The door opened.

  And hell immediately broke loose.

  Her mother’s entire body went rigid. Her eyes locked onto Momo, and her face twisted in disbelief, the wrinkles in her skin contorting to cartoonish dimensions.

  Meanwhile, Momo’s lungs refused to inflate. All the muscles in her body clenched in unison. Any hope of a breath or a word or even a scream emerging from her lips was completely fruitless. From afar, the pair of them must have looked frozen in time—two women with the same apple-shaped faces, thin black hair, and frenzied nerves stuck in paralysis.

  What do you say to your own mother after twelve entire years?

  What do you say when she thinks you’ve been dead in a forest in Upstate New York?

  Momo supposed it couldn’t hurt to start with hello.

  “Annyeonghaseyo,” Momo mumbled, bowing awkwardly. The Korean sounded utterly clunky falling out of her lips. “Umma—”

  “Demon!” Her mother gasped, her hand flying to her chest as if Momo had only just appeared there at that moment. She fled away in fear, nearly stumbling onto the floor as she backed herself into the hallway wall. Her face had gone completely white—like street chalk. “The transforming demon from the television has visited us, looking for blood! Daehyun, get your appa! Rebuke, rebuke!”

  Momo’s face turned bright cherry red. This was officially the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to her. “No, no, no. Umma, I’m not a demon,” she insisted, feeling less and less confident by the second as she emerged from the broom closet.

  As she stepped out, her mom shrieked and picked up one of the plastic slippers from the hallway floor, holding it like a weapon in front of herself.

  “Back, back!” the woman yelped. Their father’s muffled footsteps began approaching unenthusiastically from the living room. “What is all this commotion?” he yawned.

  Daehyun tried to intervene, putting a hand on their mother’s shoulder. “Umma, put down the shoe. You’re being ridiculous. This is really Momo—she’s alive.”

  Clearly, this was not persuasive. Jiwoo flipped the shoe in his direction, her eyes narrowing at her son as she waved the slipper towards him accusatory. He held up his hands like a cop had pulled him over on the highway.

  “Auntie Jeji was right.” She shook the slipper. “Hollywood is corrupting your soul.”

  He groaned. “Umma.”

  Momo pinched the bridge of her nose. It seemed that it didn’t matter if she was dead or alive, demon or goddess, twelve years in the grave or twelve years old, it did not stop her from being involuntarily weaponized against her little brother.

  “These rich people consort with the devil, Daehyun-ah,” their mother continued, completely ignoring Momo now as she swung the slipper around the air, gesticulating wildly. “They make blood sacrifices. Bring back dead. And now here you are, walking into our home so brazenly with a dokkaebi at your side. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Their father at this point had made his slow, unrushed journey into the hallway, and was now standing a foot or so behind Jiwoo. He had aged only in the face, with thick-rimmed bright blue glasses shielding saggy eyes. The stark color of them almost made Momo laugh. She could only imagine the fight they must have spurred when he bought them.

  “Eh, Jiwoo, we are in America now. No dokkaebis in the floorboards, only guns and ghosts.”

  Seeing Momo, his eyebrows furrowed. He lifted the glasses over his forehead, looking at her with his bare brown pupils as if to verify her existence with his own eyes. After a moment of staring into the blur, he settled them back on his nose. His face was expressionless.

  Momo’s heart sank. She had been naive, expecting anything more.

  Her mother was right. She was a demon now. Unwanted in this world.

  There was not enough love left between them to bridge that gap.

  But then her father’s hand snapped through the air, stealing the slipper from Jiwoo’s grasp.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Enough.”

  Her mother turned to him as if bitten, but before she could complain, her father had thrown the slipper onto the floor like it was nothing, like it was worth less than a grain of salt—and took a large, eager step towards Momo. He extended his warm hands, unguarded.

  “My daughter.”

  He wrapped his arms around her, and pulled in tightly.

  ***

  As Momo sank into the velvety living room chair, a million questions being pelted her way from the party of two on the opposite couch, the thought idly passed through her head—

  So much for the dress.

  She was greeting her parents for the first time in twelve years, had the power of unlimited shapeshifting magic at her disposal, and she was somehow wearing her #1 Most Valuable Player t-shirt from her middle school basketball team (she had been so scared that she only played two games all season, and scored 0 points and 0 points respectively), a pair of heavily ripped jeans, and worse for wear black sneakers. She couldn’t even recall magic-ing those clothes onto her body; she must have done it subconsciously, back in the closet.

  This was how she felt her parents saw her, she supposed.

  Incapable. Small. Coddled. Destructive—

  Daehyun placed a cup of hot tea in front of her, and gave her a sympathetic look.

  Somewhere inside, she was grateful. But she couldn’t find it within herself to smile back at him. White noise was bubbling inside her ears, drowning out the droning voice of her mother. Her hand was trembling as she picked the tea up and blew on the top.

  “Umma, you need to slow down. You’re overwhelming her,” she heard Daehyun say to their mother as he slouched into the other living room chair. That one was an inheritance from the old house—stained and crooked, nowhere near comfortable to sit in, but still something Jiwoo insisted on keeping. She was just like that. She didn’t like losing things.

  A fact that was never more obvious then right now. After their long embrace had ended, Momo’s father had led her to the living room, given her a kiss on the forehead, while Momo’s mother had continued her inquisition from the couch. The elder Lim obviously didn’t seem to know how to cope with the situation—her mouth constantly opening and closing, flooding her daughter with questions to prove that it was really her and not some scheming extraterrestrial.

  Of course, the hard part was that her mom wasn’t wrong. She was quite literally a demon from another plane wearing the face of her dead daughter. Except for one small detail—the demon in question still was, technically, their daughter.

  She took a deep breath in, digging her fingernails into her jeans. It didn’t matter what or what she was or wasn’t. She wasn’t about to debate the Ship of Theseus with her parents. She was still Momo, through it all, shy and weak and yet surprisingly enduring—and so, being herself, she had endured all the way from death to the afterlife to Alois and back again to this couch. It was just a matter of putting that into words.

  Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t.

  Because the truth was, she had been dead to them for longer than twelve years. Dead ever since they dropped her off at her college dorm; hell, dead even before then, in high school, in middle school, locked in her room, alone, door locked, music on, computer fan whirring; wrapped up in a nest of repetitive, anxious thoughts—worried she’d disappoint them, worried she already had. A pencil glued to her nobbled, tired fingers, drawing to exercise her endless demons, filling up pages and pages of notebooks just trying to escape.

  The Momo before Alois was a different person.

  The Momo now was free.

  “I don’t have an explanation,” she said, looking up at them suddenly, adrenaline fueling her. “I wish I did. But the truth is, a lot has happened to me. A lot of things that I’m only just beginning to process myself.” She laughed, but it was cold. “I really, truly wish I could put it all into a neat little package of digestible sentences and make this easy for you both to understand, to make this a little less painful, a little less confusing, but if I’m being honest with myself, I just can’t. I wouldn’t know how. So the only thing I can do—the only thing I can truly control—is the fact that I’m here now, and… that I’ve missed you all. A lot. So much. Everyday. And I’m asking for that to be enough. Enough for now.”

  Momo’s eyes were shut completely tight by the end of her sentence, her arms wrapped protectively over her knees. She could almost feel the anger radiate from across from her. It was anger she knew well, expected even; this was not a house in which grievances were so easily washed away with words. She would not get away with this.

  And yet, to her surprise, her mother went quiet. It was the first true silence they’d had since arriving here. All that accompanied them now was the soft noises of traffic from the street.

  Eventually, Jiwoo sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair.

  When she looked back up from her lap, she had a thin smile on her face.

  “Ani. I am the sorry one, Momo,” she said quietly, and then turned to her husband. “We have been rude. Your appa will run to the store and get some groceries for dinner.”

  Momo’s jaw went slack.

  Was that it? That was all she had to say?

  And yet, she said nothing as Jiwoo lifted herself carefully off the couch, her age evident in the way she used her hand to balance on the wall. Taking a slow breath in, in the way that Momo did herself everyday, her mother made her way over to her, and slowly leaned down, placing her cheek flush to Momo’s own. She could feel her mother’s pulse in her own ear.

  “My Momo-yah.”

  Oh.

  A single tear streaked down Momo’s face. Jiwoo breathed out, then pulled away.

  “We have a very treasured guest returning from a very long journey away,” her mother said, beaming down at her daughter. “It is only right that we celebrate with her favorite meal. Come. Help me prepare the kitchen. The dishes are dirty. Your appa still does not know how to put them in the dishwasher, even after all this time. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  She patted Momo’s cheek, and started walking toward the kitchen.

  Something inside Momo’s soul, like a strained muscle, finally unwound.

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