Bedevilled 2016 →

Bok-nam was no longer the bright-eyed girl who’d shown her how to crack sea urchins with a rock. Now, at 38, she looked 60. Her face was a landscape of bruises—yellow, purple, fresh. She lived with her husband, Jong-sik, and his three unmarried brothers in a compound of grey concrete. They treated her like a pack animal. She hauled seaweed, gutted fish, carried water up the cliff stairs while the men drank soju and played go-stop .

Hae-won had seen. Jong-sik had dragged Bok-nam by her hair across the yard for burning the fish stew. She’d heard the thud of a boot against ribs. bedevilled 2016

A corruption scandal at her bank had made her a pariah. She wasn't guilty, but guilt was a currency the mainland spent freely. The island’s elder, Grandfather Kim, had given her his dead wife’s cottage. “Two months,” he’d grunted, toothless gums brown from tobacco. “Then you go back to your noise.” Bok-nam was no longer the bright-eyed girl who’d

“You were going to leave again,” Bok-nam said. Not a question. A fact. “You were going to run to the mainland and forget my face by next week.” She lived with her husband, Jong-sik, and his

She turned and walked back to the compound, her spine crooked, her bare feet silent on the wet stones. That night, the wind changed. It brought the smell of iron and salt. Hae-won couldn’t sleep. She sat on her porch, listening. The men were drunk again. She heard Jong-sik’s laugh, then a sharp crack—a slap, or something worse. Then silence.

“Call the police,” Hae-won said, the automatic, useless answer of a city woman.