Land of Milk and Honey

At the end of summer, the narrator takes time off for her bruises to heal. Her employer gives her a raise. She doesn’t want him monitoring doses of painkillers, so she chooses to self-medicate with alcohol and cigarettes. When she isn’t wearing Eun-Young’s clothes and Aida isn’t in her bed, the cat joins the narrator, giving her dreams about an apartment in California. The narrator continues to entice the cat into eating. When Aida visits the narrator again, they have gentler sex. Aida even tries to befriend the cat. Residents of the community, thinking that the narrator only twisted her ankle, send gifts, worried about their places on the list.

Aida and the narrator talk about the list endlessly. Their places, along with those for Aida’s father and Kandinsky, are secure, but the rest of the list—about 100 slots—changes. Aida only cryptically says that they are headed “[u]p” (153), without clarifying their destination. The narrator at first assumes that they are headed to one of the poles, but she later learns that the mountain’s residents are planning to go to space.

Kandinsky RSVPs for the harvest festival. As the narrator makes bread with heritage grains, she remembers the cheap, mass-produced foods her mother bought when she was a kid.