at a pojangmacha on the shoulder of an unnamed port-access road, four plastic stools around a single propane burner on a folding table, freight container stacks and a distant warehouse gate visible beyond, no other structures, open sky — she has set the spoon down after the first burned spoonful — spoon resting on the rim, face in the beat of heat registering, not yet deciding whether to go again
The truck was still idling when the bowl arrived.
I heard it before I saw any of it — a low diesel groan from somewhere past the freight containers, then the smell: metal, brine, the particular exhaust of something enormous moving slowly. I had been walking the container road for forty minutes by then, not lost exactly, but following a sound I couldn't identify until it became a forklift, and then a warehouse gate, and then a wrong turn that deposited me on a stretch of road I had no name for.
The pojangmacha appeared the way useful things do when you've stopped looking. Four plastic stools. A single gas burner. A woman with forearms like someone who has lifted heavy pots for thirty years, who assessed me in about one second and said something I didn't catch, and I sat down.
I changed before I walked out this morning — jeans because the stools were low and plastic and I had known somehow. It was the right call.
Sundubu-jjigae in a black stone dolsot bowl, broth still rolling, deep red chili oil pooling at the surface
The sundubu-jjigae came in a stone bowl and it was moving when she set it down. I burned my lip on the first spoonful. The truck idled. The broth was fermented heat and dried chili and something deeper underneath — anchovy stock, I thought, or shellfish, something from the water that hadn't gone far. A container ship horn somewhere behind me, long and flat, and then silence except for the burner.
I watched a crane move a stack of orange containers from one place to another for no reason I could follow. The logic of it was somewhere above my understanding and I didn't try.
Stack of orange shipping containers under a gantry crane silhouetted against open sky, crane arm cutting diagonally across the frame
When the sun dropped below the cranes I put the blazer on.
still at the pojangmacha table, the stone bowl now empty and pushed slightly forward, the port road behind her empty where the truck had been — a long rectangle of flat asphalt ending in crane gantries against the sky — she is pulling the blazer on — one arm through, the other sleeve still hanging — caught at the exact moment the collar passes her ear, gaze gone somewhere into the middle distance of the crane yard
The bowl was empty. The truck was gone.
on the container road at the point where it opens to a view of the port basin — a wide flat expanse of water visible between two container stacks, a bulk carrier sitting heavy at anchor in the middle distance, its hull a dark mass against the last light on the water — she has stopped after the long flat horn of the container ship — the sound just finished, the silence that followed is what she is standing inside, not yet walking again
What she wore
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The skirt is short enough that I thought twice about it, then didn't — nobody at a container port is looking at my legs.
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I changed into jeans before lunch because the pojangmacha stools are low and plastic and I wasn't going to think about it — it was the right call.
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I put the blazer on when the sun dropped below the cranes — not because I was cold, but because the light changed and it felt like the right answer to that.