Pall Mall
Sora Kim-Russell 김소라”
You sit on a hard wooden chair outside beneath the kitchen window and light a cigarette. The air around you fills with smoke, turns as warm as the air in your lungs. You put your feet up, inhale, lean back, breathe out.
You smoked back when you were pregnant, through all your pregnancies. Your doctor told you to. They didn’t know better back then. It started with your first. The difficult one. The one who gave you no rest, always kicking and punching you from the inside, never settling down. Back then, you would balance a glass of water on your stomach and watch it roll and slosh, as if she wasn’t so much a fetus as an earthquake, a welling up of magma, an angry sea intent on capsizing your ship. So you smoked, to calm your stomach, to quiet your daughter.
You kept smoking after your first child, all through the second, and again through the third. You smoked when your husband was away on TDY, and when he came back. Your first cigarette was in Yokota, where your first daughter was born, and you continued along each hop across the Pacific: in Georgia, in Japan, in Idaho, in Korea, in Florida, in Okinawa.
You used to hide your smoking in Korea. You hid in your mother’s kitchen, in the outhouse, behind concrete walls. Back then a woman could get slapped for smoking in public. Like spitting in the face of your elders, to enjoy something so much in their presence. Even while eating, a woman kept one foot braced on the floor, ready to rise.
You smoked in California. You smoked on military bases and off. You smoked when you held your daughter on your lap. Hot ash whispered over her skin. You smoked so much the ceiling above the kitchen table turned a rich yellow.
You smoked indoors until the day you saw your youngest daughter’s fingers twitch at the sight of your cigarette, the way she brought ballpoint pens to her lips, to draw the air through the hairline cracks in the plastic. You knew that she knew what a cigarette tasted like without ever having smoked one. You saw the desire and knew it. Knew the crushing need. The stubborn refusal that came to define both of you.
Right now, on your hard chair, you sit with one leg folded beneath you. The other has dropped to the ground. In a moment you will rise and go back inside. You will eat alone. But for now, the cigarette is in your hand, and you are drawing the flame close to your lips. The weight of the cigarette lifts between your fingers. Your lungs contract, your heart slows, and for a moment, you are breathless. In a moment, you will let go, and the air will turn white before your eyes, but for now, you hold on.
Even the air stops for you.
Sora Kim-Russell teaches literary translation in Seoul, South Korea. Her writing and translations have appeared in Azalea, Pebble Lake Review, The Diagram, and other publications. Her hobbies include working too much, eating too much, and mumbling under her breath in public too much. If you’re lucky enough to be standing next to her on the subway, you might even get to hear the whole story.
