Mun Jung Fights God

Mun Jung Fights God


The Libertine is populated by low, single-floor boxes, with muddy lids and uneven windows. The doors are painted a matching dirt. These doors fit into compounds, twenty-six in each numbered rectangle, lettered A-Z. The Libertine does not allow cars to park in the back, does not limit pets, and does not require bags for said pets’ waste. One must own a key to a front door in order to surface from the back door, as the inner portion is completely closed, without free entry. The Libertine, thirty years old, is a convenant-controlled community, and does not have any fences surrounding the connected, aging town-homes.

Originally the proposal, put forth by designer Alexsandr Verylmia was denied - support beams were placed at the corner of each backyard, readying for the fences that would keep the small square of wooden porch and one foot by two yard lawn in check. However, an emergency midnight meeting called to recount the votes showed a mis-tally - the construction was called off, but the support beams remained.

Aleida Verylmia, Alexsandr’s grand-child, has rested her canvas against one of these four support beams. Living in unit 3813A, she paints to the left of her meditation circle. The candles surrounding the acrylic painted yin and yang are lit so long as she is home.

The tallest lilac candle burns out. Aleida bends down, gold coins lining her sari singing her every motion, humming.

Richard Connors, 3813C, two lawns to the left, bends down with her. He has no music with his motion. “What?”

Springing over the candle, legs bent like a praying mantis, she cricks her head at the blackened wick. Richard‘s stubby fingers push his glasses up his nose and fuss his bangs out of his hair.“What’s it, Aleida?”

Aleida’s bare toes rap against the porch, her hips waggle from side to side as she keeps her crouched balance. “My candle burned out.”

Richard frowns, and bends formal over the candle. The middle-aged accountant hums Aleida‘s hum. “I can see that.”

“Do you know what this means?” She hops again and Richard, under obligation, rolls up the cuffs to his tailored slacks and attempts to crouch as deeply as Aleida.

“I can imagine it’s pressing.” He makes a quarter of her depth.

Mun Pok Nae, 3813B, one lawn to the left, winds white wires together. She sits beneath rows and rows of crisscrossed 24/7 Christmas lights, suspended festive between 3813B’s beams. She continues to knot the wires into knuckles of security about her tiny garden, stationed at the corner of her family’s strip of lawn.

Richard’s daughter, Emily, is not listening to Mun Jung. Pok Nae’s older brother can’t stop telling the same story, and she is trying to see beyond his punk-band t-shirt to Richard and Aleida’s conversation across the way. “So my dad comes in and bangs down the door -”

“And Pok Nae is crying, and everything’s a mess,” Emily cuts in, rolling her well-painted eyes. She sits on her father’s wrought-iron patio table, her heels dug deep into the seat of one of the expensive chairs. Her dog, Biscuit, a pedigree border collie, lays underneath the table, head between his paws.

“Yeah, and it’s ‘cause that dog of yours Biscuit totally ate her flowers. Dad was so pissed, he made me get up, get dressed, and take her to the twenty-four hour Lowe’s…”

“‘Buy her the flowers, buy her the flowers now Jung.’”

“Did I already tell you this one?” Emily leans around her boyfriend to get a better look.

“Daddy’s at Aleida’s again.”

“Again? That’s the sixth time this week...”

The candle is a source of persistent analysis. “When the tallest of all is destroyed the little must run towards the fold.”

“You forget,” Richard sighs, “The candle’s only the tallest because Biscuit took the shortest.”

Jekyll and Hyde, two of Aleida’s three felinic children, come darting through the candles and between her legs. “And so it begins! The circle of destruction! You see? How insightful! You are more than just a number.” She taps his cheek with the tip of her fake fingernail.

“Destruction.” Richard straightens his back along with his slacks. “A tornado will come because of a candle?” He then stretches his arms over his head. His spine pops as he pulls to the right and left.

Aleida looks up through her lashes, pouting. She itches at his chin. “If be a tornado…” She shows a row of uneven, yellowing teeth. “…your daughter and her love are staring.”

Richard flushes, turns.

Pok Nae knots wires.

Jung and Emily pretend they weren’t looking.

“If only,” Pok Nae whispers, “The world were made in fences.” The flowers bend to her tongue, the wind rustling the petals, sending their freshly bought and planted messages back. She finishes filling the gap in her categorical defense and smiles.




“A tornado, Richard.” She twirls to imitate, every coin upon her lavender and iHydee sari chiming. A wind picks up, her sari jangles, the sound becoming a thunderous clank. The air hardens. The sound is plastic, slapped over their ears, blocking all else. Richard crumples first; his knee chips at the acrylic beneath him.

Emily bends over next, her heels squeaking against the aluminum lining, moaning. A small trickle of blood falls from Jung’s left ear. He stumbles towards the border of C and B, bewildered.

Richard squints up at Aleida. She hasn’t fallen, but even as she points stock-still at the sky, she’s grimacing. Richard uses her Sari to pull himself to his feet. Together, with the Libertine of 3813, they stare at a distant, brown object hurtling towards the earth.

“What the -” Richard whispers.

The wind stops dead.

The Christmas lights whine and moan underneath the sudden weight.of the wooden plank come falling from the sky. The green dollar wires holding them together finally rip free of their nails. The goldenrod and fuschia bulbs snap underneath the board’s heel, sending shards of fragmented holiday glass towards the seated Pok Nae.

She hurries to her feet. A second board spirals and stabs itself into the earth; another and then another still. The disoriented Jung finds himself pulled by the younger Mun into B’s lawn as a board splits her patient stare and his clouded vision from Emily’s well-painted, well-timed gasp.

Pok Nae’s caged garden is split in half.

Two lilies in B, two lilies in C . The wire knuckles prove useless; the hand of defense gone in a flash of wood. Pok Nae drops her brother’s arm and rushes towards the remaining two flowers. Emily’s fists pound on the fence. Jung stumbles into the patio chair. He rocks backwards to get a better look at the wood-tossed sky.

The snapping of the Mun’s glass sliding door is swallowed by the creaking-jingle. Hwang Suk is wearing a pair of fuzzy earmuffs. “What the Hell is going on here?” Still in the uniform of the record store he co-manages, the eldest Mun leaps out of the way of a shattering bulb.

Jung presses the flat of his palm against his ear. “I don’t know, Dad, it just - it got loud and -”

A lanky woman follows Hwang Suk, hair still done up in a tight net. One hand pressed hard against her ear, she takes the other to her son’s forehead. The boards fit effortlessly about the support beam.

“Ms. Mun,” Emily has pressed her body against the fence, her eye between the slats of wood. “All the way around!”

Hwang Suk and Mina turn in just enough time to catch the last of the planks fitting itself between the house and the rest of the sky-fence.

For a breath, stillness.

Pok Nae’s sobs break the new silence. Her flowers, half gone.

“A tornado.” Every candle has burned out. Aleida dusts their blackened wicks with the edges of her sari. She slams her sliding glass door shut, and the cross about the handle snaps free. Richard stumbles to the cross, palms it, traces the contours with his calloused thumb, then tucks it into his pocket. He peers towards the sky.

Then, Richard disappears into the crowd of the neighborhood for interviews, questions, impudent staring and businees-nosing, counting the steps it takes to return home.




“The front door.” Hwang Suk and Mina are seated in the dilapidated white chairs that make up their plastic patio set. Worn down from years of a teenage boy leaning back in them, the seated spend more time leaning forward trying to stay upright than actually sitting. Hwang Suk hunches over his peppermint tea; Mina over her coffee. “Who would’ve thought it existed?”

Mina adds more sugar. “Don’t be so complacent, Hwang Suk.” She removes the red stir stick and shakes it in the direction of her husband.

He’s sprinkled by the sweetened heat. “So cover me in coffee, that solves all problems.” She smiles coquettish behind the rim of her coffee mug.

New strings of Christmas lights web between the planks. The twilight burns behind the flickering red and green, leaving small haloes about each filament. Mina turns her attention to the strings of lights, woven into a netted rope now that the pointed boards cut across the horizon.“It’s nice.”

“Hmm?”

“The way the sky is cut. It makes the stars look like they’re playing hide and go seek.”

“Mm.” He sips his tea. “It’s nice not to hear Pok Nae crying because of that damn dog.” He winces suddenly.

“A headache?” Mina affectionately slips a hand to rub the base of his head. “Your medication is inside…”

Biscuit and Hyde square off just outside the fence’s jagged edges, running in brackets from C to A and A to C. “Biscuit!” Richard bats the dog’s nose with the wooden end of his paintbrush. Speckles of red and orange spot his white oxford, but not nearly as many that speckle Aleida’s pierced nose.

“Hyde is stronger than Biscuit. He’s the interior dark-side. He can take the dog.”

“I don’t want the dog taken, Aleida.” Richard paints the ends of Hyde’s whiskers with another flick. “You, stop provoking him!”

“Richard, don’t be human. Humans always assume the cats will stoop so low as to understand their oral tongues.”

The dark-side Hyde seconds his owner’s statement with a penetrating stare. Unnerved, Richard returns to the canvas. “The Muns. What do you think of them, Aleida?”

She shrugs, adding a toe to the latest paw print on the canvas. “I think they are as any other family is -- a transitioning culture within itself.” Jekyll balances about the fence, managing to find a way to lie between the board’s valleys. He swats at his owner’s dangling earring in cat lethargy.

Richard takes his own brush to the painting with much less refinery. The process of creating manufactured cat paws is not something one learns in accounting school. “I meant - they - doesn’t it seem -”

Aleida brushes Jekyll away, singing her words more to herself than to the man beside her: “Incomplete sentences make a man’s heart weaker, darling.”

“Aleida, you’ve seen how messy they are; Jung and his snack-food, Pok Nae and her flowers, the whole Biscuit fiasco, always making scenes.”

Aleida paints Richard‘s nose with a smattering of yellow. “Mm, yes.”

He wipes at it with his sleeve. “If anything it should be us who wanted a fence to separate us from them.”

“Is it painful to you, Richard?”

He concentrates on trying to get the roundness right. Jekyll purrs.

“It is that they seem to be enjoying it that hurts me so, Richard. If there is an isolation that they desired, then perhaps they should have never come to the Libertine.”

“Do you think they did this on purpose?”

Biscuit yelps. Hyde has aimed at his eye and connected with sharp, felinic vengeance. “I believe if you feel the need to ask, Richard, you have the answer your heart wants already.”

Hwang Suk totters out of his chair as he comes to his feet. “I’ll be back, then… ha, I think the last one almost got me. While I’m up, more coffee?” Hwang Suk reaches for Mina’s cup, but she gently flattens her hand, palm-down, over the lid.

Emily hums to herself, her bare knees coated in a thin film of mud, as she knots wires into knuckles of defense for the two lilies on her side of the wall. Biscuit rushes back with his tail between his legs, Hyde just inches after him. Pausing in her work she pats him once on the nose. “Be good to kitties! Kitties are good to you.” She scolds.

Biscuit promptly ignores her chide and begins the chase back to A with new vigor.

Mina snags Hwang Suk’s hand within her fingers. “Try not to have another concussion, honey. I can only accept so much brain dead in a husband.” A rumble of footprints seeps through the wood. “Can you hear that dog?”

“You can’t hear what you can’t see.” Hwang Suk takes her cup anyway.




Emily has fallen asleep against the fence.

Jung can hear her breathing. The formula of the neighborhood has now trapped Mun Jung from Emily Connors using a gate-keeper named Richard.

“Hey.” He whispers - she snores.

Jekyll yowls from atop the right fence, Emily snores, crickets chirp, and Jung makes his move. He disappears within the house to return with a rubber mallet, still holding a price tag along the yellow rubber. “Think you’re so smart, do you?” He squares his shoulders and prepares, the mallet laying next to his heel.

He picks a plank two right from Emily and one left from Pok Nae’s flowers, heaves the mallet over his shoulder, and swings it down with all the force he can. The board does not tip right nor left - instead, it merely sinks into the earth, straight down into its assigned slot.

Jung furrows his brows and examines his target. The dirt has not buckled, but the wood is noticeably three inches lower. He prepares another assault, but his balance is thrown by a heavy rumble. He stumbles. Jekyll screams as his stomach is impaled upon the impervious wood.

Jekyll’s blood works its way into the grooves of the opposing plank. When Jekyll’s corpse ceases to steam in the chilled air is when Jung drops the mallet and runs inside.




“You what her what?“ Hwang Suk drowsily stumbles into the yard, his socks sticking to the grooves in their withered porch.

“Her cat, I killed her -” Jung hides underneath a folded arm, the other pointing towards Jekyll’s corpse.

“Killed her cat? How?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know… I hit one side and then -”

Hwang Suk wraps a hand around Jekyll’s paw, and with a sharp tug, rips the pole through the remainder of the creature’s flesh. Jekyll dangles from his fingertips. “You impaled the neighbor’s cat.”

“Dad, you gotta believe me -”

“I do. The fence fell from the sky. Of course I believe you.”

“Dad, these fences are -”

“- a gift from God.” Hwang Suk finishes for him. “You are a fool, Jung, for trying to tear them down, and this,” He holds the cat up now in front of Jung’s averted gaze, forcing his son to focus his eyes on the carnage. “Is a reminder not to do the things God does not want.”

Jung’s tongue and lips refuse to cooperate in articulation. “I don’t -”

“Believe in Him or not, it’s the undeniable truth. You saw those fences fall from the sky as much as I did.” A moth lands in the split of Jekyll’s stomach.

Jung’s articulators finally align. “This is bull-shit.”

“Is that what you think? That this creature died for a bunch of shit?”

“No, Jekyll didn’t die for a bunch of -”

“The fences are here, Jung. Accept them.”

“You act as if you actually like them!” Hwang Suk shrugs. Jung first lifts his leg, then twists his foot, then finally turns towards the house, back to his father. “Whatever.”

“Don’t turn your back on me!”

“Eleven years, Dad, eleven goddamn years we’ve been one solid group and you think that all of a sudden it’s such a great thing not to have any connections anymore! Did you even think what this means for them? Did you even think what this means for me?”

“That you’ll do your homework, Jung, instead of oggling the neighbor’s girl!”

“That I’ll do my homework!”

“And maybe, maybe you’ll meet someone nice, someone Korean, someone -”

“Someone Korean! Dad, who do you think you are?! How long do I have to see Emily before she’s ‘Korean’ enough?!”

Hwang Suk shrugs again.

“No matter what I have to do, Dad, those fences are coming down.”

Jung opens the sliding glass door. “When you fight against God he fights back.”

“The fences fell not because of God, Dad, but because -”

“Don’t you go to bed yet. You’ve still got to bury this cat.” Hwang Suk throws the corpse. It lands inches from Jung’s heels. He looks over his shoulder, down at the cat, then up at his father. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Maybe God’ll keep you sleeping.”

“The shovel’s in the utility closet inside.”

“Are there good Korean girls there too?”

“If only you were a good boy.” Hwang Suk shuts the door behind him, leaving Jekyll laying on the patch of grass.

Jung punches the fence. The punch snaps back up through his arm. Tossed backwards, he cries.




It’s three am when he’s finally put the last pat of dirt atop Jekyll’s split frame.

Emily slides her eyes open, yawns, and ambles to bed.

Jung throws the shovel against the fence with a sob. He turns to storm the home, and catches a cup of tea out of the corner of his eye. Hwang Suk sits in one of the chairs, the withered legs bending under his weight.

Jung wipes the back of his hands along his cheeks. “What kind?”

“Chamomile.” Hwang Suk motions for his son to sit across from him.

Jung wipes harder, avoiding his father’s steady, exhausted gaze. “Hey, old man,” He coughs, trying to grin. “I didn’t find the Korean girls.”

Hwang Suk sips his tea. Jung shuffles his feet, and takes the seat across from him, palms flattening on either side of the paper cup. He sips, slides his eyes shut, and falls into concentrated breathing. “I hid them.” Hwang Suk attempts the same grin.

“Huh?” Jung blinks.

“The good Korean girls. I hid them for myself.” Hwang Suk’s raspy laughter punctures the air. “Your mother, she’s not a good Korean girl, you know.”

Jung clucks his tongue, and lets a few haulted chuckles escape. “Yeah?”

“Emily… is a good girl, too.” Hwang Suk sips. “A better girl than Aleida, for you.”

“Aleida’s thirty, dad.”

Hwang Suk smiles warmly, leaning back in his chair, utilizing Mun Jung’s hard work on those plastic legs. “I’ll never understand you kids.”

Jung shrugs. “Maybe not me, but Pok Nae’s easy. Flowers are cool, people are not.”

Hwang Suk switches topic again. “You didn’t give the cat a gravestone? Even a stick?”

“Why would I? It’s a cat.”

“It’s a casualty none the less.”

“A casualty? Of what war?”

“Yours against God.”

Jung crumples the cup, sending tea flying over the edges. “Dad, would you please for once stop with the divine intervention!”

“Why did this happen, then, if it wasn’t from God? How can you say anything that falls from the sky so perfectly isn’t divine intervention? There’s nothing to prove contrary.”

“Ignorance is not an argument!”

“Ignorance?”

Jung throws his cup at his father‘s head, who effortlessly avoids the onslaught. “Just because there is no proof against doesn’t make proof for.”

“Philosophy. No, even those dead Greeks couldn‘t argue --” The legs of the tired patio chair give way, and Hwang Suk falls backwards, head cracking against the planks of the fence.




Jung sits in the same chair his father had been sitting in the night before. He yawns, his hair sticks out at odd angles, and he’s spent another thirty dollars at Lowe’s on a yellow tank of gasoline. Pok Nae is bent over her flowers, tending calmly to the soil.

“Pok Nae.” Jung nudges his sister with his foot. “Hey, Pok Nae!” He nudges again. “Pok Nae, Dad has a concussion, he’s in the hospital, do you know what that means?”

She folds her hands in her lap.

“It means his head isn’t all in one place. It’s swelling and bleeding on the inside.”

She frowns.

Jung curls his nose. His clothes smell of Jekyll, the bloodied body just a foot from Pok Nae - after taking his father to the hospital, he had no time to change. “Hey, doesn’t that make you sad?”

Pok Nae, after two beats, nods.

“Why don’t you show it, then? Why don’t you cry a bit? I cried about it, Pok Nae.”

The seven year old shrugs.

“If you cried about it a bit, I’d feel better.” Jung continues, rising from the chair. “I’d feel better and we could take down these fences because you’d be sad too. Then it wouldn‘t just be me, you know?”

Tears form at the corner of her eyes.

“There we go. It’s good to be sad with your family. You see, not everything, Pok Nae, is flowers.” Jung pats his little sister on the head, and unscrews the cap on the plastic tank.

“Don’t.” She whispers. The word hiccups in her throat - Jung doesn’t hear it.

Emily and Richard are sitting in their pristine chairs.

Aleida is painting a memorial portrait for Jekyll. Hyde sits mournfully at her feet.

“Don’t, Jung.” He pours the gas along the base of the fence.

“Don’t, what?” Jung ignores the pinched expression on Pok Nae’s face, withdrawing a matchbook from his pocket. “Some God Dad’s got going on. Send him to the hospital while he’s defending His existence, send a fence to crack his head on, send a fence to kill Jekyll with - Not God, never God, God can‘t exist if he‘s going to be this much of an asshole, right?”

Pok Nae examines the dirt about her flowers and finds the shards of her former defensive gesture. She picks up the split wires, and begins knotting them. “Biscuit will come, Jung.”

“Some fence, fucks everything up. This is why we didn’t want the fences, right? That’s why everyone voted against it. Fences don‘t do anything right.”

“Fences protect.”

“I’ll show the damn fence, Pok Nae. Watch, your big brother’s gonna liberate this place.”

Pok Nae stands, wobbly at first, and moves to Jung, tugging on his sleeve. “Listen, fences -”

Jung pulls her fingers from his arm. “C’mon, give me room.”

“My flowers’ll be ruined!” She cries.

“We’ll buy you more flowers!”

“Don’t yell at me! Don’t hurt my flowers!”

“Flowers aren’t people, Pok Nae! I’m people, I’m your family!” He shakes her off. She falls to the patio, scraping both knees. Burying her face in her hands, she sobs. “Listen, Pok Nae, you sit here all day long, you baby those flowers, you build your stupid wire nets you - you -” He doesn’t hesitate though his words fail. He throws the match down onto the layers of gasoline.

The gas lights on fire.

The wood does not.

Jung shrieks as the fire takes over his body, scorching against his skin. Pok Nae can’t help but drop her hands. “But - fences -” She stammers, forcing herself upwards.“- protect, save, they -”

Emily moves from her chair, slipping to the fence. “Jung! Jung, is that you?!”

Pok Nae tips over against the chairs and skitters to the ground. “Emily -” She manages, but not loud enough.

Richard raises his brows. “Emily?”

“Daddy! Jung, he’s screaming! Jung! Jung are you okay?”

Richard pauses, rises to his feet. He moves towards the fence, and peers through the slats. He moves from slat to slat. The frown across his features grows deeper.

“Emily!” Pok Nae manages to scream. “Emily, he’s on fire!”

Emily jerks her head upwards.

Against the sky there is no smoke. The sky is blue. The clouds roll onward, white and simple.

“Emily! Please!”

Emily chews on her lip. Richard peers upwards himself. “Daddy. You - you hear her, don’t you?”

Jung collapses to the ground. Pok Nae covers her lips, but can’t help the vomit. In lot B, the stench of burning flesh overpowers the lilies and the left-over chamomile tea.

“Daddy! Daddy we have to help them!” Emily runs to their sliding glass door, but Richard places a hand on her arm. Biscuit whines, dropping his muzzle between his paws. “Daddy…?”

Pok Nae forces herself to her feet, and skirting about her brother, rushes for the door. She is met with the fire. “Please.” She whispers. “Please, please let me through.”

The fire thickens.

“Daddy! Please, don’t you - she said -”

“Look up, Emily.” Richard murmurs, and points at the sky. Emily begins to cry. “You can’t hear what you can’t see.”

Aleida places the last touches on her painting - one golden paw print.




Emily takes in a shuddering breath, her normally straightened hair a mass of frizz about her reddening cheeks. The rusty spade digs into the ground, underneath the wire knuckles, deep into the earth to where the end of the defensive fingers lay. First these come up, thrown to the side along with clumps of brown earth. Her spade knocks against the fence when she digs too far forward.

Pok Nae’s flawless spade knocks against the fence as well. She jabs it one more time, and the stab reverberates through her arm. No, not the fence, now, the flowers. Pok Nae takes her spade to the roots of her friends. These come up one after the other, their white petals burried under the wad of dirt that follows.

Emily does the same. All four lilies are now uprooted, and the holes where they once grew left unfilled, exposed.