On the noontime asphalt road lay a lump of roadkill.

        Ashen fur matted with inky blood. Remains of a small creature, recently alive. Too grisly to take a closer look. The seven-year-old turned away. He imagined a tiny burial mound. Like a cartoon grave, marked with a twig cross. His parents had warned him not to touch anything dirty. At the crosswalk, he glanced both ways for cars. That road between the drugstore and lottery shop was usually empty. No stoplight.

        By that age, the boy had accumulated a long list of rules. Cross only at crosswalks. Don’t follow strangers. Turn off the tap. At your friend’s house, line your shoes up by the door. If they ask you to stay for dinner, say it’s okay and come home . . . Pitfalls at every corner: getting hit by a car, growing sick, losing things, forgetting good manners. His dad, a county office civil servant, and his mom, a NongHyup bank teller, filled his mind with wisdom. Less about achieving and more about avoiding harm. News of a fallen bridge, a collapsed department store, or the financial crisis prompted his parents to say across the dinner table, “We’re the lucky ones, aren’t we? Doing well.”

        He was the youngest of four, an obedient boy. Neighbors gushed, “Your youngest is such a little gentleman,” to which his parents would say, “We don’t get to baby him at all.” On the night of his fourteenth birthday, all six members of the family squeezed into the living room of their stand-alone house. His eyes lingered on the shared family features of his parents, two sisters, and brother. He wondered why his parents had so many kids. His dad admitted with a chuckle, “Actually, you weren’t planned.”

When teachers doled out the typical warnings, “If you boys don’t study, you’ll end up—,” he took the words to heart. He never slept in class; in the evenings, he never skipped his study sessions. After weighing careers, he chose the rising field of statistics. An undergraduate majors handbook informed him that statistics played a part in every discipline. His homeroom advisor, a literature teacher, flipped through his school records.

        “Solid plan. I see you scored well in math. It’s a good fit.”

        He was accepted to an “in-Seoul” university, upper-mid tier. Relatives said, “Well done.” Only the ninety-third percentile gained admission there. He deserved higher praise but was simply relieved to be entering a reputable school.

        Freshman year. He decided to channel his enthusiasm and free time into the theater club. Classmates were surprised, but he pushed up his squarish round glasses and explained, “I can be somebody else.”

        The conversation moved on since all the other freshmen they knew were busy performing in plays or in bands, writing for the school paper, or joining the national trekkers. In the theater club’s first production, a campus romance, he played one of the three underclassmen who followed the main character. His glasses stayed on. He delivered a few lines to the effect of “We’ll help you.” Before heading to the afterparty, he went back on the darkened stage, pretending to pick up a bit of trash. During karaoke later on, the lead actor, an upperclassman, reserved the song “After the Play.” The club president, an economics major, made a sly remark.

        “Now that song is a public good, so don’t hog the mike.”

He’d never heard the song before, but everyone sang along. Was it even possible, he wondered, to be robbed of something that was never his? In the productions that followed, he played another sidekick, followed by a similar bit part as an upperclassman.

        Behind the scenes, he kept busy. He noticed and fixed the props that were getting unglued, steadied the volume of sound effects, and preemptively ensured that audiences wouldn’t get lost in search of the restrooms. Everyone regarded him as indispensable. He eventually took pride in his role. During his final leave from military service, he inspected all six hundred of the theater club’s mini lightbulbs and, in doing so, ended up winning over a female club member two years his junior. Thus began his belated first romance. His girlfriend’s parents called her every night at nine o’clock to ask where she was. Not wanting her to get in trouble, he always walked her straight home. One evening, she dragged her feet all the way. She pouted when they arrived. “I like you, Oppa, but you’re so you.”

        Confused as he was, he resolved not to let her down. Over the course of their three-year relationship, he learned the rules of being a good boyfriend. As he went through classes, certificate programs, and career study groups, he stayed faithful and turned down a few girls who were interested in him. Looking back, he couldn’t pinpoint why his first relationship ended. He chalked it up to some quarrel or another of two twentysomethings.

        Job interviewers approved of his flawless GPA and résumé. The theater club experience in his cover letter was taken as a sign of bold initiative. He earned respectable scores on the personality assessment test, excelling in chart analysis and logical reasoning. Even his thoughtfully nondescript appearance matched the image of an ideal job candidate, and he received offers from a number of conglomerates. Prioritizing job security and salary structure, he joined a global conglomerate known for its automobiles. He was one of the few in his class to land such a lucrative job in the tough market.

        He arrived on his first day with the same buoyant energy as the company’s flagship sports sedan. The business district lined with office towers now had a place for him. With his first paycheck, he bought his parents a massage chair. With what remained, he took out four insurance policies that covered everything from dental care to cancer, traffic accidents to legal disputes. He opened a savings account for a future home purchase along with a private pension plan; he also signed up to donate two percent of his monthly income to an NGO for children and refugees. A year later, an eight-hundred percent bonus allowed him to purchase the company’s sports sedan. The employee discount came in handy, and a twelve-month payment plan easily covered the remaining balance.

©CHILDISH BLUE | Choi Myung Bo

By the time the installments were paid off, the company had removed all office partitions in the name of business innovation. It was meant to facilitate communication. Coworkers grumbled over the messenger app, blaming the HR team for their loss of privacy. He didn’t mind as much since he rarely left his desk anyway. But the change intensified the presence of his thirty-odd coworkers in Marketing Team 3, Floor 17, each fixated on their monitors.

        His monitor displayed a swirl of customer data: age, occupation, time of car purchase, marital status, number of children, commuting distance, leisure activities, and customization preferences. “Medieval artists believed that sculpture revealed divine forms hidden in marble. Statistics do the same for messages hidden in numbers,” a professor had once said. Grand words but false. Messages weren’t hidden in numbers but conjured in boardrooms. Shaping numbers to serve predetermined ends—that was his task, at which he excelled. Fresh ideas weren’t necessary since he’d already penned enough eager reports during his training period. The numbers he crunched kept his superiors and coworkers satisfied. For that, he was rewarded with KPI scores and performance bonuses. At a get-together with old friends, he asked how they were doing. “Just working for money,” they replied. Right. Same here. One of them piped up, “Maybe we should start getting dates?”

        At work, competence readily translated into personal appeal. It also helped that he never voiced ambitions or complaints. Coworkers willingly set him up with acquaintances. He humbly accepted those blind dates, never asking for photos or prying into their background. Despite his less-than-extraordinary looks, he had carefully curated tastes and good manners. He wore well-fitting clothes, kept his hair cut, chin shaved, and nails neatly trimmed. Inside his jacket, he carried a handkerchief, ironed and folded. His glasses, still squarish round, were upgraded to a popular, branded frame. He planned date night itineraries around dinner and dessert, with the possibility for a short walk or scenic drive afterward. He was an attentive listener who knew when to chime in or steer the conversation.

        On first dates, he avoided places he’d visited before with others. It took effort to find new places each time. One where you didn’t have to eat with your hands. One with enough space between the tables. Not too quiet, not too noisy. Not too cheap, but not uncomfortably expensive either. Not a chain restaurant. It wasn’t easy to tick all the boxes. But I can't go to the same restaurant, expecting sparks to fly. A first date calls for someplace . . . special. That vague intuition served as his moral code of conduct.

        Over the next five years or so, he had a series of four relationships that lasted fairly long, but not too long. A French bistro in a renovated house, a Western-style restaurant dating back to the colonial era, and an urban temple serving vegan food became no-go zones. Reasons for breaking up always outnumbered the reasons not to. He reminisced about the National Museum’s third-floor cafeteria. Meanwhile, at work, he moved up a rung as assistant manager, passed on his former duties to his juniors, and took on new responsibilities from his seniors. Over his lunch of spicy pork, he overheard the latest gossip—IPOs, cryptocurrencies, next-gen smartphones, exotic vacation spots, the first-floor receptionist’s hairdo—and sometimes got soup stains on his shirt. He quietly condemned a coworker who bragged about his monthly visits to a nightclub where he smoked marijuana; he disapproved of his superior’s lack of morals, knowing he played golf in Southeast Asia just to enjoy the illicit, nighttime attractions. He switched to a diet of salads and whole wheat sandwiches except for cheat days when he gave in to spicy fish roe soup or pork ribs. He eventually freed up his lunch hour by drinking protein shakes that contained all eight essential nutrients. He competed in a swim meet organized by the local district office and won a bronze medal; he handcrafted a wooden stool at a woodworking studio and kept it at his dining table. Now and then, he visited a new location to repeat well-worn conversations with a stranger. “I did theater at university, always playing students. I never had to change my glasses for a role.” Despite the sixty percent chance of getting a laugh, he’d grown tired of the line. Later, he ventured to take a new date to a highway rest stop for noodle soup; he took another blind date to the fish market for flounder. With the latter, he had two bottles of soju. It’d seemed like a good idea at the time but not so much the next day.

        Now aged thirty-three, he tossed and turned, unable to sleep. He lived in an upscale studio with a walk-in closet, but in the quiet of midnight, he only sensed his solitary bed. He recalled the ad jingle: You leave bed and return to bed. Why settle for a mediocre mattress? He scrolled through the profile photos on his messenger app and scanned the news. Clear skies tomorrow. Unusual Russian troop movements. K-pop girl group climbs the Billboard Hot 100. Fat-soluble vitamins include Vitamin D. He tapped on a trending post to read it. I quit my job and went on a journey to find myself. Here are five habits to live as your true self. I chose singledom to live as me. “What true self? What does that even mean?” he demanded—then he cracked up. Those lines came straight out of a TV drama. He wondered what it took to live as oneself, but then he grew fed up with the idea.

        He tried to envision his future. It seemed absurd to think in terms of a dream.

“Why aren’t you married yet?” His newly appointed boss asked him at a company dinner before the pork belly slices were even on the grill. This time, he gave a different answer.

        “My thoughts exactly.”

        His colleagues weighed in as the pork sizzled. He pieced together their comments: “You marry whoever is by your side when you hit the marrying age”; “You marry to save money, but you can’t marry without money”; “The later the better, but it’s part of your human duty”; “Young people these days aren’t responsible enough to pull it off”; and to quote a disgruntled coworker, “Screw all that. You don’t want to take the plunge.” He ate the pork, alternating between salt and ssamjang sauce for seasoning. He wrapped the slices in lettuce and chewed to absorb the vitamin A and lutein. The married men, after arguing throughout dinner, began answering their phones and heading home. He followed them out. He didn’t agree with any of their views, but he had no words to articulate what he wanted.

        When asked about his ideal type, he resorted to a simple stock reply:

        “A pretty, smart, kind, fun girl who loves me.”

        He delivered the line in his best flippant tone. “You’ve gone nuts,” people told him. A few of them were serious. Yet, as far as ideal types went, there was no better summary. He could elaborate, but people lacked the patience to hear him out. He had no idea how long it would take, nor did he know which parts were essential. Ideal signified too much to mean anything at all.

        One day, he formulated twelve traits on a legal pad. The first one read as follows:

        A person who is biologically female, identifies as a woman, and is heterosexual.

        Too broad a beginning, maybe. But as he penned that first line, he was delighted to find vague notions gaining clarity. He wrote the next line:

        A person who shares my mother tongue.

        Drawing on empirical knowledge, he hypothesized a being who had yet to arrive, approaching the task like an astrophysicist or inventor. He omitted details of profession, wealth, and family background. He believed in specific signs of a person’s essence, visible to the discerning eye. He listed a few peculiar traits. For instance, the twelfth:

        A person who doesn’t wear white trousers.

        Imagining that person and finding her were two different matters. Social conventions around dating helped in his undertaking. With careful efficiency, he approached women and won them over. It all hinged on saying and doing opportune things at the opportune time, and he had a fair amount of experience to guide him. By now, he knew that “opportune” included an “opportune element of surprise.” A small but unexpected gift, for example, a late-night text, or even a glib show of indifference.

        At times, he questioned his caution. But he couldn’t marry a person who was rude to servers or deferred credit card payments. A relative offered some testy advice: “You’ll never marry if you’re picky.” It seemed he needed a value-for-money mindset. Except that he was searching for the right person, not purchasing a gadget. He couldn’t lean on the iffy judgment of “seems good enough.” With his thirty-fourth birthday around the corner, he visited a marriage agency for a consultation. The application form made him realize that his other half wouldn’t appear by dint of a standardized algorithm—so he walked out. That night, while lying in bed, he thought, If I were to adopt a pet, I’d want a dog, not a cat. He calculated the probability of him dying alone and being eaten by that dog. Two months later, he met her.

        He received the phone number of a friend of a friend’s younger sibling. With a brief text, they arranged a time and place. Reservations were in short supply around the holidays, and he booked a table at an Italian restaurant that wasn’t his top choice. Their faux flower centerpiece bothered him, but she enjoyed the eggplant parmesan with spinach and roe. When she suggested a nearby pub for drinks, he pretended not to have brought his car. The pub was packed, with only the uncomfortably high seats by the window available. They sat side by side, sipping dark lager sprinkled with cinnamon. The noise muffled her voice, but he offered her another round of drinks upon hearing, “On off-days . . . and I’m in an amateur theater group.”

        After tasting the dark lager, she ordered a pale lager for her second drink. A darts machine jingled. Outside the window, a Santa passed by with a handcart.

        Within three days, he got in touch with her again; by their fifth date, they were official. As the season changed, he came to know how punctual she was. She ponytailed her hair during meals, and whenever a peddler granny appeared, she bought some gum or chocolate and shared them with him. One evening, he sat in a small theater’s darkened auditorium with a flower bouquet. Twelve Angry Men was on stage, a play about twelve jurors disputing the verdict of a murder trial. He’d been aware of the theater classic since his university days. In the first vote, eleven jurors raised their hands to vote guilty. A single dissenter stood up. It was her.

        “It’s not easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.” 1

He felt as though their eyes met. The jurors debated for an hour and a half. By the end, they agreed that the accused boy was either innocent or at least couldn’t be proven guilty. He tucked the bouquet under his arm and gave a standing ovation. A few others slowly followed his lead.         He grew convinced that his memory of the clichéd Italian restaurant and noisy pub would stay with him. Sweet dreams. Sweet dreams. Lying in bed and exchanging those texts sometimes put him in a daze. He couldn’t grasp how something so extraordinary could emerge from simple moments. He would repeat the ringing vowels of her name as if counting woolly sheep. This would gently lull him into sleep.

It was high noon on a late summer Saturday. He stopped at a self-service car wash to clean his car inside and out before picking her up. He’d made it sound like a casual weekend getaway, yet his linen jacket in the backseat hid a ring in its pocket.

He’d explored options—everything from a sky lounge to a hot air balloon—but the moment required someplace more scenic, sincere, and timeless. The National Museum’s antiquities had an allure, but his other memories weighed on him. Gyeongbokgung Palace fell short since it was reconstructed; Angkor Wat was too tiring a trip. His thoughts turned to the sea. The sea had always been and always would be, and yet no two shores were alike. He booked a private villa overlooking a hidden rocky cove—without consulting her. He had no way of knowing if she would say yes to marriage. Proposing wasn’t a negotiation but a mission. To drop hints and offer the ring as a foregone conclusion would be absurd. She might waver and ask for some time, but more probably, she would offer her hand, her face flushed. With his nerves buzzing, he helped her into the passenger seat.

        He’d expected the weekend traffic, but it took far too long to exit the city. At the end of the bottleneck, they passed a warning triangle, skid marks, and a crushed sedan. Wanting to explain that the delay wasn’t his fault, he gave her a sheepish look, which she met with a soothing smile. Over sandwiches at the first rest stop, she mentioned wanting to visit a place on the way. A Catholic church deep in the mountains, built long ago by a group of persecuted believers. She said it was known for its brick façade and spire. He’d always hoped to meet someone who wasn’t religious, and as far as he knew, she didn’t attend church. Surely, it was just a cultural curiosity of sorts that made her suggest the stopover. The church lay somewhere in the vast space between their starting point and destination, taking them off the highway. The GPS led them to a signpost, and they covered the final ten minutes of the journey on foot.

        As they trudged through the overgrown path, he wondered if she might want a Catholic wedding. He hadn’t considered the possibility since neither of them were Catholic. Weddings seemed less meaningful than marriage proposals. A proposal was a private moment between the couple; a wedding, a public spectacle for others. When he factored in the extended family, the most practical options for a wedding venue seemed to be a university alumni hall or a company retreat center—the middle ground between common wedding halls and ritzy hotel ballrooms. He’d attended Catholic ceremonies in the past and admired their dramatic formality, but he didn’t see the need for a priest to exchange vows.

        The building appeared out of nowhere. A small, single-story structure of ash-colored bricks. A cross on the modest spire marked it as a church. Trees circled the structure, arching over the spire. A heritage plaque gave details of its construction, yet there wasn’t a soul in sight. Thick chains held the wooden doors shut. To chase away the eeriness, he blurted, “You could set it on fire and no one would know.”

Instead of responding, she snapped a few photos of the church with her phone. He wanted to clarify—he had no wish to see it burn but was simply concerned by the lack of upkeep, especially given public arsonists. He decided against it. They held hands and walked back down the path where crickets hummed. The sun began to set. He helped her into the car and called the villa’s manager to delay their arrival time. A two-hour drive would require two hours, after all. Should he propose in the morning, he wondered, to signal a new beginning? Was this trip the best time to propose at all? When he started the engine, the automatic headlights switched on.

        The road meandered through the mountains. Darkness swallowed everything beyond the headlights. No other cars passed by. His senses dulled, and he could barely tell if they were driving uphill or downhill. The road carried the car forward. He struggled to recall the rush of steering a machine larger and faster than himself.

        “Are you asleep?” he asked, turning toward the passenger seat. His voice was low enough to leave her undisturbed if she was, loud enough to reach her if she wasn’t. If she wasn’t asleep but wanted to be, she could pretend. Her head tilted toward the window, with only a part of her face visible. Then came a sharp shattering of glass.

        He pulled over without panicking and hit the hazard lights. She sat up.

        “Are we there?”

        Each time the hazard lights blinked, a few yards of road flickered into view. There was nothing in sight. He noticed that only his left headlight was on. He released his hands from the wheel and unfastened his seat belt. Muttering about the broken headlight, he stepped out of the car.

        The crisp breeze gave him a chill. The jacket in the back seat crossed his mind, but he shut the door and stepped ahead. The thick woods were pitch dark. Towering trees stood watch on either side of the road. He rounded the blinking left headlight and saw the cracked lens cover on the right. No other damage. He stepped toward the edge of the road. She called out as he passed by, her lips forming the words, “Everything okay?” He nodded and walked on toward the back of his car. The taillights blinked on and off, casting a scarlet glow on the path they’d taken. A few dozen yards later, he spotted a single shoe.

        A rubber shoe, navy-colored with a fur-lined ankle. Worn down but too intact to be thrown away. Based on the size and shape, a woman’s left shoe. He tried to make sense of the link between that shoe and the cracked headlight. He scanned the surroundings but saw no trace of the missing right pair or its owner. With no explanation for the fur-lined shoe, he began questioning why he was there. He eyed the dark, dense forest. With only the treetop spires faintly visible, he had no way of fathoming the depth of that wilderness. Each gust of wind swept through the leaves that ebbed and flowed like waves. Standing at the edge of that dark sea, he imagined the back of someone walking away without the one shoe they lost.

        The car door swung open. She stepped out but then leaned back inside. She draped his jacket over the shoulders of her dress and called his name. As she stood with her back to the taillights, her shadow stretched across the asphalt. A midnight road, in between locations and impossible to place. Trees swayed, crickets murmured. A woman wrapped in his jacket, voicing his name. A moment no one else would know, in a place where no one would ever stop.

        He walked toward her voice and stood before her. The unease that tugged at him seemed only natural given the weight of a marriage proposal. She had her hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket.

        “There’s something in there. Have a look.”

        “Uhm, okay,” she mumbled, pulling out the ring box.

        When she glanced up to ask, “Really?” he gave a nod.

        She shook her head. “No.”

        His mind reeled. Where did it go wrong? The leaves and crickets seemed silent. She held out the box to him.

        “You’re supposed to put it on me.”

        As he took the box, he somehow knew that the crucial, thirteenth trait had been met before he could even put it into words. He wanted to deliver the pivotal line perfectly, but he choked up. She held out her hand. The ring seemed a touch too loose.

“So you do know how to cry,” she said.

He drove with one headlight that night, and together, they reached the sea. The sheets were silky smooth, and her body warm to the touch. She whispered words into his ear that she usually kept to herself. Once she fell asleep, he lay gazing at the ring on her hand. Morning arrived. They had breakfast on the terrace with croissants, scrambled eggs, and hand-drip Kona coffee. Back to the office on Monday. He reviewed his team’s work and cut the error margin before clocking out. He transferred the dash cam file to his laptop, saving that footage of the dark road and his disoriented figure. Two months later, they opened a joint bank account and arranged a formal sanggyeollye to introduce each other’s parents. A few months after that, he purchased a snug new apartment near her workplace. His parents pitched in with money they had saved for him, but he quietly set it aside as a retirement fund for his parents and in-laws. She approved. It meant taking out a larger loan, but his income made it manageable. At times, he stared at his phone, half-expecting a call about something found by the roadside—but the call never came.

        Whenever people asked about her age or job, he looked for better ways to describe her. When they asked what about her had attracted him, he struggled to answer. After a futile search for the mot juste, he decided there was no need to explain.

        “She’s a pretty, smart, kind, fun girl who loves me.”

        “Lucky you,” they said, and he would insist it was a joke. An old university classmate, who made a questionable living as some sort of influencer or essayist, arrived at a meetup in a neon bucket hat. He opened the wedding invite and asked, “So, you love her?”

        “Of course.”

        He drove home. Left turn, right turn, a stop at the light, then a straight drive ahead. Of course, I love her. What’s love anyway? This is love. The real thing, right? Hah, that clown. He went shopping with her for appliances and picked out a dishwasher, dryer, and a Styler steam closet. They chose not to have a TV in their living room. The wedding invitations had come in every imaginable design, and the pre-wedding photoshoot turned out to be an elaborate ritual. He set out his guiding principle: whatever the bride wants. Sometimes, he tried to anticipate her wants before she even knew them as they checked off the items on their to-do list. On the list were RCIA and Pre-Cana courses, which would allow them to marry as Catholics. At last, in a small Catholic church downtown, he knelt beside her.

        Notes from the pipe organ reverberated in the air. The stained glass shimmered in the midday light. Her white wedding gown matched the lilies on the altar. She didn’t think it mattered, but he’d insisted she buy a wedding gown instead of renting one. The priest began his homily with, “Although I’ve never been married myself,” drawing giggles from the crowd. He’d heard the joke before, but this time, it landed even better. The priest addressed them by name and asked them to rise. Kneeling, he’d lost a part of his past; rising, he gained the entirety of his future. After the ceremony, she teased him for almost crying again. Their island honeymoon took them to a whole other world. When they returned, hauling their luggage into their new home, she asked, “Exhausted, right?” “Not at all,” he replied. The first lie he told in that house.

        On weekdays, they came home from work and sat across from each other at the dinner table. They relished their warm meals, with only brief exchanges such as “Okay” or “Now?” followed by smiles. She occasionally let out frustrations about work that he didn’t fully understand. Still, he could do the dishes, brew her tea, and run a bath for her. On Fridays, he took her on drives to the suburbs. On Saturdays, he pushed their shopping cart through the supermarket; on Sundays, he whipped up jjajang ramen as their Chapagetti chef. He crooned the old ad jingle from the kitchen—cha-ra-cha ra-cha-cha Chaaa-pa-getti. With a cheeky smack on his bottom, she quipped, “Had I seen this coming, I would’ve never!”

        They celebrated their first anniversary with a studio photoshoot. She wore her wedding gown again, and he put on the white trousers she’d gifted him. They made plans to have a child, had fun trying at first, but then became regulars at a clinic. Fertility devices and drugs. Yoga and meditation. A full year of treatment led to her first pregnancy. They lost the baby at eight weeks before they’d chosen a taemyeong nickname. She sobbed on the hospital bed for two days while he refilled the humidifier, peeled her fruit, and stroked the back of her hand. Four out of ten pregnancies, unnoticed ones included, ended in miscarriage, but the statistics did little to ease her pain. For the first time, he stopped by a Catholic church by himself on his way from work. He heard the choir singing as he sat on a bench just outside.

        Then came one night some months after his thirty-ninth birthday. Groans, screams, and cries. Everything blurred, but the nurse pressed something cold and sharp into his hands—scissors. He cut the umbilical cord. The nurse wiped the newborn and cheerfully announced the time of birth.

        “11:49 PM. It’s a girl. Eyes, nose, and mouth open. Two ears looking good. Fingers—one, two, three, four, five . . . Toes—one, two, three, four, five . . . No outward abnormalities. Congratulations.”

        Her tiny, wriggling hand wrapped around his finger. A person. Born of a person. He was humbled by the profound, brutal changes that had occurred in his wife’s body for ten months or perhaps longer. He cared for the baby before heading to work, and after scouring the internet all day for the best baby food and toys, he returned home. To lessen the disruption of his wife’s career, he broke the unwritten rule at his company that male employees didn’t take paternity leave. A few of his superiors made snide remarks, but he didn’t care. The company already had some two hundred employees in his department, with eleven of them in roles identical to his. Yet, he was the only person in the world on stage as his wife’s husband, and this emboldened him.

        To accommodate their fast-growing baby, he purchased a larger home. As they moved, he packed his bronze medal from the swim meet but threw away the handcrafted stool. He donated half the clothes he no longer wore and had an e-waste recycler pick up a few outdated electronics. The old laptop he discarded still had the dash cam footage saved on its hard drive, which he’d long since forgotten. On their first night in the new house, they hadn’t finished unpacking but decided to celebrate in their living room. The table stood among the unopened boxes, unassembled furniture, newspaper-wrapped house plants, and a ride-on toddler car. A single candle flickered on a small cake as he switched off the lights. Darkness, and the night outside, closed over the table. For a fleeting moment, he mourned the suffering of faraway people starving, weeping, wandering, colliding, and collapsing. Then his eyes fell on the table, his wife, and their baby in her arms, all bathed in the glow of one candle. As he moved to join them, it struck him that they hadn’t seen a single play together since they’d gotten married.

        “Wait,” she said.

        He stopped mid-step. “What is it?” he asked, and she stared as if trying to recall.

        “No, never mind.”

        He stepped into the Polaroid-worthy scene and sat by his wife and baby. The little girl reached out, her arms waving, only to burst into giggles. “What’s got you so happy?” His wife cooed the baby’s name and laughed along. He took courage from the thought that some things defied anticipation as they were simply called forth. He had a clear, simple task ahead. He blew out the candle and clapped in the dark.

Translated by Sunnie Chae

1. Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men: A Play in Three Acts by Sherman L. Sergel, Adapted from the Television Show by Reginald Rose (Chicago: The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1955).