Volunteering

At the nursing home, the soft and brittle were flipped twice a day to keep their skin from melding to the bedsheets. As I passed one of the cots, a papery hand grabbed mine and pressed something sticky into it. It’s candy, the old woman said. I opened my hand to look. Some were oozing from their wrappers, some had teeth marks. Some were whole and new. They were from a brand that had gone out of business in my childhood. It’s dementia, a passing nurse explained. No, it’s candy, the old woman said. No, the nurse said, carrying a bucket of human waste out of the room, it’s dementia.

In Some Ways I Have Changed

As a mature and gifted child, I did not often play with my sister, because she was five years younger than me and thus unwaveringly stupider and worse. But when we got a catalogue in the mail—Sears, the local grocery store, American Girl Dolls, any catalogue—I made an exception. I would play with my sister for hours at a game we invented, a game that brought us together, a special game we loved. The game would go like this: we’d hover over the catalogue, each holding a marker. On the count of three, I’d flip open a page and we’d scan the glossy spread for the best thing, the one item we wanted most, and circle it with our markers as quickly as possible. This meant we “got” the item. Each item could only be circled once—we could not, for instance, co-own the Truly Me Western Horse and Saddle Set. Twice, I attacked my sister because she was quicker to circle the thing we both wanted. The things she took from me, or, more accurately, the pictures of things she circled that I wanted to circle, for which I attacked her physically, were a 2002 Toyota Camry and Premium Shredded Turkey Breast.

Hedgie Choi received her MFA in Poetry from The Michener Center for Writers and her MFA in Fiction from The Writing Seminars. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Noon, American Short Fiction, Poetry Magazine, The Hopkins Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.