when your city broke my skin and bones (say don't go) | WOOSAN

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His parents ring him that afternoon. They normally ring on a Sunday morning, about nine AM for San and six PM for them, but he asked them to ring him later because of the interview.

'Hi darling,' his mum says, holding the phone too close to her face.

Joonho gently takes the phone from his wife, holding it out so San can seen them sitting on the sofa, Ji-eun leaning heavily into Joonho. Her face looks blotchier than it was last week, the skin around her eyes red and tired-looking. San can see the red, inflamed skin of her neck above the collar of her dressing gown, the sides of her neck swollen.

'How are you doing?' San asks his mum before she can say anything else.

She smiles sadly. 'I'm okay. Feeling a bit better.'

They both know it's a lie.

'We've got an appointment with a specialist in Busan on Friday,' Joonho tells him.

'Are you driving?'

'Yeah. It'll take less than three hours if we miss the traffic.'

That's something, at least. Maybe a specialist will have the knowledge and experience to actually tell them something useful about what's making his mum ill. All the doctors his parents have seen for the past year have ran them in circles, referring them to someone else, a different hospital, making them pay for tests that never tell them anything--all while Ji-eun's health deteriorated.

Sometimes San blames himself. His mum started getting ill right as he started planning his move to England, after all, and ended up in A&E after collapsing a mere few weeks after San moved. Perhaps the stress of her youngest child--and the only one who still speaks to her--moving away from her made her ill. Sometimes the dark corners of his mind tell him she wouldn't have gotten ill if he hadn't left.

'Well, uh, let me know how it goes,' San says.

'Don't worry so much, San. I'm not going to kick the bucket anytime soon,' Ji-eun jokes, but Joonho's face contorts. San's considered the possibility of his mum's death too many times this past year for the joke to be anything but a sharp twang in his chest.

'Anyway, San, how was the interview?' Joonho asks, and San's thankful for the change in topic, even if it's one he has to lie about.

He cant possibly tell his parents he's resorted to porn for money. Not that he's even really resorted to it, not when he actively sought out jobs in the industry, not when he signed that contract of his own free will. His parents will be disappointed if they ever find out, he knows. But then again, porn is something that was never ever mentioned in the house, all through his childhood, so he doesn't really know what his parents think of it. If his parents needed to talk about porn or sex or anything along those lines for whatever reason, they did so in hushed voices, heads together and avoiding using the words if they could.

San's short stint of a porn obsession was at seventeen, when he spent hours every day bypassing the parental controls and pornography blocks on the broadband to watch video after video, half disgusted and half aroused, one hand on his phone and the other on his pussy. It happened again at nineteen, mostly to try and ward of the aching lonliness and blow off the deep, itching sexual frustration. San's not proud of it, but he can't bring himself to feel ashamed, either.

'Yeah, it went really well,' San says. 'They said I'll get a call back for a second interview if I make the shortlist.'

More white lies. His dad is the one who taught San to never accept a job they offer to you on the spot, and that's exactly what he's done. But his parents won't know--they can't know. If they find out San's gone into porn to pay his bills, they'll insist he come home, come straight back to Korea, move back in with them. San moved abroad to get away from that. The thought of his parents, of his mum and dad, finding out he's having sex in itself makes him want to crawl into a black hole.