Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller

seeds clean, she spit them into her hand and buried them in the ground.
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    In the late afternoon, we burst through the rice onto a dirt road carved by jeep tracks. “This is the last part of it,” Lobetto told us. “The Monkey House is at the end of this road.” Then he taught us American marching songs his father had taught him. Like soldiers heading home on leave, we shouted out:
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    â€œThis is my weapon, this is my gun.
One is for shooting, one is for fun!”
and:
    â€œI found a whore by the side of the road.
Knew right away she was dead as a toad.
Her skin was all gone from her tummy to her head.
But I fucked her, I fucked her even though she was dead!
I know it’s a sin,
But I’d fuck her again!”
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    â€œEh, Lobetto,” we joked. “Do you even understand what you’re singing?”
    â€œOf course,” Lobetto said. “I’m half-American.”
    â€œWhat’s ‘toad,’ then?” Sookie challenged.
    â€œToggobi.”
    â€œWhat’s ‘fucked’?” I asked. I had heard Lobetto curse us with that word often enough to know that it was bad, but I wasn’t sure how it translated.
    â€œYou don’t know?” Lobetto hooted. “You don’t know? Sookie, you tell her.”
    Sookie’s mouth thinned, like she was holding something in, but she said, “It means, Hyun Jin, ‘Your mama will die.’ So don’t ever say it.”
    Lobetto bent over, laughing, and held his sides like he was vomiting. I hated when he did that, acting like we were big jokes. “I bet,” he gasped, “your mama wishes she was dead whenever she gets fucked.” He laughed some more, then croaked, “Do you guys want to know what ‘whore’ means?”
    Sookie and I pushed past him. We knew what whore meant; we knew whose mothers they were.
    A jeep roared up behind us, silencing Lobetto’s laughter, and we skittered to the side of the road. When it passed, we gave chase in the exhaust of fumes and dust. Without turning to look at us, the driver lifted his arm, releasing a handful of wrapped candies in the wake of the jeep. The candies landed like golden bullets in the dirt at our feet, and we laughed as we gathered them up. Unwrapping them, we sucked as we marched down the road, our mouths too full of sugar to sing again.
    After a dip in the road, an abrupt hook, we came suddenly—almost unexpectedly, though that was our destination—face-to-face with the Monkey House. Gray and squat as a toad, the two-story Monkey House, ribboned by a chain-link fence, looked like any other government building. Except that this one, far outside the town, was half-hidden in the midst of nameless hills that rose around it like burial mounds.
    In front of the padlocked gate, two guards pitched knives at the ground. Each time the knife quivered upright in the dirt, they would laugh. Then the thrower would step back and money changed hands. I could not tell if the soldiers were the same ones that had passed us on the road.
    Lobetto pinched our elbows, then flicked his head toward the back of the building. In the shadow of the Monkey House, blocked from the guards, Sookie and I pulled and prodded each other over the fence. Lobetto, who had scaled it easily, puffed out his chest and grinned at us as our toes gripped loops of fence and our fingers slipped and slid off cold metal.
    As we scrambled over the top, Lobetto scrounged on the ground for a handful of pebbles, which he threw at a window on the second floor. The rocks hit the window like a spattering of hail, then, rebounding, showered down on us.
    â€œOw, ow, ow,” Sookie and I whispered as we danced around, trying to avoid the pelting. Lobetto stood under the window without moving, then shook his head free of pebbles when the quick onslaught was over.
    â€œShhwee, Lobetto!” A woman had lifted the window and poked her perm-burned head out.