Excerpt from Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I remembered the tailor squatting in the dirt courtyard by the water spigot, holding his precious rooster between his legs, stroking its feathers into a beautiful scarlet sheen, sharpening its claws, fitting it with the bamboo spikes it would drive into its opponent like spurs. My uncle Hyongbu had taken us once to a cockfight, and we had watched as the two birds circled each other and then collided in a chaos of feathers and sound. In an instant, it was over, one cock strutting back and the other listing forlornly before falling on its side, surprising us with the vast amount of blood that suddenly gushed forth. Hyongbu, having lost his bet, never took us again—nor had Yongsu or I ever asked to be taken. It was too awful. The smell of blood and feathers mixed with the acrid sweat and cigarette smoke of the audience had not only settled into our clothes but permeated our very skin.

Now I simply took a few quick steps and got out of the cock's way. I crossed the street and walked toward the train station at the foot of the hill. I planned on paying a visit to the old house in Samnung where we'd once lived, but just as I reached the main road, I saw Kisu's mother leading her ninety-three-year-old mother-in-law out of an acupuncturist's house. Halmoni was oddly dressed from the treatment, in old Japanese-style pantaloons that exposed her emaciated, knobby-jointed legs.

Kisu's mother was having trouble holding Halmoni upright, so I rushed forward to help them back across the street, half carrying the old woman. She was so light I might have lifted her in my arms like an infant, but I hesitated as she mumbled something about the indignity of being outside without her proper white clothes. When we reached the gate of the house, the tailor's rooster gave us only a curious look and let us by without a challenge, merely twisting his neck around with frenetic alertness as we entered the small blue-green door in the gate.

"What's the matter?" I asked Kisu's mother.

"Halmoni was lucid today," she said. "She knew how sick she was, and she wanted a treatment right away."

"I almost died," said Halmoni. "I almost died, and you kept me in that room alone all morning. What kind of daughter-in-law are you now that my son is dead?"

"Quiet, Mother," said Kisu's mother. "This is Kisu's friend who lives across the maru. He's the little girl's older brother."

Kisu's grandmother squinted at me as she sat down on the granite stepping-stone and let her daughter-in-law remove her rubber shoes for her. "How old are you?" she said suddenly.

I was about to tell her I was fifteen, though reckoned fourteen in the American way, when she said, "Two thousand and three hundred and forty-four years. That's a long time to be an ancestor. Yaeya, how many hwangap does that make? How many times does the zodiac turn in that many years, ungh?"

"I don't know," I said.

Kisu's mother took Halmoni by the hands now and led her back to their room, while I stood there, trying to do the calculation in my head. Each hwangap was sixty years—five turns of the lunar zodiac, which is made of twelve animal signs. Two thousand three hundred and forty-four divided by sixty was ... thirty-nine, with four years left over. Thirty-nine times five was ... one hundred and ninety-five. Four years was one-third of a turn, so the zodiac must have turned one hundred ninety-five and a third times in those years. One part of me wanted to deliver the answer to Kisu's grandmother, though I knew she was just lapsing back into her senility.

Excerpted from Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Copyright © 2023 by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.