Early this morning, I fell back into dreaming after another fitful sleep, and there I saw you again as a small boy, before you ate fermented stingray and live octopus and learned to use your fists to prove your toughness, when your favorite things were a warm bath and getting a bowl of rice all to yourself. You were sitting up in the branches of the peach tree you always talked about, the one haunted by a beautiful woman who hated men, so tricked them into falling in love with her, then killed them in their sleep, and you were eating giant peach after giant peach, gold syrup dripping down the front of your school uniform. You waved to me from the tree and called out, Ya, ahn museopdah! and I shouted back, Good! There’s nothing to be scared of, Appa! and you threw your head back and laughed like a little demon. I could see the peach pits piled up on your lap like small flesh-colored skulls, and I did what I usually did in these dreams, which was watch you, love you, want you to be better than you ever could be, and so I smiled as you smiled, frowned as you frowned, and I forgave you for being terrible because of how cruel it must have been growing up poor, growing up a Korean man, which not for a million dollars I’d ever want to be, growing up next to a haunted peach tree that taught you all women were beautiful serpents who’d stab your heart out one day, so you’d better beat the light out of your wife and any daughters that came along the way.

I woke up and stirred, remembering you died three years ago. The serpent was inside your head all that time, and it finally stabbed at a thick vessel until it broke and poured out blood through your brain. I heard that when you fell to the floor at home, you called Yobo, come! and at the hospital with your oldest daughter, you said, Amy-ah, get me out of here! And when you stopped being able to speak, I imagined your eyes darting around the ceiling of your bleach-white room, screaming in your mind, Umma! Umma! Umma! And then when your eyes closed for good, I imagined your fingers pushing into the sheets beneath you like you used to push them into the bark of that old peach tree, waiting for some woman to either save you or to kill you, you no longer knew–and I wanted so badly for you to know I was coming to hold your hand, to let it press into me however hard or soft it wanted to go. You would always be my sad little demon who I loved, despite how you tricked me then, trick me still.