My personal goal is to draw and paint all my life. Hopefully my last painting before I die will be a relatively good painting because I spent my lifetime learning and improving my skills. The lifelong challenge for me, which keeps me so excited about art, is simple: Give one hundred percent and make the next painting a good one and better than the last.
Everything You Have Seen
written by
Alisa Alering
illustrated by
KARSEN SLATER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alisa Alering was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, where she ran around barefoot and talked to trees. When not riding her pony, she could be found on the floor of her grandparents’ log cabin, rereading The Green Fairy Book.
On trips to town for more horse feed, she was introduced to the glories of the public library. She brought her books home and gobbled them greedily. Luckily, in her family, reading at the dinner table was not only permitted but encouraged. She also mastered the skill of reading on horseback during long trail rides.
After working as a llama handler, barista, lab rat, and life model, her fond memories of the library caused her to give up her job in public television and move to Indiana to study the intricate art of library science. She became a librarian.
Her Writers of the Future win is her first professional sale, but she has since sold two more stories, one to Flash Fiction Online, and another to Clockwork Phoenix IV. She contributes to the “Writer’s Room” column in Waylines magazine.
Follow her on Twitter @alering.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Karsen Slater has been fascinated by the supernatural since she was a child. Drawing inspiration from stories of aliens and AIs, dragons and demons, and everyday kids with extraordinary powers, she began answering the call to create her own magical monsters through art. Gradually, her passion for the nonhuman world expanded to a love for worldbuilding, and throughout her youth she both wrote and illustrated her own stories.
Karsen grew up in Glendora, California. She took her first art class in high school and soon enrolled in a program for young artists called Ryman Arts. From there she attended Laguna College of Art & Design for a degree in illustration and animation, where she gained a strong foundation in drawing and painting before learning skills in character design and concept art. She still enjoys drawing creatures and looks forward to developing her ideas into more of her own stories in the future.
Her website is karsenslater.blogspot.com.
Everything You Have Seen
I went outside to get away from Chung-hee.
The snow in the courtyard was coming down in thick flakes, making that special kind of silence like the whole world has been wrapped in a cotton bojagi cloth and put away for the night. I thought at first that the guns had stopped. Then a flash lit the sky over our empty chicken coop. The boom traveled through the snowy ground, up my legs and spine and into my skull.
Before the war, Chung-hee and I were friends. My brother is two years older than me, but he’d never treated me like an insignificant little sister. He’d carried me home from school on the handles of his bicycle, weaving in between the traffic and the electric poles. In the summers, we roamed the hills beyond the city, picking mushrooms and hunting crayfish in the stream that splashed out of the mountains beyond the Parks’ farm.
The American soldiers had retreated to a position in the hills east of town, digging into the forest between the mountains and the sea. Their distant guns picked up speed. The shelling was worse at night. Mother would get angry with me for being outside. I turned back toward the house, when I heard a shuffling noise from inside the chicken coop, like a bird shifting from foot to foot. The chickens had flown off when the artillery began, and four weeks later they still refused to rest in their coop. Now they took their chances in the trees, picked off every night by quick-climbing weasels and rats.
I moved toward the coop, imagining how good chicken would taste, chicken soup with garlic and chilies, chicken with rice. I paused before the door of the dark shed. I didn’t want to scare the chicken, if one had returned. My belly growled out loud, and the bird shot out into the night sky, its heavy body skimming so close to my head that its flapping wings lifted my hair. I jumped back, stumbling over clods of frozen mud. That bird had been too fierce and fast for a chicken, and it had smelled dark and bloody, like old meat.
Worse, something was still inside the shed. I could hear it moving around. It knocked into the walls, and a loose board clattered as it fell.
I stood still, my eyes fixed on the shed’s dark doorway. How many were there? I wondered.
A boy walked out of the shed.
He was a little taller than me, and skinny. I thought he must be about eleven years old, the same as me. A bomb burst overhead, lighting up the courtyard, and I saw hair the color of red-bean porridge. He had pale skin and a narrow face. He was waegukin, just like the soldiers.
The boy stepped toward me. He wore a loose shirt and pants made of matching dark cloth with a light-colored print. His breath steamed in the cold air. Snowflakes melted where they landed on his bare head. “Who—” he said, then stopped. He looked around as if the sound of his own voice had surprised him. I thought he might be a gwishin, but ghosts aren’t supposed to have any legs. I could see the shape of the boy’s legs through his thin trousers, right down to his bare toes curled in the snow.
He had to be real, but I couldn’t imagine what he was doing here.
“How did you get in the chicken coop?” I asked.
He said something, but I didn’t understand. He talked louder, and I cut my hand across my neck to tell him to be quiet. The boy balled his hands into fists in front of him. I thought he was going to hit me. His face scrunched up, and his upper lip thrust over the lower one like that of a bad-tempered turtle. Frustrated, he opened and closed his hands, like Mother pulling dough to make knife-cut noodles.
Dim starlight reflected off the snow, bright enough that I could see something beginning to grow in the space between his hands. He stared at me, eyes furious and urgent as his hands worked, trying to communicate. The air between his palms darkened, whirled into a heavy smudge that grew and rebounded as it bounced between his palms. The sphere of thickened air flashed with one color after another, as if he were trying them on, like a ball rolling through paint.
ILLUSTRATION BY KARSEN SLATER
I stepped back, holding my hand over my mouth. The boy looked down. He seemed just as surprised as I was. The little ball of darkened air hung between his hands as if it were suspended from a string. I lifted my arm. The floating thing looked solid. I tried to touch it.
Just as my finger reached the dough, Mother shouted my name. She stood in the doorway of the house with my baby brother in her arms, calling me to come in. I had to go. I looked back at the boy’s hands just in time to see the colored shape collapse into itself, like a house falling down.
The next morning, I helped Mother with the laundry. She had the radio on and, while I broke up boards to make firewood, we heard the grave schoolteacher voice saying that more Chinese troops had crossed the border from the north, and the Americans were retreating down the coast to Wonsan, where their ships waited to take them to safety. I wondered who would take us to safety. The fighting outside our city might stop, but the advancing Chinese troops were just as dangerous.
I held the baby, tickling his angry face while Mother beat the cloth with a paddle. We hung the clothes on the southern side of the house and I carried the wash water around back. A skinny black hen sat atop the broken tiles of the outhouse, poking her beak into her feathers. I lun
ged for her, but she flapped up into a tree with a squawk. Her feathers scattered on the ground where the morning sun was melting last night’s snow.
I looked around the courtyard, but there was no sign of Chung-hee. Good. I stuck my head in the door of the chicken coop and called softly. For a moment, I thought I must have imagined the waegukin boy, but as I stood, my eyes adjusted. In the darkest corner, the boy had dug a nest in the musty straw and burrowed down as deep as he could. Close up, I saw that his blue shirt and pants were patterned with white-sailed boats.
I didn’t know what he was doing here, but looking down at his bony arms and pale skin, tinged purple from the cold, I could see that he wasn’t dangerous. I felt bad for him. He had to be scared to be alone in a place that was so strange, where he couldn’t talk to anyone, and no one looked like him. What if Chung-hee found him hiding here?
I crouched beside him, and he bolted awake. I laid my hand on his arm to let him know it was okay. I told him my name, Min-hee, and pointed to my chest. I asked his name, but when I said it back wrong, he pushed his mouth into that funny pout. I decided I would call him Turtle. Even though I could still see his legs, I pinched him to make sure he was really alive. He yelled and hit my hand away. I shushed him and moved my hands as if I were stretching noodle dough, telling him to speak that way.
Just like last night, the air thickened and Turtle shaped it between his palms. His fingers pulled the air, kneading the darkness until it was smooth and pliable, stretching and working until it made a picture. The first images were wobbly, but the more he worked the better they got. He showed me a long brown field full of grain, a funny yellow house with a pointed roof, a raised mattress with a blue blanket, a black and white dog, a red brick building with the American flag, pictures of himself going to school, carrying books.
When he finished, the last image hung in the air, alive but undisturbed, like a sleeping mouse in its nest. Then he put his hands together as if he were clapping. The picture, the thing that slept, collapsed in on itself and was gone.
I watched carefully, copying the way he’d worked his fingers. I wanted to talk to him, too. My best friend, Hye-su, had gone away at the start of the war, and I felt lonely. I wanted to show him my life, have him understand me. But it didn’t work for me.
In the middle of the day I sneaked back into the house for food. I put a handful of millet in a bowl with a few frostbitten leaves of cabbage, then poured hot water over it all, and took it out to the boy. He drank, but made an awful face as his teeth squeaked on the last limp cabbage leaf. I couldn’t believe it. I had stolen from my own family, and he didn’t feel grateful.
I kicked straw over him and yelled, “What do you think you will eat instead?”
Maybe he couldn’t understand my words, but he knew what I meant. He got angry right back, shoved out that turtle lip of his and worked his hands, showing me all kinds of things: roast chickens with crackling skin, steaming bowls of porridge, plates heaped with hot, boiled corn.
My stomach growled, and I couldn’t help myself. I reached between his hands and grabbed an ear of yellow corn. It came away in my grasp, hot and dripping with juice. I was so astonished I dropped it in the dirt of the shed. The smell filled my head—so delicious, so savory—until I felt dizzy. I snatched the corn up from the dirt, and without bothering to wipe it off, bit into the bursting kernels. The boy watched, his sky eyes wide. It crunched between my teeth, and juice ran down my chin. I passed it to the boy, and he bit into it with a groan.
His hands flew with fury, whirling up food as fast as he could think it: round dumplings swimming in gravy, a pan of cooked berries wrapped in a flaky crust, meat patties and puffy circles of dough covered in sugar. I picked out each dish as it appeared and set it aside until Turtle had made everything he wanted, then we dove in and ate and ate and ate. Some tastes were strange to me, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten so much food. I ate until I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
After that, I lay back in the straw, and I didn’t care that I couldn’t make my own stories. Turtle told me about his family. He showed me a woman with dark-gold hair, the color of beech leaves in winter. She wore a flowered apron and had pink cheeks. She wasn’t very pretty, but she smiled nicely, very happy. I thought she must be his mother.
I asked about his father. I cleared away the straw, and with my finger drew a picture of a man in the loose dust of the chicken shed. He tried to show me, but the picture wouldn’t come. I could see something flickering there between his hands, thickening like a mist, but it wouldn’t form. I shrugged, and smiled to tell him it was okay.
I spent the rest of the day with Turtle. The coop sheltered us from the biting wind, and the sun shone between its loose slats. We burrowed down into the straw, watching the pictures Turtle made and eating snacks he conjured. This was the happiest day I had spent since Father went away. Turtle acted strange, but he was good company.
Later that night, when Chung-hee snatched food out of my bowl as he did every night, I didn’t even mind. At last, I stretched out my bedroll on the warm floor and went to sleep happy, my stomach full.
But in the middle of the night I woke, stomach screaming with hunger. It felt as if an angry beast were in my stomach, trying to claw its way out. While I slept, all the boy’s food had turned to nothing. I turned over on my blankets, trying to ignore the pains. In the black night outside, guns started up again, louder and closer than ever before.
The next morning, smoke billowed up into the sky above the radio tower on the west side of town. Mother was angry because Chung-hee had disappeared again. Little brother wailed, beating his thin arms against Mother’s chest. Mother opened a tin she had hidden under a loose board and took out a small hairclip with a bright stone at the top. She told me, “Take this to Mr. Lee and trade it for medicine for the baby.”
The smoke had grown thicker as I crept closer to the center of town. I covered my mouth, breathing through my fingers. The doors of buildings stood open, their windows blown out, and the glass scattered in the street. The walls of the Yuwon sock factory had collapsed, but the knitting machines were lined up inside, still waiting for girls in their aprons to come stand behind them.
When I reached Mr. Lee’s, the windows of the shop had been smashed. Inside, the shelves were empty and broken. I banged on the shutters, trying to wake him. An old woman came by, collecting broken bricks in a bucket. She said, “The Lees were robbed last night. At dawn they took the last of their stock and fled.”
“Where?”
“South, I think. Mrs. Lee has family there,” she said. She picked up another brick and walked on.
I retraced my steps. A jeep roared through the street, soldiers standing in the backseat. I jumped into the ditch, pressing myself against the crumpled walls, hoping I wouldn’t be seen. I held onto Mother’s hairclip so tightly that the stone hurt my hand. I waited until the motor died away and was just about to climb back onto the road when a girl crossed the street in front of me, running fast, her long braids bouncing against her back.
She ran toward the ruined sock factory, tears streaming down her frightened face. After her came a pack of boys, their heavy shoes echoing on the empty street. The boy in the lead was Dong-sun, the butcher’s son.
I slid back down into the ditch. The rest of the boys, wearing castoff soldier’s clothing, shouted and shoved each other as they ran, chasing after the girl as if she were a dog. Chung-hee trotted in the middle of the pack, the backs of his bare ears showing red in the cold. They herded the girl into the alley. Dong-sun grabbed her braid, yanking her to a stop. She st
umbled in the dirt, and the boys closed in around her.
I knew then that Chung-hee had left us. He had broken off from the world where Mother and I still lived as a family. The things we did here in this world, the rules we followed, meant nothing to Chung-hee. He and the other boys had created their own world out of the bombs falling, the bullets exploding, the tanks rolling. They had found and filled a new space.
When I returned, Mother worked in the storehouse, scooping out the last of the cooking oil. I gave her the hairclip and told her that the Lees had closed their shop and moved away. I didn’t tell her the rest. The radio was on again, the serious voice reading out the missing-persons messages. Mother’s face fell. We had received only one letter from Father since he joined the army, and that had been six months ago. I sometimes thought Mother was like the chickens—frightened by the guns, but afraid to move too far from the place she knew. After all, if we left, how would Father know where to find us?
I played with little brother, letting him grab my hair and pull it with his fists. It was late afternoon before I could get back to the chicken coop.
Turtle was ill. His face was pink, full of hot blood. He wouldn’t talk to me, only lay there moaning.
I thought our food must not have been good for him. I was used to the weevils and the old stale taste of the cabbage. His body must not have liked it. He sweated, even as his breath made clouds of steam in the cold. I heaped straw around him. He twisted in his makeshift bed, throwing off the straw, pieces clinging in his hair. He opened his hands, and the pictures flowed in a jumble. People, animals, buildings, were all mixed up—a dog with a wagon wheel for hind legs, a flower growing out of a kettle.
I brought him another blanket, an old one that used to be Chung-hee’s. I worried that Turtle would die. I pushed him back on the ground, and tucked the blanket around him. Still he shook and moaned. He cried out in his strange voice and I worried that someone would hear. I slid under the blanket beside him, and pretended that he was Chung-hee, back when we were friends. Chung-hee before the war when Father was with us and the radio played songs that Mother sang to as she sewed and we played games and thought alike and loved each other.
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