Category: Writing
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, Finale
Pablo asleep under the Christmas tree. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim The year before his passing, he crawled under the Christmas tree and fell asleep on top of the presents. To remind us of the gift he was and will always be. —Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 1 The routine We woke up to rain…
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 4
Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim I took the boys to the park. Two men waved me over—I think they’re both deaf and homeless. One man wanted to know what happened to Pablo’s legs. I told him it was bandaged to protect the pressure wounds. He didn’t understand, so I lied and said, “His joints gets stiff.” …
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 3
Pretty boy Liko. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim Pablo is aging before my eyes. He seems to sprout new fatty tumors on a daily basis; there are two that are growing like deer antlers above his ears. I was scratching his chest the other day and felt another plump, round bump. Assuming it was another tumor, I bent over…
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FOBby Barbie
Photo courtesy Sandra Gabriel via Unsplash My parents often dressed me in a too-short cherry-printed dress I had outgrown. Photos of our family at Niagara Falls and there I am in the cherry dress hanging just below my waist exposing my yellow terry cloth underwear. I wore them or was clothed in them so often it…
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Eating Envy
Photo courtesy xandreasw via Unsplash I read a book titled Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents. It described the fear a child feels when they see their parents’ behavior become erratic and aggressive; it addressed their coping behavior to control their parents. As children, they impaled themselves on the sword of self-loathing when they couldn’t extract…
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 2
Pablo “m’ama, non m’ama, m’ama” (she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me). Watercolor and pen. By Ayoung Kim Pablo, our monk-artist-deep-soul golden retriever, loved dancing with drag queens. At the time, I had been living in a three-story flat in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco with my sister and two friends.…
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 1
Pablo, our gentle giant. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim This is a collection of stories I sent to family members in the year before our beloved golden retriever Pablo’s passing. I never intended to publicize any of these. However, Pablo’s light shouldn’t be kept within the confines of our family. These stories bear witness to the…
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This is What Love Looks Like
This morning uh-muh-ni came padding into the kitchen complaining of heaviness. My whole body feels heavy, I don’t know why this happens. She stretched onto tip-toes for a box of cereal from the top shelf. It’s been there for over a year. Fumbling with it she noted, Oh, I never opened this. Scrambling out the…
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Morning Appointment
Photo courtesy: Karolina Kolodziejczak via Unsplash The other morning, we had to go to UCLA medical center for uh-muh-ni’s check-up. With an early morning departure time, uh-muh-ni had woken only fifteen minutes beforehand. She was scampering around in the kitchen in staccato movements: fixing her coffee, packing fried man-doo, and grabbing a bag of tangerines…
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Coughing Flower
Part 1 She sits a folded flower in her chair, coughing into her iPad. Pulling a tissue, she spits floral spittle into it, tosses it to the ground, wadded and soiled. Her stigma is swollen. It’s constantly dripping. She declares her diagnosis: “I have too much nose.” Coughing Flower swipes her iPad and wipes her…