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일만 번의 다이빙

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Ten Thousand Times of Diving

Lee Song Hyun

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

그린 레터

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Green Letter

Hwang Mogwa

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

럭키 펀치

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Lucky Punch

Lee Song Hyun

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

플라멩코 추는 남자

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

A MAN DANCING FLAMENCO

Heo Taeyeon

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

오늘은 좀 돌아가 볼까

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Let's Take the Long Way

Song Ji Hyun

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

슈퍼 루키

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Super Rookie

Kim Youngri

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

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Korean Literature Now

Vol. 72 Summer 2026 이미지

Magazine Vol. 72 Summer 2026 In his famous essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin argued that storytelling was a dying art. For him storytelling was tied to a way of life that was essentially coming to an end. Storytelling used to take place in an interpersonal “web” of relations in which the story functioned as a “gift” passed on orally from the storyteller to the listener. Stories told in this way would impart communal counsel and wisdom. In modernity, however, communities were no longer held together by oral stories representing communal life and experience. Indeed, after the shock of World War I, individuals were no longer able to make sense of and communicate their experience. The decline of storytelling, in this sense, was for Benjamin a symptom of the “productive forces of history.” Benjamin’s contrast between an older culture of oral storytelling and a modern print culture centered on private reading and information circulation generates the following questions: What happens to storytelling with the development of mass-printed literature? If, as Benjamin says, oral storytelling is no longer the prime narrative form for our historical moment, why are some Korean writers drawing their inspiration from folktales and other kinds of oral stories? For this summer issue, we invited Bora Chung and Kang Sungeun to comment on the stories they tell. As you will see, Chung and Kang draw on both Korean and non-Korean storytelling traditions, and suggest different ways in which storytelling continues to inform and enrich literary practice today. This summer, our featured writer is the poet An Heeyeon, who is best known for her lyrical poems that build on powerful images and enigmatic narrative turns. The eponymous poem in Walking the Carrot Field (2024), for instance, features a lyric speaker who encounters “a mole’s eyes” while standing on a “Carrot patch unfurling / under moonlight.” In the last two lines of the poem, the speaker describes the carrot field as “A long story only beginning / as a short one draws to an end.” We invite you to read ten poems specially selected by An Heeyeon for publication in this issue and to think about the stories embedded in them—stories featuring, in critic Song Hyungji’s words, acts of gift-giving and “meticulous care,” “rescue,” and “hope.” These are not stories of the kind Benjamin was discussing, yet they are in their own ways stories about finding counsel and community in the twenty-first century.In every issue of KLN, we try to bring you diverse voices from around the world. In this issue, we have an exceptional lineup of international writers joining us. We are pleased to share an essay on untranslatability by Deepa Bhasthi, who won the 2025 International Booker Prize with her translation of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a compelling collection of stories about Muslim girls and women in southern India. Hong Kong Canadian writer Sheung-King has given us a moving Bookshelf essay about masculinity and silence. In our Featured Review, acclaimed science fiction writer Sarah Pinsker discusses Anton Hur’s translation of Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, which was just released this past April, and tells us why short stories are in many ways better than novels.I would like to thank our special contributors, as well as all the other writers, reviewers, and translators who are helping us keep up to speed with all that is happening in the literary world, both within Korea and without. Lastly, I’d like to thank Joey Yu for giving us illustrations that invoke all the pleasures and wonders of storytelling. As Kang Sungeun puts it, stories “slow down time.” Have a wonderful, slow summer. Eun Kyung Min Editor-in-Chief

Poetry An Heeyeon Selected Poems White Space Write Someone trips on a stone, before your eyes, he’ll brush the dirt off his pants, get up You watch him standing for ages till he vanishes, and you learn half-drawn faces have even more expressions He bursts straight into your room, says the blizzard was fierce, huddles on your floor, asks it for heat, comes back covered in mud, breaks the window, screaming, “Why don’t you know how to think anything happy?” I want to hear news beyond my power to see: how many fingernail scratches the word cliff contains, how much more that means these submerged stairs must darken He departs for the poles in my stead, then I imagine the next scene for the people around the table I want just one book, nothing written inside, night, open my eyes, ride a swing about to snap, and every single second make new sides So Whose Bite Mark Is This? On a clattering train, no memory of boarding, we trusted we were headed somewhere Each envisioned in our hearts that shooting star Where the flame began When we buried a white dog in white snow, knell tolling low Days of nothing but white past the windows dragged on, suspecting what’s real can’t be seen Someone voiced concerns Have we jumped the rails? Was there ever really a meteor? People demanded proof Started doubting that whiteness Their faith ground the train from dash to halt Doors opened, people poured out Hundreds of huge boulders lay strewn helter-skelter Plenty of these in our own backyard! Coming from afar, we thought the winds would shift; the boulders slowly lost the light The train’s disappearing! someone shouted, alarmed, and we watched it wide-eyed Feet firmly grounded To return, now one had to believe in those black boulders’ beauty Enormous Life Though I dashed down the stairs I didn’t sprain my ankle Today such things amaze Do you think unhappiness is easy? The bus came on time but I arrived late, looking up how crackers differ from biscuits I let two summers stream by Or actually, set just their rainy days adrift It’ll all get caught, so why wonder about the bus stop’s feelings, whether spaces and traces each know the other exists? When you burn a log, its catching amazes, so I spend a whole evening staring at the fire It would have been nice had the flame burned only the log, would have been nice had the wind not helped, pot boiling and boiling Faced with this world’s roiling cadence, I keep missing buses Mysterious, the woodpecker’s bill, why we count rice in grains, the word ripple I don’t know what’s in the pot But I rehearse switching amazing’s to mysterious’s as I tend it Not being a quitter matters so much to me Listening Room We were discussing an island. They say there’s a museum that holds eighty thousand heartbeats. And a forest with little bells dangling from every branch. Imagine standing there some dark windy day. If it were you, where would you want to go first? Want to hear your own heartbeat recorded? Feel a thousand bells shaking at once over your head? You, downcast: Either’s fine for now, but after you die, it’ll all change. I scoop you from the current of thought and seat you on a chair. You know we’re alive right now? Let’s focus on reading the emotion in the sound. We talk again about every kind of sound in the world. Stare at black-and-white photos of a choir. Wish we could hear what they’re singing. Probably not a single one still alive. Taken in the early 1900s. They say sand shifting in the desert sounds like it’s weeping. Know what they use to make it sound like rain when they redub dialogue? You tell me not to answer, cover my mouth. Is it still the sound of rain if you know it’s fake? Don’t you think the sand was crying all the same? Am I broken now? Is this my body? I can’t believe it . . . If you go down that road, there’s no sound in the world that isn’t weeping. Drilling into the earth, chopping fish, trees falling in hurricanes . . . A fire helicopter passes overhead. This room for relistening to every sound in existence. I think there’s a big fire. You take my left arm and feel my pulse, like some quack. Still, I think this sound’s the world’s saddest. Because you can’t overdub this. The sound of blood swirling. Tempo of blood. Where’s the maestro? Overhead once more the chopper flies. In-Ear The current quickens · I’m heading toward Saneum · Ringed by five mountains, with a name meaning rich in shadow, whenever I say Saneum, Saneum aloud, I end up guessing the height I can scale when I go looking for that um tone · Even wondering, Does a height like that really exist, because San is San, -eum is -eum, with the current, with the current, I wanted to unfurl the road from San to -eum · I imagine a fire unquenched even underwater, believe in my buoyancy, comprehend derivation, and soon after, the current picks up · The mountains birth shade, shade births chill, and every gap in the night I clung to a boulder slightly smaller than me, waited for permission to just plop down, that it’s fine to love · Saneum, Saneum, imagined planting a tangerine tree there, sketching a railroad · Won’t something run down those rails? · Won’t a world be made? · Days dreaming of landing, straightaway a light gleams, warning not to deviate from the route · The current quickens · A locomotive called Morning’s spurred ceaselessly on · I lean on a boulder smaller than me, watching Saneum receding · The wind’s mouth blowing out every lit candle, torrential downpour, raking both cheeks, landscape of five mountains sinking into the sea · I don’t know how to slow this current, and Saneum fades to a sound that can never return, and as I clasp this boulder smaller than me, it and I, I and it, I wonder who’s really the smaller · Only paper, knowing the press of my pen, remembers I’m here · Sheet music notates each day that floats off on the current, but only the sound of treading the floor and returning becomes a glance piercing paper · But I am headed for Saneum · I’ll convince you why a tangerine tree shakes in my navel every time Saneum comes to mind · To shake your own tangerine with the sound only my ear hears, and by shaking, show you your Saneum · Gooseberry, Gooseberry I imagine wearing white sneakers, running full speed ahead To deliver them to you on your gooseberry farm Today, too, you receive a cold glare and bored, slice gooseberries in half Too sour to eat raw, hand-stinging From here to there heaped mountain-high, freighting carts, starting all over again You mutter, No one’s rescuing me I hope the world ends and you dream if you close your eyes opening them will bring you an ungooseberried world I kick off my shoes, lace them on you When I tell you to get them filthy as you want, you crush with the toe box one beadlike berry that fell to the floor You loathe how they squelch when you squish them This world barely cares when someone goes missing, and I mimic you, halving a berry, and then you advance like a bloodhound Those were great shoes You came back You did And as your back walks toward the orchard the seabed’s story makes you quake Gooseberry, gooseberry, growing in ripe Though beg you not ripen we may Gooseberries grow only on gooseberry trees And dreaming of others is vain To those who ask why on earth you’re humming, you answer, I’m back from world’s end The deep-sea fish swimming in your pocket, no one would believe Tonguing * Because I can’t believe I exist, I walk And walking I discover a deep black part, so truly black The moment I peer at it I feel like my body has caught on fire The zebra’s stripes, the pony’s smallness— are they cold? Are they hot? I too have spots only I can see Small specks caging the elephant of sadness I’m practicing my fingering Tonguing, tonguing When I lift my hand the sound of the beast weeping seeps out I might close, might open, might dam up, might flow, through force of will, my will What kind of performer will you be? To answer the world’s question I go on from fire to embers, embers to ash I exist, and therefore, noise I exist, and therefore, sheet music When I pull myself out from within me the birds perched on the wire fly off My instrument’s stored in its case Ready to take out at any time but not to resound any louder Its sound when shut alone in its box Torn summer wings secretly mended A road toward that sound with neither ash nor trace remaining The further it goes, the lusher the recording * Use of the tongue to control the flow of air when playing a wind instrument Dimensions Variable I’m contacted for evidence I have a soul and stand up Today I shall cook bell pepper Left alone, it’d go ghastlily rotten, yet plated it’s something to stare at, so I prep the equipment Just a plastic bread knife Fine if there’s no other options! Even if the knife cuts with bumps The key’s not misreading boll for bell And trusting when you slice there’ll be a time when it slices Like a caramel tree quakes in the wind What does a pepper become when sliced? Sliced pepper And what becomes of sliced pepper? A pepper you were going to do something with And what of that something you were going to do?A pointless pepper And what awaits a pointless pepper? What is not bell pepper becomes non-bell pepper And then? And then? Sings, like a caramel tree quakes in the wind I love peppers’ vegetal scent, their lack of heat for a capsicum Do you know the plant bears blossoms? They symbolize waste-of-breath Every time I get a dunning call to prove I have a soul I love my pepper blinking its big eyes, rolling to hide in corners What did you make? What is its genre? Well, this, this is my soul . . . Before I even start explaining, the door bangs shut, the ringing won’t quit Despair builds no stairs when it comes Toward Saneum 1. Terrified each night by buglers popping up, outpacing me, the rising intervals’ blaring shriek at my back, the trumpets’ cry, their cry, I plugged my ears, wanted to go back to being unborn Toward Saneum *where I first started, um, um, searching for a story not yet spun into words, I plunged into the water 2. It took time to get used to the watery dark, passing the vaguening gaps from yesterday to today to tomorrow Did I know what I was looking for? I harbored doubts, but as a coral reef neared I finally realized what I’d been looking for, wanted to find I shot out questions, How much can you hide me? Can you blot out my stripes, my colors? The colorful corals told me I was large, so large they couldn’t conceal me 3. I needed to find a bigger reef I want to hide That’s how I’ll come to understand myself, light passing through my hair Here, each time their too-many names touch my fingertips, they tickle awake I stand once more before the corals Are you the reef that can put up with me? —this time unspooling when all color’s leached from these bone-bundlelike bright white corals . . . um, a note, a tone, tale of how I waited for those corals I faced to be rediscovered and got this deep eye-gleam One tone, spark hanging from its tail, circles beneath the surface and disappears 4. White vase, white paper, white chalk, I think of clean white things Close my eyes, hold my breath, feeling nothing but ocean and me existing, submerged with neither an end nor even a drop of water All this happened though I merely jotted Saneum on a blank sheet of paper That moment, blank paper adrift on the sea became a white bird and flew off * Name of the place where my parents first met. It no longer exists. Walking the Carrot Field Here to there’s all your land, he said. I’ve never had so much. I close, then open my eyes. There it is. What’ll I plant? Hope whatever I do’s harmless. I blink, and something starts growing. I’m a grower. A warm color, orange. Gives vim, vigor. He said it won’t be long before I harvest the carrots. I was mulling whether I even want carrots and stumbled a second but trusted the spillage so small no one would notice. But the carrots were watching. The gleam in my eyes. Shining, cutting through me. My carrots dug into the soil, took in a mole. It had eyes. I’ll give you a bag. Take as many as you like. Too good to eat alone. I relished the crop, then gave up the land, on which Now I face the mole’s eyes Here I am Carrot patch unfurling under moonlight A long story only beginning as a short one draws to an end

Reviews With the Eyes of a Mole: On An Heeyeon’s Proposals Now that I’ve read Walking the Carrot Field (2024), when I think of An Heeyeon, I picture a person left alone in a vast carrot field after she’s given away all the carrots. Then I picture her without a carrot in sight, but instead face to face with a mole’s eyes. Then I wait with excitement for her to launch into her next long story—but also with a touch of anxiety. And after growing all those vim- and vigor-giving carrots, then handing them out for free to anyone around her, will she have any strength left for herself? I wonder about that because the speaker in the book’s title poem starts blending together with the speaker in “Listening Room,” who uses all her strength writing poems to “scoop [someone else] from the current” of sadness. Since An’s first collection, When Your Sadness Gets in the Way (2015), she has been right by the side of people riding “a swing about to snap,” watching them “tripping on stones,” standing on cliffs, or trapped underwater—and she touches their unseen sadness (as in her poem “White Space”). Ten years on, her attitude in Walking is much the same. The speaker of “Gooseberry, Gooseberry” takes off her own “white sneakers” and laces them onto the addressee, who dreams of “an ungooseberried world,” so that the former can briefly take the latter’s place on the farm: “I mimic you, halving a berry.” Just like that speaker, An suffers others’ sadness for them, offering up her poetry. She donates her poems for us to lace them up, run to the ends of the earth, then use the memory of the trip along the way to cope with this life. Walking the Carrot Field galvanizes her prior language of meticulous care for others’ sadness into an exhortation: “Let’s not give up living.” To taxonomize the book: some poems testify about the world, others ask it questions, and others still exclaim over it. But no matter what their mode of narration, in the end they all amount to proposals. “Marriage Proposal” testifies that “time’s molten ore will pour down our faces”: a suggestion that we deal with sadness together. “The Big Island” asks, “Can anything stop this boat?”; it requests we stop the boat together to save someone. “Enormous Life” exclaims, “Mysterious, the woodpecker’s bill,” recommending we live in awe of the many still-undiscovered mysteries filling this world we live in. In “Listening Room,” An reminds us that even with a fire helicopter passing overhead to save others, our greatest desperation can still come from hearing our loved ones’ blood swirl. She alerts us that we’re all still alive, so we can let our loved ones hear that sound. Her stance is that of rescuing those who have fallen into sadness, even as she acutely feels her own precarity and discomfort. That posture has remained steadfast from her first collection up to the present—evidence that it’s the foundation shaping her whole poetic world, not just a byproduct of individual events. In retrospect, placing “White Space” at the start of her debut collection foretold her future path. One of that poem’s portents is riding a “swing about to snap,” an image of approaching someone else’s sadness. The later lines about how “he departs for the poles in my stead” imply why she’d shoulder such acute sensitivity: those “poles” are extremes of sadness accessed only after difficulty. All An’s work up to this point comes from a sense of debt to the people who have suffered that sadness in her place. That indebtedness comes from the attitude in “Walking the Carrot Field,” a sense that growing and giving away carrots is a kind of calling or vocation. The first line, “Here to there’s all your land,” implies the speaker got “so much” from someone else, who told her “it won’t be long before [you] harvest the carrots.” The speaker raises carrots in the place of that “someone else,” who at a glance seems like the Absolute. She grows and shares the strength to live in the place of those whose lives are harder. And if she does so from a sense of indebtedness, that fact also lets us infer why she’s tried so hard till now to be just “one single person,” using poetry both to look deeply into others’ sadness and also to rescue them from it. That desperate urgency may scarcely be legible in her poems’ beautiful sentences and gentle style. But that fact merely attests the intensity of her hope that her words might somehow reach others intact and whole. Convincing someone rather than pressuring them requires even more strength than simply ordering them to do something. And that returns me to my earlier question: what kind of strength does she have left, especially for herself? Which is to say that at the same time as I suspect An, just like her speaker in “Walking the Carrot Field” complied gladly and swiftly with the vocation handed to her when she says “I was mulling whether I even want carrots and stumbled a second,” I falter right alongside her. But it didn’t take me long to realize my fears were unfounded. An’s newest poems find that speaker still growing and sharing carrots, just like before. The narrator of the two-poem series “Toward Saneum” and “In-Ear” returns to Saneum, a place that existed before she was born, and uses the music she hears there to make others see their own respective Saneums: “To shake your own tangerine [tree] with the sound only my ear hears, and by shaking, show you your Saneum.” The eponymous poem tells us Saneum has disappeared, is invisible to the eye, but exists forever in memory. The closer the speaker draws, the more she learns about some part of herself that resembles Saneum: real yet unseen, or something she’s tried not to see. An depicts this journey, seeking to expose an inner self “not yet spun into words,” with a Korean homophone: eum can mean “sound,” but the -eum in “Saneum” means “shade.” The person who stammers “um, um” in “Toward Saneum” transforms into a person who at all costs makes “the sound of treading the floor” of her deepest self. The poem “Tonguing” shows her coming to perform at last on the instrument of her wounded body. She confidently takes her hand from the hole she’d previously covered from others’ view, and now opens and closes her body naturally, letting the wound pool and flow; she persists in offering the music that confidence creates to persuade others again. And that confidence and persistence return me to “Walking the Carrot Field.” In the wake of her previous collection, An has started telling her own story, which should lead us to read more closely the part of the poem where she confirms, “Here I am,” after giving away her carrots. That statement comes right after she “face[s] / the mole’s eyes.” The mole, its eyesight weak, nevertheless has senses with which to hunt for carrots. Yet she lifts it up and notices, “It had eyes.” Taking these two observations together suggests that the speaker, who has long wanted “to hear news beyond my power to see,” now has eyes like the mole’s, which can see the invisible (“White Space”). The fact that this happens only after she gives away all the carrots, and that her new eyes let her confirm her own existence, matters. Sharing her strength wins An eyes that notice her own sadness, comfort her, and ultimately affirm her own being. As “Tonguing” puts it, “I exist, and / therefore, noise.” I think I claimed to believe in the firmness behind her proposals, but didn’t actually put enough faith in them—that the person doing the proposing has a greater strength than anyone else’s. Doesn’t the form of the proposal mean moving yourself so that you can move others? For moving others means suggesting you move, too. It’s trendy lately in Korea to say, “Neo-reul mitneun na-reul mideo”: “I trust you—so trust me.” You say it to give hope to the person you’re talking to. But now, I see how the moment you say that, you also have to believe in yourself. Because such strength is invisible, you can’t give “evidence” for it (“Dimensions Variable”), and its invisibility means someone might voice “concerns” (“So Whose Bite Mark Is This?”). But An Heeyeon, as if trying to make sure her words reach even those people, is expanding her range of vision to include herself as well, to persuade even more people with the greater strength she has drawn up. Her own “long story” may be “only beginning.” KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: · An Heeyeon, “Walking the Carrot Field,” ”Listening Room,” “Gooseberry, Gooseberry,” “Marriage Proposal,” “The Big Island,” “Enormous Life,” “The Meaning of Sympathy,“ in Walking the Carrot · Field (Munhakdongne, 2024)안희연, 「당근밭 걷기」, 「청음실」, 「구스베리 구스베리 익어가네」, 「청혼」, 「본섬」, 「굉장한 삶」, 「긍휼의 뜻」, 『당근밭 걷기』 (문학동네, 2024) · An Heeyeon, “White Space” and “So Whose Bite Mark Is This?,” in When Your Sadness Gets in the Way (Changbi, 2015) 안희연, 「백색 공간」, 「그럼 이건 누구의 이빨 자국이지?」, 『너의 슬픔이 끼어들 때』 (창비, 2015) · An Heeyeon, “Toward Saneum,” Haksan Munhak 130 (Haksan Munhak, 2025)안희연, 「산음으로」, 『학산문학』 130호 (학산문학사, 2025) · An Heeyeon, “In-Ear,” Contemporary Literature 853 (Hyundae Munhak, 2026)안희연, 「인이어」, 『현대문학』 853호 (현대문학, 2026) · An Heeyeon, “Tonguing,” Littor 54 (Minumsa, 2025) 안희연, 「텅잉」, 『릿터』 54호 (민음사 2025) · An Heeyeon, “Dimensions Variable,” Poetry & Prose 123 (Siwa-Sanmun, 2024)안희연, 「가변 설치」, 『시와산문』 123호 (도서출판 시와산문사, 2024)

Fiction When Our Enemies Climb the Mountain What was the newbie’s name again? The question came to Noah across several partitions and desks. She stood up and peeked over her own partition, an ambiguous color she couldn’t quite call brown or beige. “It’s Lee Noah,” she said. The section manager scanned her up and down with his sleepy-dog eyes. “Right . . . ” he said. Then he told her to head out with Assistant Manager Park. Noah nodded and glanced over at the desk farthest down the line. On the other side of that partition was a round, hunched back clad in green. That back belonged to someone with whom Noah had never conversed until now. After a moment, Park Nokwon came over. “Bring your things. We’ll head straight home from there.” Nokwon drove a white Hyundai Porter, the entire cargo bed of which was carefully covered with a slick, waterproof tarp. Clothes and handbags and years-old file folders were heaped up on the passenger seat. Nokwon gathered them all and shoved them in the back. Inside, the truck smelled of soil and pine resin. Some elderly people on a bench near the parking lot watched them get into the truck and take off. Every afternoon, those old folks came wearing only lightweight coats or rain slickers to the township office and walked through the parking lot to get to that bench, where they sat until sundown. Noah wasn’t sure what business they had there. She guessed they must have been idling the hours away. That was, after all, the most popular pastime among the residents of this small town. Letting time slip past them, slowly and relentlessly, while they watched it go by, unfazed. The township office was on the western end of town. If you left through the front gate and headed east, you would come upon a bridge that spanned a gray river. If you crossed that bridge, you’d be on the national highway. Both sides of the road were sparsely dotted with pale yellow fields and paddies, greenhouses, and prefabricated buildings with unknown purposes. Noah glanced over at the GPS screen, which said they were about a half hour away from the observatory. It had been silent inside the car ever since they left the office. Nokwon didn’t turn on any music or even the radio. It was hard to imagine her listening to either. Careful not to shoot her a sideways glance even by accident, Noah turned toward the window. “Noah.” Startled, she whipped around and found herself staring at Nokwon’s side profile full-on. Nokwon’s face was dumpy, like it had been shaped out of mud. She looked at once extremely old for her age and like she was just barely out of her teens. “Have you heard of the observatory before?” she asked. Noah said she had. Several times, in fact. Among all the petty civil complaints that came through the township office, she found the ones about the observatory especially fascinating. The townsfolk had a lot to say about the people living there. They were too noisy, they were as quiet as death, no one knew what they were thinking, they were obviously up to no good . . . According to the townsfolk, even as the people at the observatory cleaned up litter on the mountains, wandered through the forests and fields, sat around in circles and sang songs, painted the exterior of the abandoned building, tore down that old barbed-wire fence, and flashed smiles at passing hikers, there were also times when they would start shouting out of nowhere at the top of their lungs. Get out of here! This is private property! Sometimes, the people filing complaints mimicked the sound of their voices. Their impressions were either low and heavy, or else sharp and pitchy like cracking ice. Either way, not pleasant to hear. The traffic light shone yellow. As the truck slowed to a stop, Noah shouted. “Ah!” She’d spotted something behind the traffic light pole. A dark brown flock was clamoring in the middle of an open field. “Eagles,” Noah exclaimed. “Must be lunchtime,” Nokwon said, peering through the window on the passenger side. “Have you never seen one before?” “It’s my first time seeing them in the wild.” Noah lowered the window a little. Faint chitters and the smell of bird shit commingled and entered through the crack. The smell reminded Noah of another one of the locals’ complaints. The one about the flock of eagles that lingered around the food manufacturer on the outskirts of town. It seemed that everybody in a small town had something to say about the smell and sound of birds. Every winter, the eagles flew 3,000 kilometers to the town from Mongolia. They made regular visits to the food plant, scavenging in the early dawn among the discarded scraps and offal of cows and pigs. On weekends, a few citizen groups would come out, cameras in tow, hauling more animal carcasses in their Starex minivans or trucks to scatter the remains across the paddies and fields. Residents who lived near the food plant begged the city to do something about the eagles’ shit and noise. Yet there were others who pleaded for the city to ensure that the eagles would never leave. They said the town generated a good amount of tourism revenue from all the people who traveled there to feed the birds or else to birdwatch and take pictures. “Goodness, they’re huge,” Noah muttered. On a few different occasions, she had seen jokes about the eagles of Gangwon-do posted online. They always seemed drawn from the same playbook. Like the one about seeing a little kid or an older person on the street in fur clothes, but when you go up to them and try to start a conversation, they just spread their wings and fly away. Seeing the eagles in real life, Noah could understand where the jokes were coming from. The birds really were shockingly huge, and there was something weirdly human about them. Especially their hunched, rounded shoulders and drooping necks. The traffic light changed, and the truck peeled off again. Noah felt embarrassed about the sound she’d made just then in her excitement. She shut her mouth and rolled up the window just as Nokwon spoke again. “This may be a bit of a sensitive question, but I think I should ask.” The truck traced wide curves along the winding road. Nokwon seemed to be stalling even more than earlier. As if she were waiting for the words to rise slowly to the surface of the water, revealing their distinct shapes. “Does your name . . . happen to have a religious meaning?”“Oh. Yes, it does. My mother is a Protestant.” Nokwon bobbed her head. In the silence that settled over them again, Noah tried to guess what she would say next. With her left hand, she slowly picked at the fingernail on her right thumb. Would Nokwon praise her name or attack it? Noah wasn’t exactly looking forward to either response. Questions about her name had always made her anxious. That uneasiness was one of the reasons she had long wanted a name change. But what Nokwon said next fell neither on the side of praise nor censure. Instead, she tossed Noah a complete curveball of a question. “When we get to the observatory and meet the people there, if we have to introduce ourselves by name, could you use an alias? Would that be all right?”“Oh, sure,” said Noah. “That’s no problem, but . . . ”“The people there are sensitive about other religions,” Nokwon explained. A green sign appeared, pointing toward the observatory beyond the guardrail. Noah nodded slowly. At last, she could understand where the anxiety that permeated the voices of all the townsfolk who had filed civil complaints stemmed from. The truck exited the highway and drove straight along the bypass marked with a road sign. The endlessly winding route soon transformed into a mountain road. The glaring potholes dinting the asphalt suggested the road had long been neglected. Once they had driven about ten minutes uphill, a cylindrical building emerged between the gaps in the overgrown foliage. At a glance, the building looked like a tall, white lighthouse. When they passed the sign at the parking lot entrance, a domed roof that gleamed like tinfoil and a rectangular building attached to the side of the rounded one also came into view.Nokwon parked the truck. Yet another sign stood near the stone steps that led inside. At one point, that sign had borne the observatory’s name, but now it was coated in black paint. “Noah, this is your first time working offsite, isn’t it?”“It is.” As soon as they got out of the car, the wind burrowed into the napes of their necks. The air was twice as cold as it had been lower down the mountain and made their hair stand on end. Noah looked behind her. Fierce streaks of white cut across the faces of the mountains that lay beyond the observatory. Her mother’s voice rang in her ears. It always snowed in Gangwon-do starting from October. Remember? Could you really spend the rest of your life in a place like that? You’re so sensitive to the cold as it is. Nokwon checked once again that the tarp over the cargo bed was secure. “Just think of today as a time to learn the ropes,” she said. “Watch what I do. If someone starts a conversation with you, keep it short.” “Will do,” Noah said, sniffling. Nokwon handed her a scarf from the backseat. Noah tried to turn it down several times before accepting. The scarf, too, smelled of soil and resin. Nokwon started up the stairs first. Noah followed close behind. As they drew nearer to the building, they spotted several figures behind the floor-to-ceiling window. Standing in a row, the shadows were watching the two of them. At last, one of them moved, and the door to the main entrance swung open. A woman in a dark fur coat stood in the doorway. She was small in stature with greasy black hair that fell nearly to her waist. “Park Nokwon!” Her voice pierced through the two buildings, the staircase, and the mountain itself before landing in front of them. The woman came running toward them with small, quick steps. By the time the echoes died down, she was standing right before their eyes. She clasped Nokwon’s hands in her own. No one had ever treated Nokwon with such uninhibited familiarity, not at the township office or anywhere else. The woman pumped Nokwon’s hands up and down as she spoke. “It’s been ages. So good to see you. The roads weren’t frozen on your way here, were they? Temperatures have plummeted lately. Aren’t you cold? Come on inside. I’ll fetch you some tea.”Then she turned to Noah. When Noah took a step back, the woman quickly closed the distance and started in on her, too. “I believe it’s our first time meeting. Are you a new hire? What’s your name?” The woman held out her hand. Instantly, the gesture became a handshake. Noah took pains not to stumble over her words. “Pleased to meet you. I joined the township office last month. My name is Jeong Seonhwa.” It was her mother’s name. Even she wasn’t sure why this was the first name to come to mind, but it seemed fitting. Old-fashioned as it was, her mother’s name was unassuming. Perfect for hiding her true identity, and familiar enough from years of hearing it said that it rolled right off the tongue. Which was why, when she met Nokwon’s eyes over the woman’s shoulder, she was startled. She couldn’t understand what emotion she was seeing in her colleague’s glare. Likewise, she had no idea why the woman in front of her who had initiated the handshake then opened her mouth and let out a long exhale. All Noah knew was that she must have accidentally knocked something over or spilled something out. She felt a chill graze the nape of her neck again. “How fascinating,” the woman said at last. “What an amazing coincidence. My name is Seonhwa, too.” Seonhwa ascended the stairs with the two women on either side of her—to be precise, she had one arm locked around one of Nokwon’s arms and the other around one of Noah’s. The glass door to the observatory opened automatically. The warmth inside the building nestled its way in between them. The place smelled of detergent and bleach. The lobby was divided into two areas: the left side, which boasted a backless bench, and the right side, where a tall desk that had once served as a reception counter was located. Behind the desk was a white staircase that led upstairs. Several people in work clothes were seated on the bench. They were the ones who had been watching Nokwon and Noah through the huge window moments earlier. From a woman with frosty white hair and drooping eyelids to a young man who looked like he’d just graduated high school, they were a group of about six people who appeared to have absolutely nothing in common. All of them sat up ramrod straight, their brows and the corners of their mouths taut and perfectly straight, which made them look like mannequins. Beside them were all sorts of cleaning supplies—a red washbasin with a neat pile of rag mops inside, a bigger mop leaned up against the wall, an industrial vacuum cleaner, the works. “It’s a bit hectic around here, isn’t it?” Seonhwa said. “Mondays are our big cleaning days.” She led Nokwon and Noah into a small room between the staircase and the desk. She mentioned that the space had originally been used as a staff lounge. On the middle shelf of the otherwise empty cupboard sat a box of coffee grounds and tea leaves. Seonhwa took a coffeepot out of the cabinet under the sink, chatting nonstop as she boiled water.“I stocked up on a nice variety while I was in town. And thank goodness I did. Which do you prefer—caffeinated or decaf? If you don’t have a strong preference, I can prepare one of my favorites for you . . . It has an especially nice aroma.” Noah furtively studied Seonhwa’s face as she accepted the teacup the other woman handed her. Just as with Nokwon, it was hard to guess Seonhwa’s age. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were deep, but her cheeks and lips were as rosy as a teenager’s. Her unwavering cheeriness made her look like a bright-eyed college first-year.The tea was suitably warm and smelled strongly of grass. Noah tipped back her teacup and snuck a glance straight ahead. Nokwon was leaning against the cupboard opposite Noah, sipping her own tea. In the truck, she had spouted all those warnings about using an alias and keeping conversations short, but now that they were in the observatory, she looked very much at ease. Noah would even venture to say she was behaving more naturally than she did at the township office. Nokwon didn’t say a word until Seonhwa had led them back to the lobby. Only when Seonhwa started saying something to the people on the bench did Nokwon sidle up to Noah and hurriedly whisper, “Don’t hold eye contact for too long.” It was a directive without an obvious subject or object. With whom she was supposed to avoid eye contact, roughly how much time spent looking at someone counted as too long—not one thing about the instructions was clear. And there was no chance to ask follow-up questions because, right then, Seonhwa turned back to them. She pointed at the bench and introduced the people seated there one at a time—men and women, elders and children, straight-backed and tight-lipped in their head towels and aprons. The whole time Seonhwa was speaking, Noah kept her eyes on the ground and merely nodded. “You all met Park Nokwon last time, didn’t you?” When the people on the bench answered that they had, Seonhwa gestured to Noah with both hands, beaming. “And this—this is Jeong Seonhwa. She has the exact same name as me. Isn’t that neat? I was so surprised.” All eyes in the lobby turned to Noah. She could feel their gazes on her with her entire body. She no longer needed to consciously adhere to Nokwon’s earlier command. She needed to concentrate all her efforts on training her expression and could barely manage that, let alone look anyone in the eye. Nokwon took a step toward her. The person who seemed so distant and awkward around her at the township office felt like her guardian here. So much so that Noah had to actively resist the urge to grab onto Nokwon’s sleeve or arm. “Seonhwa,” Nokwon said. “We came today because of some civil complaints. We keep getting them at the township office.”“Yes, yes, go on.” Seonhwa’s voice was truly pleasant to listen to. It made Nokwon’s seem pitiful in comparison. In a shrill voice that cracked often, Nokwon relayed the contents of the complaints that had been made. She deftly pruned and trimmed the contradictory parts, and her tone was polite and refined. In sum, residents had complained that in the last several weeks, the group at the observatory had been unusually rowdy, doing things that filled the air with a burning smell as if they were stoking fires, and flashing light beams into the sky. Residents who had come up to the mountains early in the morning to forage for wild vegetables were startled when the people from the observatory appeared wielding scythes or weed trimmers, giving the townspeople such a scare that their hearts dropped to their stomachs. Some of the complainants had even appealed for clarification on the purpose behind the group’s stay at the observatory . . . With that, Nokwon ended her report and took another sip of tea. Her slurping echoed throughout the lobby. The people from the observatory did not say a word, nor did their expressions change in the slightest; they simply stared at Noah and Nokwon. Noah once again lowered her eyes. Seonhwa said they would need time to discuss the matter amongst themselves, so Nokwon and Noah returned to the staff lounge to wait. They could hear whispering on the other side of the walls. Noah glanced over at Nokwon several times. She was waiting to hear something that might shed a bit more light on their current situation, but Nokwon said nothing. She merely held her teacup, still faintly steaming, and stared at the little window behind the lounge sink. Seonhwa returned shortly after. She suggested they all have a quick chat upstairs. Nokwon stood first. Noah followed, glancing over at the window Nokwon had just been staring at mere moments earlier. When she stood directly in front of the sink, she could see down to the parking lot below the mountain woods. In the center of the lot sat Nokwon’s truck, covered in that blue tarp. Someone was approaching the vehicle. That someone wore a white sweater, a varsity jacket, and a head towel. Noah had seen that outfit earlier in the lobby. The side of the person’s face, scarred from acne, also looked familiar. The boy stood in front of the truck and hawked up spit. He was holding something long and curved in his hand. It looked like a scythe. “Seonhwa!” Startled, Noah whipped around. There was Seonhwa, who had called her by their apparently shared name, smiling at her. “This way, please,” she said, gesturing toward the staircase at the end of the lobby. When Noah glanced out the window again, the boy was already gone. On the walls as they climbed the stairs were photographs that had faded blue. Most of them were pictures of the heavens. The dynamic light of Capella as observed in December, the pale or blue-tinged glow of the Pleiades star cluster, the moon’s craters and Jupiter’s stripes—all the labels and dates beneath each photo were from over a decade earlier. Noah had heard that the people currently living here purchased the observatory and its surrounding land about a year ago. She thought about the complaints from the town’s residents claiming that during that time, the atmosphere in the mountains had grown immensely tumultuous. “I’m not convinced this so-called tumultuousness is because of us,” Seonhwa said as she made her way up the spiral staircase. “As you know, Nokwon, what we’ve done here is essentially no different from volunteer work. Don’t you remember? How we cleared all the weeds on these grounds, cleaned up the mountains of trash that had piled up, and got rid of the wild animal traps installed here ages ago—all those things? You know it, too, don’t you? We’ve done what any good neighbor would. But if people are complaining that these good deeds have made things tumultuous here, well, we have nothing to say to that.” She pushed hard against the iron door at the top of the staircase. It opened with the scraping of the hinges. Inside, they were all bathed from head to toe in a clean, white light. The moment Noah stepped foot into that light, she realized she had never been to an observatory before. She had only seen pictures or videos. The observation deck was much more crowded than she’d imagined and much brighter than anticipated. Light poured in through the tall glass windows that reached up to the domed roof, illuminating the hall, the three of them, and the huge telescope in the center of the room. The body of the telescope gleamed white in the sunlight. The other telescopes all around them had been covered in silver cloth and looked like ghosts in a puppet show. Seonhwa crossed the room, weaving around the telescopes as she went. She explained all sorts of things to Noah and Nokwon as they trailed after her. She spoke as if she were introducing the trees and shrubs in a garden. This here is a catadioptric telescope, that one is a refracting telescope, that one we mainly use for observing Jupiter, and this one we use to look at star clusters—Nokwon cut in. “You said you and the others spoke earlier. What did you all conclude?”“Oh, about that . . . ” Seonhwa stopped short. Right in front of the telescope in the center of the room. She looked back and forth between Nokwon and Noah. When her gaze landed on Noah again, it lingered for a long time before wandering off into the air. Noah herself couldn’t understand why this felt like such a loss. “We’re leaving in two weeks,” Seonhwa said. “For those two weeks, we’ll be more careful. But our prayer meetings, cleanups, patrols, and such can’t be helped. That’s what we came here to do, after all. If any more complaints come in, please tell the townspeople that everything will be resolved in two weeks’ time.”“Why two weeks?” Nokwon asked, and Seonhwa chuckled.“We always planned to stay here only until then. We have to make our living, too, you know. How could we possibly stay here forever?” Nokwon nodded. There were no further questions. She left the deck first. Noah followed. As quick as their steps were, Seonhwa soon caught up to them. In one swift motion, like gliding over ice, she caught Noah by the arm. “Seonhwa,” she said.“Yes.”“It feels so strange to keep calling someone else by my name.” Seonhwa laughed again. Noah said nothing. Seonhwa rubbed her hands up and down Noah’s arm. Unlike her gentle way of speaking and her soft steps, her grip was awfully strong. She brought her face close to Noah’s and whispered. “Seonhwa, we’re leaving in two weeks. The morning of the thirteenth. You should come by in the evening on the twelfth. We’re planning to hold a big event. It’ll be fun, and so very beautiful. An event unlike any other you’ll ever see. You’ll come by, won’t you?” The door leading outside was flung wide open. Nokwon had put down the doorstop. Noah hurried out once Seonhwa released her arm. Nokwon stood at the bottom of the staircase looking up at the two of them. Seonhwa had followed Noah out and whispered one more thing to her—“You’ll get the royal treatment if you do come”—before she took off down the stairs. Noah stood frozen in place. Just like when she had first gotten out of the truck and set foot in that parking lot up in the mountains, her entire body shuddered. When they reached the parking lot again, the sky was already dark. A flock of red-tinged clouds was covering the forest treetops. Beneath the clouds sat the truck. One of the front tires and one of the back tires had been slashed. What stood out was the tattered look of the rubber, as if the tires had been slit several times with a knife, not merely punctured. Seonhwa came up to them and inspected the tires. She swept her long hair up into a bun, squatted in front of one of the tires, and stroked the gashes with her finger. She turned to Nokwon. “This doesn’t look good,” she said. “How on earth did this happen? I can’t tell if it’s the work of a wild animal or a madman . . . ” Noah took a step forward. She thought about mentioning the boy she had seen outside the window in the lounge earlier, telling Seonhwa that she had gotten a clear look at his white sweater and the round back of his head, even the scythe in his hand. But Nokwon’s hand shot out in front of her. As Noah faltered, Nokwon went around to the back of the truck. She snatched off the tarp and began rolling it up. Soon, the stack of spare tires tucked into a corner of the cargo bed came into view. The whole time Nokwon was replacing the tires, the parking lot remained eerily silent. Not even the sound of branches knocking against each other in the wind or the cries of birds could be heard. At some point, all the people from the lobby came to stand around them in the parking lot. They formed a semicircle around the truck. Noah quickly spotted the boy in the white sweater. He had both hands stuffed in his pockets as he watched Nokwon change the tires. His face was perfectly blank. Meanwhile, Seonhwa looked like she was biting back a laugh. She sat crouched beside the truck, also watching Nokwon work. She didn’t seem to care that her fur coat was dragging on the half-frozen ground. When Nokwon stood up at long last, Seonhwa hurried over to her as if to embrace her. “Park Nokwon,” she said.“Yes.” “When we leave here, I’ll think of you often. I’m going to miss you.”Nokwon looked down at her. She drew in several breaths before she said, “Me, too.” As they got in the truck and the whole time they were leaving the parking lot, Seonhwa didn’t stop waving goodbye. As expected, the people behind her stayed put. They drew closer like a flock of birds, eyes fixed on Noah and Nokwon as if trying to etch the two of them deeply into their memories. Two weeks went by in a flash. In that time, Noah was slammed with all kinds of complaints, paperwork, and questions. Most of the questions had to do with the business trip she and Park Nokwon had gone on. Despite the fact that it had been several years since she was appointed to her post, hardly any employees regularly chatted with Nokwon. Even conversations about work were usually kept to the point. Seeing her and Noah sitting side by side and eating together the day after their trip, several people outright gasped in shock and quietly approached Noah later to ask: What was Assistant Manager Park like? Wasn’t it uncomfortable working with her? Noah always gave more or less the same answer. No, it wasn’t. She was kind. She taught me a lot. None of it was untrue. That whole time at the observatory, Nokwon had acted as Noah’s caretaker, albeit half-heartedly, and Noah had followed her around, all but clinging to her sleeve. However, there was something odd about what Nokwon had said as they were heading back down the mountain. That conversation was the one part of the story Noah didn’t tell anyone. That day, Nokwon had asked: Will you go? Sorry? I heard Seonhwa earlier. Inviting you up there on the twelfth. Oh, my. You have excellent hearing, Assistant Manager Park. Nokwon turned the steering wheel, not a hint of laughter on her face. Only after the mountain road transitioned into the regular road mottled with light and noise did she speak again. If you want to go, I’ll help you. Noah looked over at her blankly. Nokwon went on. I have no ties to the people at the observatory. That must be why they destroyed my tires, right? So I’m just asking your opinion. Do you want to go? Nokwon pulled up in front of Noah’s house. She lived in a newer low-rise apartment building about a fifteen-minute walk from the township office. Roughly half the apartments in the building, which was made up of only studios and two-bedrooms, still sat empty. The day Noah and her mother showed up in the moving truck, her mother had taken a look around her apartment, which still smelled of wallpaper glue, and said: Are you really going to live here? That day, too, Noah kept her mouth shut for a long time. But on her move-in day and that day in the car with Nokwon as well, the answer had been clear to her. It lingered, clear as anything, in her ears and eyes and on the tip of her tongue. Yes, I want to go, Noah said. I’m curious. Nokwon studied her face. For a moment so brief Noah nearly missed it, Nokwon seemed to flash a smile. All right, then, she said. I’ll be in touch soon. Have a nice weekend. But the weekend went by, and Nokwon did not get in touch. The following week was no different. After Noah made several attempts to bring up that day over lunch before stopping herself each time, Nokwon finally gave her a phone number. It was the number of a senior officer at the local precinct. “Who is this?” Noah asked, but all Nokwon said in reply was, “You’ll meet him the day after tomorrow. I’ll go with you, too.” Where exactly were they going, and why did Noah need a cop’s phone number? Once again, Nokwon failed to share even one proper piece of information. She told Noah she would be around to pick her up in the evening and to dress warmly. That was all. Noah didn’t ask any more questions. She wondered if it might be better to just let herself be swept along. On Sunday evening, Noah woke to the flash of police lights outside her window. Just before then, she had been dreaming. About birds. The observatory and the national highway, the township office and her apartment building all bled into one image that unfolded before her eyes. The birds flew over the tangled heart of downtown. The sound of their wings beating against the air like winter blankets being dusted off could be heard loud and clear all the way on the ground. The sound grew closer and closer, as if it would soon strike her eardrums. When Noah opened her eyes to the flash of red and blue lights, her surroundings were utterly silent. She checked her phone and saw that she had three missed calls. All from Nokwon. Noah scrambled to put on a jacket and a scarf and hurried downstairs. Nokwon was standing outside the building. Behind her was a patrol car. “Were you asleep?”“Sorry. I didn’t know when you were coming, so . . . ”“Get in the back.” There was a man already in the backseat. He looked to be around Noah’s age. The armbands on the shoulders of his thick, light gray jacket stood out starkly. The design consisted of several overlapping images—a yellow sea eagle, a set of scales, a rose of Sharon. The man held out his hand and said, “I’m Cho Namwook, senior officer.” The policeman in the driver seat was a bit older. Nokwon got into the passenger seat beside him. The car pulled off as Noah and Namwook shook hands in the back. On their way to the observatory, Namwook explained the next steps. It turned out, there was hardly anything for the women to do. Nokwon had been to the observatory several times and so was going to inform the officers about the layout and geography of the place, and if they needed to interview witnesses, the officers would request Noah and Nokwon’s cooperation throughout that process. “What kinds of witnesses?” Noah asked.“According to what Assistant Manager Park has told us . . . There is a high possibility that the event being held tonight is in violation of the law.” Noah looked straight ahead. The crown of Nokwon’s head was perfectly still where it peeked over the headrest. Outside the car window, the landscape was much more unmoving and desolate than last time. The snow that had fallen intermittently over the past two weeks sat piled up like cobwebs on the branches and roots of the trees. The patrol car rattled up the mountain road. Even after they had passed the observatory, they drove up a long incline, coming to a stop where the road leveled out again. They were on a shoulder of the road bordering the mountainside. Nokwon turned around in her seat. “Noah. The sergeant and I will scope out the area around the observatory first. You and Officer Cho can head in together.” Nokwon and the sergeant got out of the car. They cut off the police lights and started on foot back down the road they had all just come up. Noah absently watched their retreating backs. She felt as if she were still in a dream. Beside her, Namwook asked, “Should we get going, too?” After locking the car door behind them, Namwook cut on his flashlight and shone it on the path ahead. They headed in the opposite direction of Nokwon and the sergeant. The mountains in the dead of night were far colder and darker than they had been two weeks prior. Even the beam from the flashlight looked like it would freeze over in midair. Noah and Namwook made their way up the mountain, hunched into themselves all the while. Once they were out of the car, Namwook kept his mouth shut. It seemed now that he’d explained the situation, he didn’t have much else to say. Noah, of course, didn’t bother him with questions. She was brimming with things she wanted to know, but she wasn’t sure that she could ask them aloud. She was also afraid of ending up on the receiving end of his questions. Questions like: What was she doing climbing this mountain in the middle of the night? The truth was, there was only one reason. And that was because of what the woman who shared a name with her mother, who had gripped her arm and looked at her with stars in her eyes two weeks ago, had said. It’ll be fun, and so very beautiful. Noah’s toes ached like they would soon snap clean off as the two of them hiked up the frozen road. She had already lost sensation in her cheeks and forehead from being barraged with the wind. Even so, she couldn’t stop turning over those words in her mind. Some part of them reminded her of what her mother always said. Every time Noah mentioned wanting to change her name, her mother would suddenly flash her a tender smile, taking Noah’s hands in hers and caressing them gently. All the while, she would repeat the same remarks. Your name is the one that leads everyone toward a better, more beautiful world. In that new world, everyone will be well fed, happy, and warm— “We’re here.” Noah’s foot slipped as she came to a sudden stop. Namwook reached for her. She grabbed his hand but fell anyway. The humiliation dawned on her faster than the pain of her knees hitting the ice-hard ground. Namwook helped her up as her face burned red. Not a single streetlamp stood on that road, but the moon shone so bright that their faces were plain to see. Namwook was frowning. “You’re not here against your will, are you?” he asked. “Did your assistant manager force you to come or . . . ” “No, it’s nothing like that at all,” Noah assured him, brushing off the frost that clung to her knees and palms. When she stood again, she could see clearly over the guardrail the gentle slope of the mountain and the observatory at its base. Only then did she realize where they were—on the roadside at a point a little higher in altitude than the observatory. Noah wiped her nose. “I came because I wanted to. I wanted to see for myself. What sorts of things go on here . . . ” She trailed off and pressed her body against the guardrail. The dome above the observation deck they had visited last time had been opened up more than halfway, and there were people gathered inside. She couldn’t see anything in detail, but she was certain that something was in full swing down there. “There they are,” Namwook said.“Yes.”“I heard you met them in person. What are they like?”“You want to know what they’re like?”“I’ve never met them, not even once. I’ve only heard the rumors.” Murmurs and movement continued to stir from the half-open deck. Seonhwa would be in there in her long fur coat, as would the people Noah had seen in the lobby in their head towels and the boy who’d snuck out to the truck with the scythe in hand. What were they like? The others at the township office had wondered the same thing. In the same tone of voice they used when asking about Nokwon, they probed Noah to find out what the deal was with the people from the observatory. Every time, Noah skirted the question with a laugh. And when they left and she was all alone, she thought to herself. They were . . . interesting. They seemed full of conviction. It was rare to see such certainty in anybody. Even her mother, who prayed every night, had never shown that degree of steadfastness. For the past two weeks, Noah had thought long and hard about where their devotion stemmed from. “They just . . . seem like people who live diligent lives.” Namwook laughed dryly at that. Just as Noah was about to laugh, too, a commotion arose from the observatory. They turned their heads in unison. The first thing they spotted were the bright yellow lights. The lights swelled gradually until they reached the roadside where the two of them were standing. Namwook took out a pocket telescope and brought it to his eye. Noah leaned farther over the guardrail. It looked like a fire had broken out inside the dome. The flames rose from the observation deck, flicking higher and higher upward as the blaze quickly began to swell. While Namwook radioed someone, Noah took out her phone and started pacing up and down the roadside. When at last she got a signal, several messages from Nokwon came flooding in. Telling her not to move and to wait where she was. Noah tried calling, but no one picked up. She huffed on her fingertips and tapped out a text. What’s going on? There was no reply. Instead, Noah got the answers to her question through other means. The first answer came to her on the wind blowing from the observatory toward the mountains. It was the smell. A fishy odor and the smell of something burning, followed at last by the sour stench of rotten meat being grilled, all intermingling in the air. The smell grew more and more dense and pungent. All the while, the flames were taking on a clearer shape. Dark gray smoke soared up alongside the blaze, and yellow and blue sparks shot out from the dome. Soon after, the second answer landed on Noah’s forehead. She looked up. Another one of the things that had just grazed her forehead struck her cheek this time. Noah snatched it out of the air and studied it. A feather. A long one with a pointed tip. In the glow of her phone flashlight, she could see that it was a deep chestnut brown. She held it up at eye level. The birds were overhead. They were mid-flight, their backs to the North Star. Their outstretched wings were long and large enough to completely obscure the star cluster. Noah tipped her head back as far as she could and tried to track the birds’ movements. She recalled the moment she had seen those wings for the first time. How the birds had looked like a group of Buddhist monks wearing black robes and sitting on a bare field after the harvest, how their stooped backs made them easy to mistake for elderly people or children, how they looked thick and soft to the touch. The birds flew toward the observatory with renewed vigor and began to circle the deck. The flames and smoke and stench all continued to rise up in between their massive wings.The eagles’ cries were higher-pitched and more grating than Noah had expected. The song being sung inside the dome was pitched lower than the birdcalls, but Noah could still hear it all the way out on the roadside. At first, all she heard were murmurs, but soon the lyrics became crystal clear. When our enemies climb the mountain,When our enemies climb the mountain . . . Noah took out her phone again. She opened the camera app and zoomed in on the dome. There were people inside, dancing. Some lay on their stomachs with both hands raised. Others shoved a lump of meat deeper into the flames. The more Noah zoomed in, the more quickly everything seemed to move. The various colors of the flashing lights and the dancing bodies and the raw meat, entangled into one. When a woman in a dark fur coat appeared onscreen, Noah gripped the phone tighter. Seonhwa stood before the flames and looked up at the sky. She didn’t react in the slightest, even as sparks flew in all directions. She was focusing all her attention—her heart and soul—on the observatory, the flames, the piece of raw meat that had not yet been tossed into the fire, the birds flying over the heads of the crowd around her. The cell phone camera couldn’t capture Seonhwa’s expression in any detail. All that showed up on the screen was the outline of her side profile. Noah was about to press the record button after several false starts when Seonhwa suddenly began to turn her head. Her dark face sizzling in low-resolution, she was looking right at Noah. The song continued, the same verse repeating over and over. When our enemies climb the mountain . . . Noah dropped down and crouched on the ground. She stared at the phone she was clutching in her hands, at the face crawling with pitch-blackness on the screen. Noah heard something bubbling inside her skull. The sound of something boiling and thus transforming. “We should get moving, too.” Startled by the hand on her shoulder, Noah whipped around. Namwook also must have been surprised because he pulled his hand away and took a few steps back. “Where to?” Noah asked, short of breath. Namwook frowned and said now that they had confirmed there was an arson, they had to get started on making arrests and putting out the blaze. Wildfire relief services were on their way, as was the fire department. The two of them began walking, their backs to the observatory. Namwook led the way down the road. He glanced back several times. Once, he met Noah’s eyes with a look that asked: Don’t you have something to say? But Noah said nothing. That sound from earlier was still stewing in her ears. It was as if the fire in the observation deck had lit a twin blaze inside her. By the time they reached the parking lot, the night was already filled with flashing emergency lights and the wail of sirens. An orange firetruck and a wildfire relief vehicle were parked in front of the observation deck. Noah remembered receiving emergency training on wildfires at the township office. If the training modules were correct, soon the volunteers would start spraying water from backpack pumps alongside the firefighters. “There’s another patrol car in the parking lot,” Namwook said. “Do you want to wait in there for a bit?” Noah nodded. Namwook regarded her for a few seconds before he took off running toward the firetruck. Noah went the other way, toward the parking lot. As she entered the shadow of the mountains, she turned back and made sure Namwook was out of sight before switching directions. She headed toward the observatory. Her steps were hurried. She thought she heard someone calling her name, but she didn’t stop. First, she entered the lobby. The sprinklers dotting the ceiling had been activated and were spraying down the hall. At least the smoke detectors appeared to be functioning normally. Noah crossed the lobby, careful to sidestep the water showers. The sprinklers near the stairs had been set off, too, but their effect seemed to have been even more minimal there, as the staircase was filled up halfway with hazy smoke. Noah covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve and climbed the stairs. Her field of vision soon clouded over with smoke, and she lost her footing several times. The third time she slipped, someone grabbed her. A long-haired woman in a dark fur coat. Seonhwa did not speak. She simply guided Noah, slowly, back down the stairs, maintaining a firm grip on her the whole time. Overhead, the sounds of sirens, birdcalls, and singing mingled and resounded. Noah shouted, “I lied to you about something.” Seonhwa did not say a word. Noah went on, confessing that she had used her mother’s name as an alias and divulging her real name. Seonhwa remained silent. She grabbed Noah’s hand and continued walking. They passed through the lobby along the edge of the room as water continued to stream down from different spots on the ceiling and exited through the back door. The cold air of a winter night greeted them outside. Only then did Seonhwa let go of Noah’s hand. She leaned down, painstakingly studying every inch of Noah’s face. Hers was an earnest gaze that seemed to be trying hard to recognize someone with whom she had parted ways long ago. “We gave the observatory a new name,” Seonhwa said. She revealed the name. It belonged to a very old and famous ship. It was also the name of the wooden boat from the story her mother used to tell her all the time as a child. The Ark. The ship that faced the new world head on, even as fierce storms raged, without capsizing or running aground. That new world was much cleaner and far more beautiful than the world that had come before. Seonhwa stood up straight again and pointed at the observation deck. “Look over there.” A spray of white, the water from the firetruck and wildfire relief truck hoses, was streaming into the dome. The eagles flew in and out of the building, beating their wings. Their noisy cries blended into the sounds of rushing water and sirens. Just as Seonhwa had said, it was unlike anything Noah had ever seen. The flock of eagles soaring between the spray of water and the dome seemed trapped in a sort of limbo one moment and in command of everything the next. “I kept waiting for our enemies in there,” Seonhwa said. At times, she went on, that felt more important to her than any teachings. In every book, salvation came after an enemy air raid. The arrival of the enemy also signified the end of that long and agonizing waiting—a wait that had become a world unto itself. That was why every day, Seonhwa kept a close eye on the people who came by. She waited for the one who would climb the mountain and bring her grueling wait to an end. “That’s why I believe it was such an incredible stroke of fate that we met. Don’t you agree?” Noah’s mouth fell open. She stared at Seonhwa. “Well . . . ” she said after a long while. “I . . . I’m not sure. You don’t exactly feel like an enemy to me.” Seonhwa took a few steps back. She let out a hm and pouted as if the words had wounded her. “Then why did you come here?” she asked. Noah could see the birds raging behind Seonhwa, the smoke rising up from the dome, and beyond all that, stars scattered innumerably across the sky. The winter sky in Gangwon-do was indeed high-reaching and full of stars. Suddenly, Noah wondered what sorts of stars she would be able to see through the big telescope in the observation deck that was currently in flames. When she asked the question aloud, Seonhwa frowned. Still, she answered. She said that telescope was custom-made, and in the winter, she often used it to see Saturn. If you brought one eye close to the eyepiece, you could see a ring of stars glittering quietly near the forest. Once the fire had been quelled, the arrests followed quickly and smoothly. The people from the observatory did not put up much of a fight as they got into the patrol cars. This was after the eagles had already vanished somewhere else. Namwook dropped Noah off in front of her house. The whole time they drove down the mountain, he’d kept sneaking glances at Noah as if he wanted to ask her something, but in the end, he didn’t. Instead, he told her something about himself. He brought up his experiences at the first post he’d been assigned to. There, he had encountered one colorful character after another. He’d seen it all—students banding together to burn down an abandoned building, neighbors who had lived in harmony for years while constantly stealing from one another as if they were simply swapping belongings. One summer, some people had come in from the city and were roaming the beach stark naked. Namwook confronted them in all their nude glory and convinced them to put on some clothes. “Now, I don’t try to understand people like that,” he said, slowing the car to a stop. Outside the window, rows upon rows of low-rise apartment buildings were visible. Noah unfastened her seatbelt, then paused and looked Namwook in the eyes. “So what do you do?”He shrugged. “I just accept it. The fact that there are people like that in this world.” Noah stood outside for a while after Namwook drove off. The emergency lights at the front entrance to the building kept flickering on and off. Noah suddenly craved a smoke. But she had neither a cigarette nor a lighter on her, and in fact, she’d never smoked before. Instead, she took out her phone. She had a text from Nokwon. Did you get home all right? Noah slipped her phone back into her pocket. She thought about Seonhwa climbing into the patrol car. She’d held Noah’s gaze the entire time. Right up until someone shut the car door. She kept mouthing the same questions. It’s you, isn’t it? Aren’t you the one? Seonhwa asked again and again, but Noah didn’t answer. Now, she wished she had. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Nokwon. Only after letting it ring several times did Noah pick up. She wanted to ask why in the world Nokwon had brought her to the observatory. But the moment she answered the phone, she found herself blurting out something else entirely. “Those people saw me as their enemy.” For a while, all Noah heard on the other end of the line was quiet breathing. She proceeded to spill everything she’d heard at the back entrance to the observatory. Nokwon listened silently until at one point she burst out laughing. It was the first time Noah had ever heard her laugh. She couldn’t even imagine what Nokwon’s face would look like laughing. Once her laughter petered out, Nokwon said, “How kind of her. To include us in her story.” When Noah finished speaking, she felt as if she had resurfaced above water. Once she managed to steady her breathing, she asked, “Why did you call?” Nokwon stopped laughing and also paused to catch her breath. She asked if Noah was planning to take off work the next day. When Noah swore she was fine to go in, Nokwon insisted. It was good to rest one’s body and mind after experiencing something like what they had, she said. Only with proper rest could Noah get back to work. After ending the call, Noah looked around. All at once, she realized it was just like her mother had said—she was truly far from home, in an unfamiliar place. From the new apartment building behind her to the lights from cars and houses glowing in the distance, everything felt both strange and new. “A new world,” Noah muttered. When she looked up, her surroundings had grown immensely brighter. It was the glow from the emergency lights that had decisively flickered on as if they had been waiting for their cue. Noah blinked against the piercing light and looked up at the sky. The night was as dark and still as ever. The star clusters and nebulae, the planets and satellites, all shone in silence. Between them, birds were flying. Birds that traveled to a new land every winter. They did not seem to be flying toward one place but rather in circles, all facing different directions. As if they had no other destination but right there in the center of everything, they circled around and around in a ring and slowly made their descent.

Fiction Deviation Day She’d had hope, at least until her husband made up his mind. His resolution concerned what they called “conscious emas-culation.” More specifically, the effects upon the wife of her husband’s voluntary shrinking of his ego. Unju and Gyeongsu, wife and husband, were forty-three years of age—an age as significant as the age of twenty-seven. Forty-three, a time when old age leapt early upon them. At twenty-seven, Unju had told people she was thirty. Today, at forty-three, Gyeongsu sat among the fifty- and sixty-somethings at the urology clinic telling people he was “coming up on fifty.” So afraid of old age, Unju and Gyeongsu attempted to age early to forget the terror of aging. No different from the trembling children who lined up first to get their lashes over with. Though they seemed indifferent to aging—at least compared to their peers, who were the picture of fortysomethings trying to look younger—the midlife crisis descended on Unju and Gyeongsu as well. But their responses were rather unusual. Attending the reunion concerts of their favorite bands from the Hongdae live clubs twenty years ago and diving into the slam zone only to stagger back with a broken wrist or two in a bid to resurrect the past like their friends was not their chosen way, however. To relive their youths, Gyeongsu went to the future and Unju to the past. That is to say, they traveled into the past, each using a different passage: change and memory. The previous year, Gyeongsu had signed up for a public lecture and seminar curation service. Unlike private lectures, these events were either free of charge or no more than five thousand won per session, but it was always the same familiar faces filling the seats. At the independent bookstores, at the local co-ops, and at the National Assembly’s rented lecture halls, it was only the last empty row of chairs that ever filled with newcomers, and the result was not the democratization of knowledge and the expansion of forums of discourse, but commercialization. It would be clichéd to call it ironic, but this was the means by which many dreams came true. Yes—the curation service discovered a way to generate profits from these lectures and seminars. They charged users a monthly fee to organize events catered to their interests into a monthly schedule. The schedule boasted a deliberately tacky design modeled on old elementary school timetables. Its title read—instead of “Afterschool Programs”— “Afterwork Programs.” A marriage of culture and nostalgia. The service offered the real benefit of cultural refinement along with memories of a younger age, when everyone walked alone across the dimming schoolyard at twilight. The very recipe that for a time had delighted Kumon’s sales department as adults returned to the old workbook programs, which proved itself a fad quickly replaced by the rising star that was the public lecture and seminar. Hey, dancn_histrynrd! Here’s your afterwork program schedule for the week! Stay radical! · Monday, 20:00: John Ross and the Development of the Early Modern Korean Language Textbook (Offline only; No charge) · Wednesday, 19:30: Solidarity Meeting for the Condemnation of the Genocide in Gaza (Online and offline; Free to members, non-members pay 5,000 won) · Saturday, 14:00: Cars in Movies – the Classic Cars in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) (Online and offline; No charge) Acutely aware of the final destination of capitalism, the curation company collected not only money, but people. Subscribers who attended the same lectures were bundled together into afterparties. As a result, the people who went to the Gaza genocide seminar on Wednesday, instead of attending the Free Palestine rally on Saturday, would gather at a wine bar in Namyeong-dong slurping lemon cheese pasta (22,000 won) to debate Netanyahu and the Nakba. Yet even among those gray crowds, some blossomed into color—like Gyeongsu. Following his subscription, he became a changed man. Gyeongsu never called himself a feminist, but as far as Unju could tell, he became one, which made life together uncomfortable. She was fine with him sitting down to pee, but when he apologized for every droplet of piss he’d splashed and offered to repent by going out to buy her pads, opening up the bathroom cupboards to take accurate stock of her usual brands, she felt a surge of irritation. But later, as her husband remembered to regularly fill the compartment next to the towels with period panties, she came to be grateful. “Don’t feel grateful,” Gyeongsu advised. “You need to practice entitlement. Don’t thank me for every little thing.” A little before the holidays, he called his parents and yelled into the phone, saying they couldn’t—wouldn’t—go visit, that Unju had no reason to answer their summons and that Mother and Father had to wake up and get with the times. One day, when a friend asked over drinks what buying period products for his wife had to do with feminism, Gyeongsu nearly blushed and replied, “Well, I’m still new to this whole ‘good spouse’ thing.” Then who the hell does he think he’s been living with these past ten years? Unju wondered. When she watched her husband prostrate himself at her feet, she felt as if she’d spent their entire marriage making concessions to him. The life of an open palm, which allowed itself to suffer as it exalted the husband seated upon it. A life of sacrifice and obedience. Me? Unju had been a rough-and-tumble child. She hadn’t sniffed glue like some of the other kids, but she was almost sure she’d been an alcoholic in her teens. She had started drinking in junior high school, and downed two bottles of Toad Jinro every other day. She had opened up the fridge and pissed in the produce drawer. She had gone all the way with a girl in fifth grade, and with a boy in her third year of junior high school. And now her naive little husband was apologizing? To her? If anything, Unju was the one who needed to make apologies. She didn’t want to be apologized to. And that meant society had indoctrinated her to feel that way, her husband would say, humbly making use of the new vocabulary he’d learned at his lectures. Every night, Gyeongsu attended online self-flagellation sessions with his lecture buddies from his room. They were mocked from every which way—Losers chopped off their own balls, They’re just doing this to fellate themselves—but persecution only made them stronger. Determined to transform themselves, they exuded a grave but sweet energy. Pointed as the beak of a pelican, there was something moving about their efforts. Gyeongsu drank nonalcoholic beer in his room as he engaged in a deep heart-to-heart with his allies, laughing and crying out loud until the meeting ended and he burst from the room to declare that his family did not need honorifics. They should no longer be called “sidaek,” but simply “siga,” he insisted with such determination that Unju found something squeezing at her heart, the contraction traveling lower and lower until it was down below. “Okay, what is it this time?” she asked.Gyeongsu knelt. “I have this friend in South Chungcheong Province called Uje. He’s a civil servant there.”“I know Uje.”“You don’t know him, because he’s a changed person. Uje’s a vegetarian now. He saw them slaughter farm animals during the big foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, and now he can’t eat meat. Physically. Some things just change you forever. Like, you think in your head that you can do it, but your body refuses. It’s happened to me, too.” Unju remembered Uje. Every summer, he insisted on eating boiling-hot goat soup and raw, wriggling octopus chop, all in the name of health. “I was watching this drama the other day, and I threw up at the kiss scene. The guy thrust his tongue into the girl’s mouth, and I felt sick to my stomach. He didn’t do it against her will, but hear me out. This whole . . . penetration thing, putting something of mine into someone else, it’s disgusting. I can’t watch another kiss scene again. And I’m swearing off penetrative sex, too. For good.” “This is getting out of hand,” Unju said through gritted teeth. “The more I talk to the others, the more I’m aware of how much I’m asserting myself into you. You’d be reading, and I’d order you to get me a glass of water—and you’d put down your book and get me that water. I can see as clear as an X-ray all the awful things I said to you, the looks I gave you, the passive-aggressive commands, all festering inside you like parasites. And all those parasites broke your will, made you give up your dreams, and made you subservient to me. And it drives me crazy, thinking about that. But I don’t have time to mope around feeling guilty, do I? I need to make amends, starting right this second. From now on, I’m going to assert no influence on you whatsoever. I won’t assert myself on you, starting with the easiest thing—I won’t penetrate you anymore.” Unju didn’t recall Gyeongsu ever making her get him water. Who was this mystery woman he’d been exploiting like a slave? This created wife sculpted by each act of desired exploitation? Definitely not herself, Unju thought. “Are you seeing some other woman?” “I can still massage you. Just on the surface,” Gyeongsu said, opening a jar of spicy massage oil. At three o’clock that morning, Unju contacted Seonsuk, her friend from junior high, and asked if she could crash at her place for a few days to get away from her husband. They hadn’t spoken in five years. She wanted to throw off this mantle of the exploited woman Gyeongsu had thrown atop her. She was being rude, and impulsive. And youthful, she thought. She wouldn’t still hit people, would she? Not now that they were over forty, she thought only after she’d sent the SOS. Seonsuk had beaten her once, over winter break in their third year of junior high school—an unusual privilege, considering how much she beat up everyone else. A token of affection for her best friend. Almost immediately, a speech bubble appeared in the chat window, indicating that a reply was in progress. Then Unju regretted reaching out, because this was going to be a bother, and was about to block her—OMW to work. Come to my place. * Back in graduate school, Unju came across a map of Seoul in the school library that used dots to indicate neighborhood population density. It was in one of the western neighborhoods, especially packed with dots, that Unju and Seonsuk went to junior high school together. The dots had nearly blocked out the map in that area because of all the public housing apartments, where families of three or four stuffed themselves into three hundred square-foot units. But as far as Unju remembered—Unju, who often skipped class and spent her afternoons romping from one classmate’s tiny apartment unit to another—the neighborhood was dense with foliage, but not people. They ended up going to different high schools: Unju to a standard school, and Seonsuk to a vocational school. They were still joined at the hip. Everyone said that Seonsuk dragged Unju around after Unju’s parents overextended themselves to move into a more “decent” neighborhood, but that wasn’t really true. In 1989, the Roh administration announced plans for lifetime public rental housing. Half a decade later, those large public rental apartment complexes were completed and allocated. New junior high schools were built to accommodate the flood of teenagers who now filled the blocks. They started school as soon as construction was finished, taking up only half the classrooms with the rest furnished but left empty for the students to come. And they would come, moving into the many private-sector condo complexes that would be ready in a few months. Six months later, the school saw half a dozen transfer students a day, until by the end of the term, the school was composed half of students from public housing and half of students from private-sector condos. Unju’s school, constructed last-minute for the influx of newcomers, wasn’t even completed until she moved out of the neighborhood, with the left side of the building still only skin over a skeleton, cloth feebly covering the bones. Students showed up in the morning alongside the construction workers. They arrived at school to the rhythm of the hammer and witnessed clouds of dust rising from the building. The incompleteness was only more evident when she stepped inside. A thick, translucent plastic cover took the place of a wall at the end of the hallway, showing only the silhouettes of the laborers slowly passing by. There was something magical about the half-obscured construction site behind that veil, and she sometimes imagined it was a portal in space-time to another age . . . But everyone said that if you went back there, you’d get beaten up. That was where the “old locals” like Seonsuk took the transfer students who pissed them off and beat them to a pulp. It almost never happened, really. It had in the other neighborhood. A transfer kid had mumbled under his breath about people making noise in the classroom, and the old locals tortured him with a pair of pliers. Pliers. Instead of smacking him in the face, they stuffed his fingertips between the pliers and pressed. The transfer student was traumatized, and wandered the school in shock with his hands held up like a surgeon prepared for an operation, and still haunted the halls to this day . . . The other neighborhood probably said it happened in our neighborhood, Unju thought. Later, when she learned the term “social mix,” she considered why the tool of torture happened to be pliers, of all things. The transfer students who kept their heads down, pressed low to their desks, especially the high achievers, dreamed of—no, prayed for—the moment when they graduated and were liberated from those old locals forever. For the moment the old locals would spill away in droves to fill the technical schools, or if they ended up in regular high schools, be quarantined in the vocational streams to be constantly away from school at workshops and practicums. The moment they would split off from each other forever. The pliers, of course, symbolized the technical school. The myth of the pliers crushing the boy’s fingers represented the real fear of bullying, and served as secret preemptive practice for the violent oppression of physical laborers. When these transfer students grew up, they would call it “menial labor,” without considering where in that phrase might be room for the intellectual work required for blue-collar jobs. Favorite celebrities, most hated teachers, personalities, blood types—those were the topics that were supposed to establish friend groups among teenagers, but reality was much simpler and clearer: teens hung out with teens who lived in the same complex as themselves. It was as if there were two schools in one. Sure, there were exceptions. Take K, who lived in public housing complex 4 and was the top student at school. K, who’d stolen Unju’s new running shoes and run away from home, only to come back on midterm day—K, who had gotten perfect grades at that midterm, transferred to a foreign language high school from which she was expelled after getting caught going to school on a motorbike she got from her boyfriend, and was now a dermatologist—was one of these exceptions. Public housing was mostly where what adults called the “wild kids” lived, and as anyone who’d ever been a teenager could attest, it was the cliques of wild kids who reigned at the top of the food chain. Unju wanted to join Seonsuk’s clique. Her grandiose dreams: sitting cross-legged on three or four desks pushed together at the back of the classroom. Riding on the back of one of those cheap motorcycles the oppas who delivered Chinese food always drove. Burning her calves on the muffler. Showing off the scar the next day and ordering the gang to bring her wet towels. Unju wanted to be a hooligan and wear jori flip-flops. When jori came into vogue, all the news outlets decried the trend, saying the jori was a variant of the Japanese geta sandal and that young people were mindlessly adopting remnants of the colonial oppressors, but Unju dreamed of going out in jori flip-flops, hoped to have snow fall and melt between her toes. She could picture all the wonderful things that would happen below the waist—the burned calves, the snowflakes between her toes—if only she could catch Seonsuk’s eye and join her clique, and thought of all the unimaginable and exciting things that would happen above the waist! If she wished to make those dreams come true, she had to become Scheherazade. She must be that one character in every Korean war movie who died first in the bombing, the tragic clown who could never wipe that stupid grin off his face because how else were they going to maximize pathos when he inevitably put on a brave front for once just to lose his life? That was her role. So she told them her uncle was a manager for some big-name celebrity and fed Seonsuk’s gang all the fake gossip she could invent. About how so-and-so got some other celeb pregnant and she had an abortion at that-clinic-over-there, how this one celeb raped that one so that one got the manager to kill the rapist. Unju was putting herself at risk, of course, telling stories like that. She made herself a target. She made herself vulnerable, scoring herself like a fish to help the spices sink in better. They grew close. Not even the high schoolers could touch Seonsuk because everyone knew her two older brothers. “Sure, they beat me up sometimes, but at least they won’t let anybody else touch me. They’re probably better assholes than the ones who beat up their little sisters and let the sisters get pushed around outside,” she mused, pulling out a wad of tissue from between the cushions of the karaoke booth sofa and telling Unju to take a sniff. “Then again, those assholes probably can’t hit as hard as the assholes back home.” It wasn’t clear why Seonsuk brought Unju into the fold, but it was clear that their friendship was a net positive for Unju’s self-esteem. Once they’d started hanging out, Unju was both wealthy and wild. In class, Unju’s teacher would call her out, saying she was zoning out all the time. Unju had been looking at herself from someone else’s eyes. And she was so magnificent she’d stunned herself. She’d even almost managed to forget the things that happened at her old junior high school, the one she’d attended for a little while before she transferred here. How the day after she got beaten up, she went up to the kids who did the beating and bowed low. She’d have felt less ashamed if they’d made her do it. It wasn’t even a calculated move. Groveling before those classmates was a reflex, involuntary and natural. That wasn’t all. Unju now lived in a big condo unit, more than forty pyeong wide, and the produce drawer actually contained produce. When they went to drink in the mountains, the others told Unju to bring fruit and whiskey from her dad’s stash. Unju sneered at the girls who didn’t shorten their uniform skirts, and took off her jori to slap a girl who lived in the same building and with whom she’d walked to school together before. Seonsuk reminded her of the produce drawer. The girl downstairs reminded her of the sole of her jori. Both filled her with a sense of superiority.Unju’s parents wept daily. They should have moved to the other neighborhood, in the famously high-achieving school district. Back when they still had a choice, the cost of a forty-two-pyeong unit in this neighborhood was the same as a twenty-seven-pyeong unit in the other neighborhood, and their daughter was never one for academics anyway, so they chose to live in a spacious home instead of letting their pride suffer in that other area where all the parents were devoted to their children’s education, but little did they know the cultural price they would pay for fifteen pyeong of floor space, her mother and father would lament over the phone with their friends. “Driving at ten kilometers an hour through the alleys every night trying to find this girl, I don’t care if the neighbors are honking at me from behind, I’m just scanning the streets, trying to see if I can find her. I dragged her out of a karaoke booth the other day, and I was glad it wasn’t a video parlor instead. The night before, she brought a friend over to stay the night, and I was so glad I’d get some proper sleep in bed this time instead of going out looking for her again. Her friend can’t go home because her dad beats her badly, apparently, and I wish I’d learned from him, because we never beat our girl when she was younger, so we can’t start now.” Unju still hadn’t finished junior high school when they moved out of the neighborhood. Her parents had taken the leap. Even Unju could tell it was the end of an era. Seonsuk had begun to look a little less cool than before, and now Unju clearly saw the state of Seonsuk’s public housing unit, which had seemed like an adult-free palace on those lazy afternoons of skipping classes. Seonsuk had pointed at the furniture and the utensils, describing them as the relics of one family’s unemployment and downfall. The mungap cabinet resurrected as a TV stand had come from the old-timey bar in Cheonho-dong; the stainless-steel cups and ttukbaegi stone bowls from the sundaeguk stew place in Hwagok-dong; and the paper wraps Seonsuk put over the spoons for fun whenever they had red bean shaved ice from the kongnamulguk soup place in Daeheung-dong. Seonsuk’s mother had decorated the house with these and other odds and ends from the restaurants where she made banchan sides, items she received in lieu of pay when the businesses went bankrupt. The design philosophy: job loss in the food industry. Seonsuk tugged on a ring hanging from the mungap cabinet, as though pulling an ox by the nose-block, and nicked karaoke money. The rice paper panels on the cabinet doors had been reinforced by acrylic panes so the papers couldn’t be torn through. For the longest time, Unju had thought that Seonsuk meant her mother had owned those restaurants, not worked at them. Unju had drunk more than her fill of alcohol, too. She and the gang would put the futons away and sit in a circle playing 3-6-9 drinking games, downing Toad Jinro, they’d have girls-only nights, stripping games while boys rapped madly at the window opening into the hallway, older boys they’d never met before. They were one step away from danger, even Unju knew that much. The mythical girl who downed 50% bbaegal liquor and got raped could soon be her. But above all, Unju never once pictured herself going to a vocational school. She partied at karaoke booths and came home at midnight for tutoring. She dragged herself across the academic threshold and made it into a standard, university-bound high school. Her friends mocked her, saying she was pretty smart if she could achieve that after all their partying. Unju hung a shiny “pretty smart” ornament on the Christmas tree of self-esteem in her mind and stared transfixed into her reflection, radiant and distorted. At her first test in high school, Unju came dead last. In this new neighborhood, she wasn’t even considered average, let alone well-off. How was her wounded self-esteem supposed to survive? With a produce drawer filled with fruits? The produce drawers of her new friends were filled with packs of expensive traditional medicine. Unju invited her old friends over to her new neighborhood. She rode motorcycles and burned her calves on the mufflers. Unju needed Seonsuk. Each time she felt pathetic, it was through Seonsuk that Unju uplifted herself. I want to ask you a favor too. Unju thought about Seonsuk’s text message as she climbed the hill up to Seonsuk’s low-rise apartment. It was thirty-eight past four in the morning. The sky turned black as pitch, as though ready to end the day before it began, and unleashed a deluge on the world. Torrents of water cascaded down the slope, fiercely resisting Unju’s steps, pressing against the tops of her sandal-clad feet as she made her way upwards. Unju knew exactly why she sought her old friend. To talk about old times. About how they’d been fearless, impulsive, violent, how they’d made their parents cry. About how they’d chugged spoiled milk and thought, Huh, it stinks, but swallowed it all anyway. She would share memories with a friend who’d been through the bad times with her, to build a roaring campfire of nostalgia—like those adults who still lived in dreams of the past, boasting about the glory days. Pushing open the fingerprint-smeared glass door that led into the building, Unju looked forward to her Deviation Day. The phrase had come into vogue a few years ago, originally used to refer to camping as a way of deviating from daily life. Then to skipping work without giving notice. One mountainous county famous for its camping scene even turned it into a slogan: Take a Deviation Day at J County and rediscover the real you—You, modern man—find liberty from the rat race and deviate from society today! Return to a time before civilization, cook meat on a grill and dare to place a pine caterpillar upon the bridge of your nose! Unju climbed the stairs of the building—it had no elevators—as if ascending a mountain and pictured herself pitching an imaginary tent in her old friend’s living room. Inside the tent, they would talk about old times. As if the outside world, warm with children blowing bubbles and adults pulling carts full of canned food, were instead a danger zone crawling with brown bears, and Unju and Seonsuk would feast on their memories hygienically, enjoying the thrills at no risk whatsoever. By doing so, she would correct the image her husband had wounded. She would erase that image of frailty, which had compelled Unju to shriek, “Are you calling me a victim? Some sacrifice to marriage? Are you saying I’m beneath you?” * Focus with Kim Jongbae was followed by Kim Young-chul’s PowerFM, which was followed by Shin Yunju and Household Music, which was followed by a regularly-scheduled broadcast on a famous YouTube politics channel, which had just begun when Seonsuk came home from work. A member of the logistics team for a Northern European furniture company, she worked from four in the morning to one in the afternoon. When she first started working early morning hours eight years ago, Seonsuk had worn two watches on her wrist, the one on the top set to regular hours and the one on the bottom running five hours fast—the time zone mandated by her job. She sometimes ran into younger people working night shifts, and they complained that their breakups were caused not by differences in personality but in time. It was two in the afternoon—that is, seven in the evening for Seonsuk. And for Unju, the perfect time for day drinking. She’d brought a Ballantine’s 21, a parody of the years when she’d steal whiskey from home to offer the other girls whenever they had a party in the mountains. Before Seonsuk came home, Unju had looked around for ways to brighten up the house for a party. But the tiny and cheap ten-pyeong apartment was a Northern European furniture showroom, as white and sterile and quiet as an empty hospital ward. The sort of place where you lowered your voice because of the sheer tension of the place. I came here to get away, Unju thought with disappointment, staring at the living room centerpiece: a hardworking dehumidifier. “Couldn’t you have emptied the water before I got home?” Seonsuk said snidely, tilting back her head to massage her neck. With a dismissive foot, she pushed the dehumidifier towards Unju, instantly resurrecting a power dynamic from three decades ago. As she emptied the water tank in the bathroom, Unju told herself that she was only doing this because Seonsuk was letting her crash for a while. Her old self-defense mechanisms were stirring to life, too, and she wondered—Why’d I even come here? She regretted her decision already. There was nothing shocking about her husband’s resolution. Their interest in each other was only one of the many elements of daily life they had grown indifferent to. Some people responded to their mid-life crisis by expelling their frustrations, while others shrank inward, with most tragedies occurring in the mismatch between the reactions of each party, but in Unju and Gyeongsu’s case, they were walking towards apathy in perfect time. Sometimes, they missed the passionate old days. Where Unju had her burned calves, Gyeongsu had memories of going around the neighborhood lowering circuit breakers. But they had extinguished those sparks as soon as they came back to life, crushing each under their heels—I can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered either—before the flames could return. They had watched each other kill the fire before it started, and sighed in relief. They were on a stroll one day when they spotted a statue of the Virgin Mary outside a church, surrounded by lit candles. Then a man emerged and used a bell-shaped object to extinguish the little flames. Smoke wafted from the dead wicks, but so wispy it was almost invisible. That was what they had wanted—for their passions to die a quiet death by extinguishment underneath those little bells. Because it was better to not have at all than to have only part of the whole. In Unju’s imagination, Gyeongsu went around the neighborhood with his self-flagellation friends like a gang of little troublemakers. He was full of energy. He burst into an Olive Young store and demanded, “Hey, are the Natracare Ultra Pads on sale yet?” His exuberance had come back to life, but he pretended it hadn’t. He was deceiving her. With his lips he swore to punish himself by abstinence, by forgoing the desires he’d never even had. And that was a double betrayal. They’d promised to be disappointed in life together, but he was leaping alone from the Mariana Trench to the sun with his barely-concealed zest. All the while, he claimed that he was making sacrifices for her. Denying his own desires. Gyeongsu was running away. Running away from the stagnation of their relationship, from the monotony, from the deadness. From the wet, sagging sense of subsumption. So please pull me out of here too, Unju thought, watching as Seonsuk scrolled through a food delivery app. She recalled going to a friend’s house for Toad Jinro. She would stop mid-run and bend down to grab the elastic ankle bands of her pant legs and tighten them. It was a different age, when the world was so fucking awesome that she barely had time to pee. “Remember the Japanese lady who sold tangsuyuk outside the school?” Unju asked, picking out whiskey glasses from the cupboard. Cook-it-yourself tangsuyuk places had been a huge fad in the mid-nineties, when the classic sweet-and-sour pork was divorced from the Korean-style Chinese restaurants and went independent like the cook-it-yourself tteokbokki places. One of those was right outside their junior high school. It was owned by a woman in her thirties who had once lived in Japan. Always covering her arms with plastic wrap for fear of burns, she used to smoke as she fried the pork and also sold alcohol to minors. “Don’t forget the fun money,” Seonsuk’s gang used to say, when they wanted to talk about getting drinks at the tangsuyuk place without mentioning alcohol. The woman, who had lived with a man who ran a yakiniku restaurant, thrived on sharing her wisdom with the junior high students. “Never do anything by halves,” she’d say, or “Nip it in the bud,” and reenact the events that had happened in Japan. Though her husband had never hit her, he had broken everything in sight when he got drunk, and she boasted that she had fixed that little problem of his. One day, when the mirrors and windows had both been broken, the woman claimed to have walked barefoot across the broken glass as if she were Jesus on the water. She wanted to avoid getting cut as much as she could, but also knew that if she tensed, the glass would only dig further, so she took a deep breath and willed herself to walk across that minefield with her full weight on every step. The floor was a bloody mess, and she was taken to the emergency room. The woman who recreated that moment, widening her stance like a sumo wrestler, each step heavy with her weight, was the one who taught Unju and Seonsuk to drink with their meal. They had tangsuyuk with liquor sold by the glass. The tangsuyuk was low on the pork, the canned pineapple pieces scantly dotted the sauce, which tasted too much of ketchup, and the liquor was way too pricey. But it wasn’t such a bad memory for reigniting lost passions. A memory of violence, blood, liquor, and meat, and even the exhausted Seonsuk would not refuse the campfire of nostalgia. “Spill the tea. Your husband bothering you? Something wrong?” Seonsuk said, getting out of the dining chair. But Unju changed the subject. “Remember the tangsuyuk lady’s irezumi tattoo? What was it, roses? A dragon?” Talking about the present was tiresome, she thought. And she couldn’t really figure out how to describe Gyeongsu’s behavior. Seonsuk stared for a long time. Then she said, “Sorry, but I’m going to take a few winks. Order whatever you want, this one’s on me,” and disappeared into her room. Because there was no air conditioning in the bedroom, they had to keep the door open. Seonsuk fell asleep quickly. Unju, who had waited ten hours for her, listened to the sound of her snoring, slowly sipped her whiskey, strained to hear the politics broadcast at minimum volume, and fell asleep. She opened her eyes at five in the afternoon. The rain had stopped, and the sun flooded the house with yellow light. The golden hour was ten in the evening for Seonsuk, but Unju didn’t take that into account. They’d both slept and woken up, but the day was still young, young enough for them to enjoy themselves. “Sorry, I ate while you were sleeping,” Seonsuk said, holding out the remnants of the delivered jokbal. “No, I set these aside before I started eating,” she clarified. The pork had been piled nicely into a corner of the packaging. Now, what hardcore stories from their past would they resurrect? What ordinary memory would they transform into epic drama? Even Unju knew that the tangsuyuk lady didn’t have a tattoo on her back. She asked anyway. Damn, that was a freaky tattoo! she hoped Seonsuk would say, joining her in her distortion of history. But Seonsuk only gave her a tired look, without even a hint of interest in the train to the past. She even refused the Ballantine’s. “No, I’m good.” Should I just go home? Unju wondered. In the meantime, Seonsuk came back to the table and held out a scrap of paper. It contained an unfamiliar name, a phone number, and a Resident Registration Number. “Said I had a favor to ask, didn’t I? All the other doctors just ask for your DOB, but this one wants your registration number, too.” Seonsuk wanted Unju to help her get an appointment with a certain doctor of neurology at a big-name general hospital. The doctor was one of the leading names in the treatment of spinal conditions, and Seonsuk needed Unju to call that number at every opportunity so the former could schedule surgery for a herniated disc. The name on the note was the doctor’s, the phone number the hospital’s, and the registration number Seonsuk’s. “Some people cancel appointments with him because they’re so desperate they go to another hospital with shorter waiting times,” she explained. “And you need to keep calling if you want to catch one of those slots. And people on spinal problem communities online are saying that he’s finally opening up appointments—they’ve been closed since September, you know. Apparently some people wait a whole year to see him, but I’m fine with that. And don’t you dare slot in your parents instead of me if you get an appointment. I’m in a lot of pain, okay? You don’t have to do it all the time, just whenever you can. Like you’re waiting for the subway or your coffee or something. I can’t use the phone when I’m working, you know? I’m starting off with a huge disadvantage.” “Are you really busy at work?” “We have a no-phones policy. I couldn’t call the fire department even if I had to.” “You’re sure you don’t want to drink?” “I have a good feeling about this one. It’s destiny, you know? Me and this doctor. Some places tell me I need surgery, and some places say I’ll be fine with nerve block injections. But something tells me when I see this doctor, it’s all going to work out. Like, the timing will be perfect and everything. What time is it?” “Seven.” “Let’s go to sleep.” “It’s seven.” “It’s midnight.” The apartment was bustling now, with neighbors returning from cram schools and offices. Seonsuk stuffed a pair of American-made neon orange earplugs swimmers apparently loved to use, and set out a futon for Unju in the living room. Then she sat cross-legged on the fresh, fragrant blankets and took a deep breath, as if to drive away the energy of the evening and summon serenity into her. As if to bend society’s clock to match her own. But what about the campfire of nostalgia? “I’m going home,” Unju said, pouting. “No you’re not. Let’s chat until my meds kick in,” Seonsuk retorted, knocking back a sleeping pill. They lay side by side on Seonsuk’s bed. It felt like old times. The sparks hadn’t died yet. “Do you still talk to Yeongju?” asked Unju. “What’s she doing these days?” Until Unju came into the picture, Yeongju had been Seonsuk’s best friend. She dropped out of high school and found work as an assistant at Blue Club, a barbershop chain, and often paid for drinks because she started working before anyone else. “Oh shit, I can’t sleep when I tell this one,” Seonsuk said. Rising slowly, she began. * One day, Seonsuk got an SOS from Yeongju, who was working as a nurse assistant. The clinic she worked at was moving into a new building, but they hadn’t hired a moving service that also packed things for them—as a result, Yeongju was left to box all the patient files by hand. The numbers on the patient files went far past ten thousand. “I’m going to throw out my back again if I try that,” Yeongju said, asking Seonsuk to do it for her. “Am I getting paid for that?” “No, we’d have hired the premium movers if we had the budget to spare.” Thousands of files plucked, moved, and shelved later, Seonsuk took in the new clinic and its freshly-renovated walls. Yeongju’s new desk was ready, installed in an empty alcove. There was a chair, so Seonsuk tried sitting in it. Her knees hit the desktop. Yeongju would spend eight hours of each day in that chair. She would twist and turn her legs in every direction, looking for a comfortable position, until she inevitably sat cross-legged on the chair, where she would labor on towards yet more back surgery. Seonsuk prided herself on her Northern European furniture company job. She’d been hired as a “multi-skill worker” at first, which the company advertised as an equivalent to a medical internship that would take her across many departments, helping her develop as an all-rounder—but it really meant she was assigned odd jobs without being affiliated with any department at all, loading packages at the logistics team before being summoned to do dishes with the food team, before being ordered to the sales team to stock their shelves. Two years later, she settled in the logistics team. At first she moved boxes by hand or pallet jack only, but she practiced with the forklift until she could drive it with ease. Back when she’d just started, though, still not used to operating the forklift, colleagues would impatiently pull boxes off her load with angry glares, which had discouraged—but not defeated—her. She had to learn at some point, so she might as well learn now, she told herself. “Sorry that took so long,” she apologized, and when the colleague responded, “Wait, that was you?” without recognizing her, she felt her chest ache. The same happened when she got the prongs of the forklift smoothly into the gap in the thin paper pallets without a hint of anxiety for the very first time. Eventually, she was stocking products on distant overhead shelves with the reach truck, crossing dock levelers to receive freight from shipping containers, and even got to ride the order picker they nicknamed the “Flying Nimbus.” That wasn’t to say it was all smooth sailing. Once, she’d been driving under a low ceiling with the mast raised, and struck a sprinkler pipe. Water exploded over the workers and the products like an unexpected waterfall, and Seonsuk sat in her forklift, frozen, with head hung low until the pipe finally ran out of water, telling herself that she was on a movie set, and they were shooting an exaggerated storm sequence that couldn’t possibly fool the audiences. The deluge only stopped once water splashed up to their ankles in the gigantic warehouse. “People always screw up just as they’re getting confident,” her colleagues said as she remained glued to her seat. “It’s all insured, don’t worry,” they said. It was those very people who, when more forklift operators joined the team and they had to take turns operating the few machines they had, forcing them to carry more boxes by hand, conspired to shove her back down to the hand-loading role. But Seonsuk held her head high. She was a born tactician who knew how to distribute and display inventory just right, a virtuoso on the controls, a master of spatial awareness, and a mediator who knew how to resolve disputes. Those intellectual exercises gave her joy. At least, until her musculoskeletal system began to act up. “Most people say it’s kind of like a stabbing pain, but for me it’s like I’m getting sliced up. It’s like a hydraulic press with hundreds of needles poisoned with pure agony pressing right on my shoulders and scapulae and arms until the pain’s been literally injected to every last cell, all the way to the toppity-top layer of skin. You know what Yeongju’s up to now? She’s calling my doctor—not my doctor, but that doctor—between work so she can get him to see her boss’s parents. And their backs are fine, but they’re just so old they’re bound to hurt something by the time they get their turn. And I’m supposed to lose out there, too? We’re supposed to lose out?” Seonsuk fell asleep at nine in the evening, that is, two in the morning. Unju stepped out into the living room and lay sleepless on the floor. She remembered the farewell party her friends had thrown for her during winter break, in their final year of junior high school. This was before the big pub fire in Incheon, back when struggling bars treated the law as a recommendation and let minors in without a fuss. They’d let the minors sneak in Toad Jinro too, knowing they couldn’t afford much, but only up to three bottles. It was snowing that night, and they were all piss-drunk when they staggered out of the bar, when the boys got into a fight with three men. The men were in those pale brown lace-up boots that were all the rage back then. Seonsuk’s gang outnumbered the adults, but they were just too drunk to put up a decent fight. One got caught and slammed to the floor, and one of the boots kicked him in the gut. Another of the boys fell on top of him, and the boot moved up to the newer, easier target, and kicked again and again. Kicked at the one below, and then the one on top. Then another boy fell, and as bellies one, two, and three felt the sting of the lace-up boot, Unju fled across the six-lane street. So did the other girls. Not Seonsuk. Across the street, in the narrow alleyway between the bar and a gimbap eatery, they could see the back of a lurching drunk. And though he made it hard to see what was happening beyond, Unju knew Seonsuk was being touched. They could not call the police. They were in junior high school, they had drunk alcohol, and Unju must not be suspended from school. She must not be expelled to attend the same high school as Seonsuk. Next she remembered knocking madly with Seonsuk on Yeongju’s front door. Yeongju opened it, and Unju and Seonsuk made a beeline for the bedroom. Yeongju’s father lay on his side just beyond the sliding door watching TV, but because he was hard of hearing, they had no reason to hush, as long as he saw nothing. Seonsuk and Unju crawled under a blanket and lay facing each other. Seonsuk reached over and touched Unju’s breast. A light hold at first, as if checking the ripeness of a fruit, but then she twisted as though to tear it off. She shoved Unju against the wall and punched and kicked at her stomach. Unju screamed, but Yeongju’s father heard nothing. Standing guard outside the door, Yeongju thought, About time she got a beating too. The next day, Unju was black and blue all over, but only from the neck down, a technique Seonsuk learned firsthand and often from her own older brothers. And because she had taken her fair share of that beating on that day, Unju felt that she deserved to use the Seonsuk of today—their friendship—as a path back to deviation. When she returned home, Gyeongsu fussed that she must be exhausted from the night out and gave her a massage. The blackout curtains were drawn shut, the lighting was dimmed, and the singing bowl music was started as he went on about muscle tissue, which told her that Gyeongsu had come back from a seminar about massages. Gyeongsu slid his thumb down Unju’s oil-slicked neck. “You think I look stupid, trying to be better.” He released her shoulder from his grip, saying it was too knotted, and switched to press with his elbow. “Knots—more like rocks!” He had become a more earnest person. So had Seonsuk. He was still massaging her when Unju fell asleep again. She dreamed they were in bed together, all three of them. Gyeongju and Unju took turns squeezing Seonsuk. Her aching neck and back, the one side that was always twisted from looking backwards—“I’m on that little machine for eight hours a day, which means I’m basically driving from Seoul to Busan and back, but half the time I’m driving with my neck turned back and my back twisted to the side. The vibration’s killer, too, gets all the way to the top of my head. Wanna see something funny?” Seonsuk, who lay in the bed next to Unju, took her hand. Unju thought Seonsuk fell asleep at that very moment, because—“See? No grip strength.” Her eyes slid shut. Like in the movies, where someone dropped a wine glass as they nodded off. As they died. Her old friend’s grip was just that frail. Back to the dream—the pungent scent of oil enveloped their naked bodies, and as if wrestling in mud, entangled, they rubbed the knots out of one another’s muscles. Hands ran down spines in a wake of flesh that had never known hard labor. Seonsuk guffawed and said out loud, “What are you, Thumbelina and the fairy prince? You’re both so good. That hits the spot. That really hits the spot.” Was this a new kind of threesome for middle-aged people? Unju laughed. She opened her eyes, however, and though excited, Unju was not even smiling. Before leaving Seonsuk’s house, Unju remembered to take the little note with Seonsuk’s registration ID. Next to that one was a piece of scrap paper, its edges cut perfectly straight and the front side marked only with the instruction for Unju to leave her own Resident Registration Number. It would take, what, three years? For Seonsuk to get that surgery with that doctor and for Unju to finally get her turn? Unju’s pen hovered over the paper, but never made contact. Seonsuk might do anything with her registration number. Not now, perhaps. But someday.

Poetry Two Poems by Hwang Sung Hee The Umbrella’s Feelings Why did you steal someone else’s umbrella? I didn’t steal it Didn’t you just get off the subway with his umbrella? Yes, I did Then how is it not stealing? He just watched me get off with his umbrella So that makes it not stealing? But he just sat there, didn’t say a word even when I pulled the umbrella out from under his legs and took it with me You shouldn’t have taken it from the beginning If the umbrella really mattered he would’ve stopped me That makes it okay to take it like that? Someone other than him reported it and you’re the one who came running after me Thanks to you, you missed the train and he’s gone now Everyone here will think that you’re the owner of the umbrella So that makes you innocent? Why is everyone letting him be? He’s a very mean person And you a good one? I’m a compassionate one, I preserved the umbrella’s dignity Then why have you been crying this whole time? I don’t know whether the umbrella will like it There’s no way to know What Happens When You Read a Signboard There were letters on a signboard, I read them and the letters disappeared The sign went blank and only the frame remained Look at that, the letters on the sign are gone Having said this I turned around but there was no one by my side I hurried to make a place beside me and set you there I said, I read the letters but they disappeared For a moment you were puzzled by having sprung into existence But then you said that it’s only natural for the letters to be gone once the reader’s gone too If I’m gone both the sign and the letters will become something that never existed, which would be revenge enough on the sign and the letters But hurt that you suggested that I, of all, should be gone first I decided to remove you before the sign Without any scream or struggle you disappeared in an instant, which made me sad and got me in tears It seemed that I was responsible for the beginning and end of all this In eyes full of tears everything blurred into stars I couldn’t read anything with such eyes for a moment, and all was good

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