by Billie Pritchett

”A series of recurring dreams takes place in my childhood home, sometimes involving my wife and our daughter, and sometimes transplanting all of us, my wife and daughter included, to the place where we live now. Only we do not have a daughter.”

In this dream, my wife Rumi is standing with our daughter Hannah on the patio at the back of my childhood home in Kentucky. From the back as in the front, the home looks like a doublewide trailer. But this is not so terrible in the dream, because the exterior affects a positive atmosphere, the vinyl siding whitewashed, though never in real life, never as brilliant. On this late afternoon, the weather is good, there’s a cool breeze, and despite the dipping sun, the sky is blue, and light breaks through the clouds as in all those glorious cards of Christ’s ascension, tucked away in the backs of pews, picked up by children at funerals.

Hannah pats Rumi’s arm and asks if she can swim again. Rumi says “Sure,” gets in with her, and the two of them splash and play. Hannah closes her eyes and spits out water and cackles. A silent moment follows. Hannah and Rumi glance toward the road. The pool is above ground, and the road is visible from here. Cars pass. The powerlines hum. Rumi picks up Hannah and walks with her, moving slowly, the current strong against their bodies. Hannah looks into Rumi’s eyes, touches her eyelids. “Stop touching my face,” Rumi says.

“Mom, am I Korean, too?” Hannah asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Dad isn’t Korean. How am I?”

“Because I’m Korean.”

“I’m a Kentuckian,” Hannah says.

“Where did you hear something like that?”

“From my teacher. She said we’re all Kentuckians.”

“Noooo,” Rumi says. “You’re a Masan girl. That’s where I’m from. And my parents. Our ancestors were yangban. Do you know? Nobility. That’s our family myth, anyway.”

“And Dad?”

“His ancestors? European. From Ireland and Wales. They were poor, I think.”

“Did you grow up in a palace, Mom?”

Rumi laughs. “Not at all. One of my grandmothers has farmland, but she grew up very poor during the Korean war, and her home is modest. There’s an outhouse.”

“Sounds nice.”

No matter what my wife has said since to the contrary, our daughter imagines Masan a magical place. This started when Rumi told her about the octopuses. She said there were markets where you could buy a live octopus from a tank outside a restaurant, and someone would scoop it out with a net and bring it inside the restaurant, where you could eat it, still alive. “There’s nothing like that in Kentucky,” Hannah said to me.

“But what about fishing?” I said. “Reeling in a fish isn’t so different than scooping up an octopus.”

“It’s not the same,” Hannah said. “There aren’t any octopuses in Kentucky Lake. And we don’t eat our fishes alive.”

“We might if they’d live long enough out of water,” I said.

“Dad,” she said to me crossly, “don’t joke that way.”

Hannah’s hair is wet and thick, flooded with pool water. Rumi pushes it back from her forehead and pretends to whisper, though the whisper is loud, and both their faces are two feet apart. “Did you know you speak Korean with me?” she asks.

“Do I?” Hannah fake-whispers back.

“You’re a beautiful fool,” Rumi says, and presses her head against the softness of Hannah’s face. Then Rumi and Hannah get out of the pool and dry off, and Rumi puts her sun hat on Hannah’s head and guides her through the patio door and on into the kitchen. “Take a shower and put on some clean clothes,” Rumi says. “Dad should be home soon.”

Before heading to her room, Hannah turns and says what she has said before, this sentence becoming something of a refrain: “I’m worried about Dad.”

“Dad is sad and maybe needs time to be sad,” Rumi told her recently. “Depression is what it’s called. It appears sometimes when adults feel overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s because of responsibilities. Or sometimes people are born with it. I don’t know which is the case with your father. Maybe both. Don’t tell him I told you.”

Children understand when adults have problems. When they’re born, they enter a world replete with baked goods and porcelain, precious objects they have not bought, not made, not arranged, but which can be tipped over with a heavy foot or hand.

My wife has said daughters are closer to their mothers than daughters to fathers. This isn’t a competition, and certainly what Rumi said is true with her and her mother, but from what I know of Hannah, I want to believe she is as much me as she is my wife. She does Tae Kwon Do not because it’s a Korean sport but because I did it when I was five. Of course, she says since she’s Korean, she’ll succeed where I failed. I was never very good at any sport, I told her. She said don’t worry, she would be good enough for all three of us.

One day, she said she wanted to learn about Murray, because this is where I grew up. Oh, I see, I said. She said isn’t it interesting that she’s growing up in such a small town.

“Twenty-thousand people isn’t so small. And we have our own university,” I said. “Besides, where else might you have grown up?”

“Anywhere else,” she said with a shrug. Then she said, “Alexander Graham Bell didn’t really invent the telephone. It was a man from Murray. His name was Nathan Stubblefield and he sold watermelons and he was a genius.”

“I heard the same thing when I was in school,” I told her.

Even in the shower, Hannah hears the living room door open. The house is so small a person can hear the front door open from one side to the other. She turns off the water, dries, dashes to her bedroom (my childhood room), gets dressed, and darts into the hallway. Her plan: to sneak up on my wife and me in the living room now that she knows I’m home. She peeks around the corner of the hallway.

More than hugging, I am holding on to my wife, my head over Rumi’s shoulder, eyes closed.

“What took you so long?” she asks.

“I just went driving,” I say.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

For Hannah, our conversations have become secrets from which she’s excluded. One night, as Rumi and I lay in bed, I shared memories of my father. Nothing good. I regret I shared nothing good. I regret I only have bad memories. “At least three times,” I said, “in the living room, our living room, I saw my father sit in front of the TV entertainment center, wearing a white sleep shirt and his underpants as he turned a rifle on himself. One in a series of mock suicides. I recall one scene like this. I was sitting on the couch where my father would sleep every night. My mother was laid back in the recliner, along the wall, farthest from my father, who had finished cleaning his rifle with his special oils, and then, either provoked by something flip that I or my mother said, or perhaps it was just something that was on his mind, he loaded the barrel, lifted it, put it in his mouth, and maneuvered his toe toward the trigger. My mother declined her chair, I hopped up from the couch, and we both ran to his side to plead with him to stop.

“This was my father’s way of letting us know he could take his life at any moment if we didn’t love him enough.

“Once, he’d gone outside and fired his rifle in the air. My mother and I thought he had killed himself. We ran out onto the patio, thinking we would find his body flat on the slab. But outside, he was only standing there looking at us. My mother beat at his chest. The situation seemed dangerous with the rifle still in his hands, but my father looked more scared of my mother than she of him as he backed away from her toward the pool.

“‘It was an accident,’ he kept repeating. ‘I didn’t mean it.’”

“My father was the kind of person who would have been unhappy wherever he was,” I said at last. “I have him in me. I hope I’m not the same way.”

I wouldn’t have shared any of this had I known Hannah was lying prone at the foot of our open bedroom door, listening in on our conversation. When I noticed the tilt of her head from the floor, I acted as though I didn’t notice. Inwardly, I was angry, not at her but at myself for not keeping our door closed. A family habit. When I was a child, my parents had always kept their bedroom door open, probably at my mother’s insistence, in case I called out for help.

Hannah sees me see her lying in the hallway as I hold Rumi. Her face begins to flush. Pulling up her shirt by its ringed collar, she covers her eyes. Only her bangs are exposed.

“Say, what are you doing there?” I say in singsong, hoping to show Hannah no harm has been done.

“Don’t talk to me,” she says. “I’m invisible. I’m a ghost.”

“If you’re a ghost, how come I can see you?”

“Because I want you to,” she says, pulling down her collar.

The irony is I cannot see her well. I must have left my glasses in the car. But I want to see the child my wife and I have created. I go to her, bend down, pick her up, my left arm a cradle. “You’re getting too heavy for this,” I say.

“Then put me down.”

It’s impossible in the dream without my glasses on to look into her eyes and see my reflection there, yet somehow I know, maybe because it is a dream I just know, I look very much like my own father with his long nose and squinty, mischievous eyes, and somehow I know Hannah can intuit this, this link between me and my father. She strokes my whiskers, kisses my nose. I don’t cry, but I could, so I put her down.

Rumi points toward the dining table overlooking the patio and tells both Hannah and me to sit down. From the stove, Rumi removes the premade dinner plates she has wrapped with tinfoil, then unwraps them and sets the table. As she puts the plate in front of me, I pat her leg. She’s wearing the dress full of sunflowers. “What have you got on there?” I ask.

“Your favorite. I’m like a flower garden,” she says, with a hint of adult connotation, lifting the skirt helm slightly with a curtsy.

Over dinner, Rumi mentions that Hannah earlier asked if she was Korean.

“What did you tell her?” I ask.

“Absolutely she is,” Rumi says.

“That’s right,” I say. “She’s also a Kentuckian.”

Rumi calls me stupid in Korean.

“Mom, you know how I said there’s magic in Korea?” Hannah says.

“Mm-hmm,” Rumi says.

“I think there’s magic here in Murray, too.”

“You’re right,” I say.

Clicking her teeth three times, my wife says, “What is magic, anyway? What does it mean to call something magic?”

Hannah raises her hand. “I know a meaning. My name means unification in Korean.”

“That’s right,” I say.

Our girl is hyper. “How did Nathan Stubblefield make a telephone?” she asks.

“Nobody knows,” I say. Though of course this is foolish to say, of course someone knows, there are plenty of people who have researched the truth about him, but the fact is I don’t know. There are some things a person doesn’t let on about to five-year-olds because they might never stop asking questions.

Even though Rumi looks a little annoyed at my response to Hannah, I try to lighten the mood by humming “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight.” But Rumi doesn’t like the song. I understand. Maybe I don’t like the song much either. She clicks her tongue three times.

In real life, we don’t have a Hannah, but maybe one day we will. Maybe this is her earliest incarnation, her avatar in that Land of Nod. Or perhaps her soul exists in heaven and awaits an earthbound body, in which she can forget her perfection, only to discover it again in time, as learning lets us do. Regardless of my earlier protests, Hannah is more a composite of Rumi than of me. One need only note her sweetness, her playfulness, her interest in my hometown, an interest my wife shares, a place we may visit someday, my old Kentucky home. We may visit but not now. There’s no urgency. We are here in Masan because we need to be. I am here because I need to be. It was love that brought me to her.

Isn’t that what your mother said, sweetheart? Didn’t she say we must have been friends in another life, that in another life I must have been Korean? Remember what she said? I must have been searching for you a long time before I ended up here with you, in this bayside city, in a three-room apartment we call home.

In the dream, we have finished eating and move to the door, not to the door of my childhood home but of our home here. Here is me trying to set the world right-side up. See, the birthday cake has fallen, a little icing has smeared across the tile, but nothing is ruined. Rumi hands me my glasses, which I had left on the sink when I rinsed my face. There’s a small space in front of the door where all three of us stand and try to locate our KF94 masks. They’re on the top shelf of the shoe cabinet. Then we try to locate the right pair of shoes, and struggle to put them on without any inadvertent heel kicks to one another’s shins. I depress the electronic door lock. It jingles. We step out into the hallway. The fluorescents above paint our skin an unhealthy orange, and there’s a draft about the hallway like a wind tunnel, it sends shivers up and down us, despite the summer season. Instead of the elevator, we take the stairs, spiraling down to the first floor, seven flights, our echoes following. At the mouth of our apartment building, where mortar meets lot, swarming gnats form an aureole around the lights high atop the utility poles. The powerlines hum. Helmeted drivers zip by on motorbikes, delivering food during this, the last of the pandemic. The blasts from their exhaust interrupt the interstitials of calmness our minds try to occupy. This must be fine. The noise is part of it. I pick up Hannah. She’s heavy in my left arm. I sling my other arm over my wife’s shoulder. We go for a walk in the neighborhood.

A series of recurring dreams takes place in my childhood home, sometimes involving my wife and our daughter, and sometimes transplanting all of us, my wife and daughter included, to the place where we live now. Only we do not have a daughter. Yet through the dream, I can sometimes glimpse the world from our daughter's point of view, and it is at these moments I see the father figure as both myself and my own father, about whose mental health issues I have only recently come to sympathize and about which I have only recently tried to understand. This essay is my attempt to come to terms with the inscrutable emotional logic of this series of dreams, turning accident into ornament, as Nabokov called it, through the speculative essay.

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Billie Pritchett is an assistant professor of English at Kyungnam University in Masan, Korea. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. His recent work appears in Concho River Review, Delmarva Review, and Pensive.