe her.
Even though Charan was not prone to telling falsehoods, her tale was far too fanciful. Her parents smiled at each other and told her that she’d simply fallen asleep and had an interesting dream. They reprimanded her for being gone so long and for worrying them so, and then told Charan to eat her dinner and finish her chores.
Only Chun scowled, his features knowing. Hurt. All afternoon, he’d wandered the woods in a panic, thinking Charan had left him behind. Once he’d learned where his sister had gone, his eyes had narrowed in thought.
After all the lanterns had been extinguished in their bark-shingled home, Chun made his way toward his sister’s bed pallet.
“Noona,” he whispered.
Charan turned toward him, still wide-awake.
“What are you going to turn into gold?” Chun demanded.
“You believe me?”
He nodded gravely. “You have to be careful what you pick, Noona. It has to be something immense. Something amazing. Something that will make us wealthy beyond our dreams. Then maybe you can stay here and marry Heechul-hyung instead of going to music school.”
Her nod was hesitant.
It frustrated Chun. “So what are you going to choose?”
“I don’t know.”
“It shouldn’t be so difficult. Turn the mountain into gold! Turn our home into gold!” His whisper had grown louder with his annoyance.
“But . . . I like our home as it is.”
“It could be bigger,” Chun insisted.
Charan sat up. “Yes. It could be. But then we would have more chores.”
“Then we will pay someone to do our chores!”
“Then what would we do?”
“It doesn’t matter!” he nearly shouted. “Don’t you see, if we have enough money, we can do anything we please!”
Charan said nothing in response.
Chun’s hands balled into fists. “Is there nothing that you want?”
His sister toyed with the ends of her hair.
Chun forced himself to relax. In his sister’s hesitation, he caught the glimmer of a truth he’d long suspected: Charan wanted to go to music school for herself, not to provide for her family.
Again his eyes narrowed in consideration before he spoke. “I’m sorry I was rude to you, Noona,” Chun said softly. “You didn’t deserve it. Tell me what happened again, and maybe we can come up with a plan.” He paused. “Together.”
As his eyes widened with persuasive innocence, Charan remembered how much her younger brother had loved to hear their mother tell them stories at night.
She smiled. “Of course, Chun-ah.”
Her brother smiled back, sly as a charming fox.
Chun ran through the forest, hurtling toward the Goblin Tree. The moon above him was at its highest peak, and the skies were a thick blanket of indigo, spangled with stars.
He crashed to a halt at the base of the Goblin Tree.
Then he raised the magic club he had stolen from his sleeping sister.
As the leaves fall
As the sky turns to night
Summon the magic
To turn nothing
Into all
He pounded the club against the trunk of the Goblin Tree, willing the tree to become gold.
Nothing happened.
Chun felt his cheeks begin to flush. He raised the club once more. If he didn’t use the wishes before Charan did, his sister would leave him behind, and his family’s coffers would diminish even further.
As the leaves fall
As the sky turns to night
Summon the magic
To turn nothing
Into all
He struck the trunk of the mighty oak tree even harder.
Still nothing happened.
Chun tried a third time. A fourth time. When he smashed the tree trunk a fifth time with no success, he shouted into the night, his cry filled with fury.
“That magic was not given to you, you little thief!” an equally irate voice yelled from behind him.
Chun turned to find a goblin with a tilted hat glaring up at him. It had to be the same goblin from his sister’s story.
“Then give me my own wishes!” Chun said, the flush rising into his forehead. “My sister does not know what to do with them.”
The goblin harrumphed. “I don’t give magic to people I don’t trust.”
“Then trust me. I would do far more good with magic than my sister would.”
“Why would I trust a little thief?”
Chun felt his fingers become bloodless in his fists. “Because I promise to use your magic well.”
“Promises from a thief are as useful to me as a pebble in my shoe.” The goblin turned away. “Give that club back to its rightful owner.”
Anger raced through Chun’s veins. The spiteful little creature wanted him to ignore his family and let his sister vanish to the city in search of her own dreams? In a fit of fury, Chun lifted the club as though to strike the goblin.
The goblin spun on his heel and swiped his hand through the air. A loud crack echoed into the night, followed by a flash of green light and a cloud of smoke.
When the smoke began to rise, the goblin waved his sight clear.
Then he sighed before bending to collect the new pebble beside his feet.
When Charan combed the forest in search of Chun the next morning, she found the magic club beside the trunk of the Goblin Tree.
She knew in an instant what her brother had done. Without hesitating, Charan made her way to the thicket of nearby mugunghwa flowers.
Though she did not know how to summon the goblins or fall through the earth into their cavern, Charan held the magic club in both hands, like an offering.
“Please tell me what you have done with my brother,” she asked the flowers. “If you return him to me, I will give back the magic club without even using it to turn nothing into all.”
The ground did not give way. Nor did anyone offer her a response.
Charan asked again. She knelt before the flowers and rested the club before her. Briefly her mind drifted to thoughts of her parents. Thoughts of her past. A memory of last week, when Heechul had smiled at her and she’d turned away. Visions of a future she should want, yet did not.
She took a careful breath. “I have no doubt what my brother has done. What my ignorance has allowed to happen. But beneath Chun’s petty thievery lies his care for our family. Please forgive him.”
Neither the flowers nor the trees took any notice of her.
Charan thought about forgiveness. Her father had once said it was an act meant to unburden oneself. She’d failed to understand him then, and still she did not quite grasp his meaning.
The birds twittered through the trees above. A brush of air stirred the purple and mauve petals before her. “I know it is difficult to grant forgiveness. My brother has not yet granted me forgiveness for what happened when we were children, and he is angry that I wish to leave him. I have not unburdened myself either. But perhaps I can try. I forgive Chun for what he did today, and I hope he will forgive me in time.” She inhaled slowly. “And I ask you to forgive him as well.”
But neither the flowers nor the trees took any notice of her.
Charan swallowed. The morning swelled into noon.
She sat studying the mugunghwa flowers, determined not to leave the forest without her younger brother.
“When Chun lied, I would ignore it. Sometimes I would tell my mother and father I was the one who had done wrong,” she said. “And when he made mistakes, we all pretended he had not. But it was not out of love. It was out of pity.” Charan recalled the rolled egg from the morning past. “Often I hid my successes so they would not burden him.” Her thoughts cleared, just as a ray of sunshine cut through the trees. “I know this is not my fault. It is not my responsibility to
make amends for my brother. It is Chun’s fault he has become a thief. But please let him have the chance to make it right. Give him the chance to become a great man.”
She placed her forehead against the magic club as she bowed low to the ground, her palms on either side of her head.
A bright light flashed to her left.
Beside her hand lay a single shining pebble. As dark as the thick hair she and her brother shared. As dark as their black-mirror eyes.
Charan raised the club into the air.
As the leaves fall
As the sky turns to night
Summon the magic
To turn nothing
Into all
The Goblin Treasure
A Korean Fairy Tale
When I was a child, my mother would often read Korean fairy tales to me from a collection of bright green hardcover books that had been given to us by a family friend. My favorites were ones that involved talking animals and the complicated relationships between siblings. “The Goblin Treasure” has been a favorite of mine because I love the way its two brothers—one a good soul and one a troubled soul—disappear into a world of magic beneath our feet. After they are faced with the chance to gain riches beyond their wildest imaginings, the two brothers’ respective treatment of money and each other often gave me pause, even as a child. The idea that good and evil could exist in the same person is intriguing to me even more now.
When Ellen Oh approached me to write a story inspired by the fables of my youth, I knew I wanted to write a tale of a brother and a sister. It was also of utmost importance to me to turn a few fairy-tale tropes on their heads in doing so, and it was such a joy to bring to life a world of fairy-tale Korea.
—Renée Ahdieh
Spear Carrier
Rahul Kanakia
During my first day I was in shock. A many-armed demon-thing brought me to this huge field that was full of millions of people and alien creatures and tents and structures. The only normal things around me were the mountains in the distance. The demon took me to a little trench and said, “Hey dude, you’re just in time. This is the last day of enrollments. The battle starts tomorrow.”
Those were the last English words I heard that day.
A brown-skinned guy in bronze armor came up and corralled me and the other new arrivals—few of us spoke the same language, and most weren’t even human beings, as I’d define the term—to show us how to use our new equipment. Then he formed us into rough lines and taught us the rudiments of what I guess was a military formation: when to lower our spears and when to raise them, mostly.
Afterward he passed out jugs of some kind of liquor: moonshine, pretty much. Everybody started quaffing, and the whole place disintegrated into a nightmare of drunkenness. The—er—the things next to me tried to talk to me by making little drawings, but I shied away. Which sounds cowardly I know, but you would’ve too if you could’ve seen them. They were twice my height and had the body of a man and the head of a lion.
I didn’t drink. I didn’t speak. I went circling around, looking for somebody, anybody, who could tell me who we were gonna fight and why. I guess a part of me figured that the strange man—the one who’d appeared to me in my car and brought me here—had to be around somewhere. When I’d agreed to his offer, it was because I had thought I’d be a hero. But a hero wouldn’t be so lonely and so afraid. A hero wouldn’t shout for help, and then, hearing only silence, go back to his trench and cry.
When the sun rose, a hand shoved me over, and I stood, groggily. The man from last night—our sergeant? drillmaster?—mimed for us to get rid of all the random crap we’d come with and put on our armor over the bodysuits they’d given us. I collected all my things: jeans, my T-shirt, notebooks, phone, pens, watch, and class ring. When everything was in a pile, I weighed it all down with a rock and tried to memorize the pattern of the pits and ruts around me, but I think I knew I’d never recover any of it.
Our bodysuits were incredibly warm, and you could piss and shit inside them with no problems. The suits were from somewhere farther in the future than I’m from. Or maybe some other world; I still wasn’t too sure about the cosmological underpinnings of this place, and nobody was eager to explain.
The suits were skintight, and I was a little embarrassed—I’m not in the best shape. Maybe I’ve got a little extra around the middle. And there were plenty of human girls around who, er, well—the suits showed off a lot. . . .
Armored in the stuff they’d given me—a white skirt-thing, a bronze breastplate, and a long spear with a wicked point—I stood in line with everybody else.
Though not everybody here was human, I also didn’t think they were aliens. They were too humanoid: They had heads and mouths, and we all ate the same food, whereas if we were actually from different planets, our biologies would’ve been too radically different to allow for that. (On the other hand, what do I know? Maybe it was all magic.) Sometimes they were weird, chimerical combinations of Earth animals. A few were human, except they had the heads of tigers. Others were tiny as ants, and had as many legs, and the only way you’d know they were people was by looking at the little spears they carried with them. Huge snakes lay still, caked in mud, almost invisible unless they moved. The snakes talked, but of course I couldn’t understand them.
Our sergeant did his best to shove us into some kind of order.
The day before yesterday I’d been at school, and now I was in this immense valley, tucked between two sets of mountains, and something electric and awesome was taking place. And maybe it didn’t matter that I was alone, because I was experiencing something so new. Except . . . this place made me feel so small.
We were shivering, waiting. A scream went up. Two tigers embraced, farther up the rise. I heard grunts, and several elephants came into view. The army had woken up. And all around me camps of people were chatting and arguing and fighting. Some people had come with their families. Or maybe with their friends. The other possibility—perhaps they had made friends here?—was something I didn’t like to think about, because it meant maybe I was wrong to be so terribly lonely.
Most weren’t sleeping rough like me. I was surrounded by huge tents. Some were familiar: canvas stretched over aluminum poles, held together by cords staked into the ground. Others weren’t. Furs and skins draped over wooden poles: a yurt, right? Teepees and covered wagons. And other things: a network of tiny tubes and wires that ran along the ground; a huge glass structure full of blooming vines and flowers; a starship with wicked rocket engines that were always hot. The night had been full of fires and music and shouts, but I’d covered my ears and eyes with my shirt and hidden from all of it.
Cold clouds of visible air blew out of my nose and mouth. I was shivering. My toes were wet with muck. I’d slept all night in mud, but my bodysuit had shielded me from the damp. Now I was exposed. Next to me, a crab thing turned its googly eyes on me. This creature was enormous. It was about as tall as a human being, but many times as wide, and I could easily have fit a tent or a picnic table on its back.
“Hey,” I said.
We both looked away at the same time. Its pale fleshy body reddened. The creature said, “Hello.”
“What?” I said. “You speak . . . English?”
“It’s a language I have access to.”
Please believe I don’t have the words to convey how goofy this thing looked. Its eyes were as huge and flat as the ones on a teddy bear, and the pupils bopped around inside them just like, well, like googly eyes.
“Okay, wow,” I said. “Wow. This is . . . wow.”
“You’re American?” the creature said. “Perhaps you can tell me . . . I wasn’t given that much information about why to come here.”
“That’s just . . . That’s fantastic,” I said.
The crab’s voice was so human. A baritone, cultured voice that came from a slit somewhere in his stomach. I’ll spare you the long line of questions about where he (it? they? the voice was male) came from and how he’
d gotten here. It turns out that they’d engineered him, somewhere in the American South, to live and work in the toxic delta of some river. He was from the future, my future, obviously. And he wasn’t some combat-soldier supermutant type of deal. He was a farmer: his tiny little legs were to pick their way through the rice paddies without hurting anything, and his claws were designed to bend and twist complex irrigation works.
He’d gotten out. Gone to college. The whole bootstraps story. And then a guy had appeared to him with an offer.
“Yeah,” I said. “That happened to me too.”
“I took it,” the crab said. “But now . . . I don’t know.”
He gestured over my shoulder toward the enemy army. I didn’t like to look in that direction. Strange things were brewing over there, within the mists: flying chariots, massive beasts, and showers of light. We had the same things on our side, I hoped, but I wasn’t sure that’d help me much during the battle.
The crab had a spear, too. Did I mention that? The spear lay against his side as we spoke, and now he picked it up. His claws had crushed little grooves into the metal handle. He held out the spear, point forward, then tucked the end behind a leg. Then he tried to march forward (rather than side to side), putting one leg carefully in front of the other. The movement was so ungainly and slow.
“This is what they taught me,” the crab said. “This is not good. This is not a good use of my body.”
“Yeah . . . ,” I said. “Stabbing is gonna be a little hard.”
“I’ll die here. They’ve brought me here to die.”
Two days before, I’d been sitting in my car, parked at a vista point up on Skyline Boulevard: a place where kids from my school sometimes came after dark to drink. I was there with a bottle of vodka and a bag of pretzels, even though I knew if they showed up, I’d only stare in silence. I had no friends, and sometimes wasn’t that sure if I even wanted one. My thoughts were so expansive, and I knew, from experience, that boiling them down into words made them soft and weak.
Night hadn’t yet fallen, but the sun was low over the bay. A haze enveloped San Francisco, out on the far side of the water, and closer by, the golden sunlight fell on the rows of houses that ran across the hillside.
