i heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too (1/2)
i heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
~16,500w; r (hongbin/soyeon, some hongbin/woori)
it takes thirty years to cheat death.
a/n: written for kpop olymfics 2015, with the prompt Lyn and Leo "Blossom Tears." probably one of my most ambitious fics (the longest!!), but definitely not one of the best. this is literally a slow-paced, 16.5k fic about supernatural heartburn. somewhat a Dead Like Me AU, reworked with elements of Korean death mythology. quotes "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae.
warnings: for death and mentions of sex.
June
The window’s open. The air is humid, the cicadas are screaming, and Woori’s trying to finish the story she started after they were done fucking as she pulls on her jeans. Hongbin listens, or at least he thinks he tries, but the cicadas create a static in the background that can’t be ignored. He stares out the window, still shirtless, cold glass of water numbing his hand, listening. It is too dark outside to see anything but a tinted mirror of his bedroom.
“And then he just leaves the next morning before I wake up. Doesn’t even buy breakfast or leave a note. No ‘I’ll be back late. Don’t wait for me.’ Nothing.” She sits back on his bed. Shakes her head. Hongbin sees her reflection from where he’s looking out the window. Watches her walk up behind him, press her clothed body against his bare back. He flinches, though he saw her coming. Her body is warm, the air is humid, and the glass in his hand is sweating, water all over his fingers. If Woori notices, she says nothing. She has always been good at that.
Her arms snake over his torso, welcome parasite encircling his skin. He’s attached to her - has been ever since they made out that one time in graduate school. “What would I do without you?” she murmurs, chin resting on his shoulder jabbing the desperate syllables into his flesh. Hongbin doesn’t know.
“You should just leave him,” he swallows. She shifts her position so her head rests against the nape of his neck. Inhales. “Myungsoo.” Exhales. Repeat.
Laughter bubbles in her chest but doesn’t fully escape her mouth. Or maybe it does, drowned out by the cicadas. “So insincere.” She reaches over him and pulls the window closed. The glass pane muffles the noise from outside.
“This is why I tell the stories,” she whispers, breath cold against his back. They have this conversation every time, and it always ends the same way, in a different position. Tonight, her lips press against his spine. They are colder than expected. He shivers.
A dark silhouette among many other shadows, walking in the same direction, but only she is in focus. The occasional motorbike weaving through the crowd illuminates half of her face in lemon-peel yellow. Then, she’s a shade in the darkness once more.
Her work clothes have long become a raised, second skin upon her first. The pencil skirt and white dress shirt stick to her uncomfortably, the heat from her body rushing out of a little hole in her stockings above her right knee. The humid summer air only pushes it back in. Her blazer, easy enough to throw on and off her shoulders, crumples into a wrinkled mass between her arms. Short black heels click, click, click against the street.
The night clings to the backs of apartment complexes. Yellow lights ooze out of resident’s open windows and back doors, chasing the darkness away. It slinks down the corners, plummets straight down into the shadows. She stops breathing. The scent of burning tar hangs in the air. She blinks, but there is no evidence of smoke.
It is here. Turns another corner into a backstreet, her silhouette unfocused. All the other shadows are gone now. Short black heels splash, splash, splash in the alley, the ground damp. The leaking sewage is scentless compared to the burning, smokeless combustion. She stops breathing.
The tar black thing is sticking to the back wall, pulsing, rotting, hers to swallow. Waiting to be swallowed. It hardly resists when she pries it off the concrete, hissing in her palm. She opens her mouth, inhales, catching the decaying soul with her tongue. Swallows. It claws down her throat, looking for a pocket in the flesh to burrow, before falling into the pit. She screws her eyes shut and swallows again.
Short black heels go back the way they came from - click, click, click. She walks down the street, the headlights of a motorbike illuminating half her face a lemon-peel yellow. Now she smells the sewage clinging to her heels, ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes.
The soul is in her belly - ruined thing, decayed thing - was her soul to take. Reminds herself this on the subway home, blazer crumpled across her lap like a lifeless body.
Gershwin builds up. The triumphant blares of trumpets blend in well with the honking of early morning traffic. Hongbin doesn’t remember putting this song into his MP3 player, doesn't remember the last time he even listened to Gershwin. "Rhapsody in Blue" continues to provide dramatic background music to his morning, anyway.
The sun is out, beating down on his back. It is not an unbearable heat just yet. The day has just blinked open at seven thirty, sunny after a week of non-stop rain. He takes a shortcut through the park next to his office. The trees create inconsistent patterns of shadows over his face when he looks up at their tops. The sky is blindingly white through the spaces the leaves reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
This is when "Rhapsody in Blue" ends. The beginning notes of a Park Hyoshin song starts up - his soft voice follows suit. This was the song that Hongbin loved, and it sounded so much clearer through someone else’s earphones, like Hongbin was hearing the song the way -
Cicadas chirp, a chorus in the trees. Hongbin turns his face up, the sky blindingly white through the spaces the leaves reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover. He tries to look for one in the trees. When he looks back down, there are dark spots in his vision. He blinks repeatedly, but they persist, like the cicadas - deafening summer bugs, lost in the trees. Hongbin welcomes the distraction.
“Another sleepless night?” Jaeseop asks with a raised eyebrow, leaning against Hongbin’s desk. The office is sweltering - doesn’t help that the air conditioning isn’t going to be fixed until next week. When Hongbin runs an absentminded hand through his hair, it comes back slightly damp. He pats it on his pants.
Hongbin gets up to refill his glass of water. The cold air of the refrigerator cools the slightly damp spots on his trousers. “That obvious?” he jokes, a friendly-enough smile on his lips. Last time Hongbin checked in the mirror, his dark circles looked about the same - no marked improvement, but no signs of deepening, either.
Jaeseop sighs. He digs his hands into his pockets. “I know you’re dedicated to seeing our magazine succeed, but don’t kill yourself over it, ok?” Hongbin doesn’t shake his head or hum in approval, but he looks at his boss as he sips his water. The years Jaeseop spent in America for college must have really influenced his outlook on the workplace.
Hongbin offers him another smile, amicable, but silent. Jaeseop claps him on the shoulder before they return to their respective positions. The files sitting on Hongbin’s desk are stacked high enough to keep him company for the rest of the week. Don’t think, just work. Shakes the mouse to wake up his computer.
The cicadas scream from the park, so loud the vibrations catch in Hongbin’s fingertips. The feeling is an afterthought, the kind that fails to come into consciousness. He’s too distracted to notice.
Soohyun’s the first one she sees when her eyes finally open, the second time. They shifted frantically - up, right, down, left - and she gasped for breath, the breath that she couldn’t take when her heart started slowing, slowing, slowing. She was thirsty for oxygen then, too.
That’s when she found him in her area of vision. A cheek there, an ear here. Eyes, far from merciful - keen, dark eyes, that knew, knew what she’d been through. She blinked and the image went unclear, looked down just as his lips moved.
“It’s ok,” he said. Stood up straight, still looking at her. “You’re dead.”
Something hitched in her throat and she coughed, coughed and felt how empty her chest was, how light it was. It was not a good emptiness. She coughed again. He held out a hand. “It’s ok.”
She took it.
Soyeon wakes up in her bed, stockings rolled off. She vaguely remembers throwing them into the trash before falling asleep. Her work clothes still stick to her skin, and the sheets smell faintly of sweat when she turns in them. Half-awake, she lifts a leg up. Inspects the ankle, wiggles her toes. Puts it down and does the same with the other. The scar she got from jumping off the swing set in fourth grade is still there - a sliver of childish ignorance on her skin.
She closes her eyes again. The space beneath her lids is now peach, the morning wiping out the pitch black of sleep. They say she’s spouts of blood in the form of flesh - the iron taste so human that it neutralizes the souls, tar black most of the time, rotting outside from the body - her kind, that is, the ones that take care of the loose souls. She’s no longer a body - just a concept, an idea in the shape of a human. Masquerades as a person, someone, when she’s anything but.
That’s why she wiggles her toes. They feel like her toes, look like her toes, though she never really paid attention to what her toes looked like exactly until she became spouts of blood. She feels; she thinks. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am.
I think, therefore I am, I think, I think, I think.
The last time Hongbin fell asleep, he dreamed of a beating heart. Raw and red muscle - the bones and flesh that were supposed to be protecting the heart not in his field of vision, as if everything was cut away and only this image was left, palpitating. Steady, strong beats, like the ones he felt when he pressed a thumb against his wrist. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Slower. Ba. Dum. Ba. Dum. Struggling. Ba - Dum. Failing. The beginning notes of the Park Hyoshin song they listened to with the same pair of earphones floods into the cavity, as if ushering in an end. Stopping, stopping, stopping -
And then the heart ceased to beat.
The light of the television screen cuts through the dark, English-teaching program on cells casting an alien glow over Hongbin’s face. His eyes have long adjusted to the brightness, burning into his vision, casting long shadows over the black print on the loose leaf papers scattered over his lap. Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. VI-RUS. English now. He speaks the words aloud, the V weak. VI-RUS. VI-RUS. Another infected cell emerges on the screen.
Four fifty-seven in the morning. The fan’s on, the tv is plugged in, he’s learning English at odd hours in the dark and nothing has overheated or blown a spark.
Thirty minutes into the program when it tries to get them to say: THE VI-RUS MU-TATES. Hongbin’s tongue catches on all the wrong syllables. THE VI-RUS MU-TATES. Thousands of infected cells decorate the screen, silently multiplying behind the words.
Viruses remind him of her. Woori. Woori and her parasitic arms that snake over his torso. Vi-rus, Woori. They don’t sound as similar aloud as they did in his head. He won’t see her again until Saturday, when Hongbin has the day off. Will it be raining again then? Thundering so loud that they can’t hear each other take labored breaths? Repeat after me. The way her hands ghost over his skin then press, hold him where he wants them to hold him. THE VI-RUS IN-FECTS A-NO-THER CELL.
Hongbin gathers up the papers, stacking them neatly on the uneven coffee table he props his legs on. Repeat after me. The program goes too fast for anyone with little to no knowledge of English to follow along. THE VI-RUS IN-FECTS A-NO-THER CELL. No one wants to watch this shit.
He repeats the sentence. The pronunciation sounds more accurate to his ears than anything else he tried saying that night.
They all watched her the first time she swallowed a soul. The others like Soohyun - the ones who made sure those who were supposed to die died, that their souls were sent to Death, the proper noun rather than the state of un-living - Yujeong, Jaehwan, Hoonmin, and Haein.
Take the soul. This one was gray, gray like dust rather than pitch dark, flat against the sidewalk. If Soyeon didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t have given it a second glance. Grab the soul. She scraped the thing off the ground, placed it in her palm. It was there, but it didn’t feel like it existed. It wasn’t supposed to exist there in the first place.
Inhale. She heard Haein in the background - is this supposed to happen? Is she supposed to - ? The soul trailed into her mouth. She curled it onto her tongue. Swallow. She did.
Swallow. The soul was like powder in her mouth, rolling off her tongue, dry, so dry, she couldn’t push it down. Swallow. She did, she pushed it down. What now? The soul choked her on its way down and she gasped for air that she didn’t need, air that wouldn’t fill her lungs - you’re not human so you’re ok, Soyeon. You’re ok. Yujeong’s hand in hers is the last thing she remembers about the incident.
She leans over the toilet, sure that she’ll throw up. She doesn’t. The taste of burning tar is still there when she licks the roof of her mouth, swears the smoke curls up her throat and works its way out her mouth. Licks the top of her mouth to make sure the sensation remains. It makes her cough, but nothing else. She flushes the toilet though she hasn’t touched it.
Suzy, her co-worker, is washing her hands at the sink. “Are you ok?” she asks, dialect coming out. Suzy smiles sheepishly when she realizes her mistake, but Soyeon laughs. Both of them came from Gwangju - dialect was bound to slip out in some form whenever they spoke. “You’ve been going to the bathroom every thirty minutes since this morning.”
“It’s nothing,” Soyeon replies, waving a hand. When she reaches to turn the faucet, she catches her reflection in the mirror. Eighteen-year-old Soyeon looks back at her. What would she look like if she wasn’t frozen in time? Soohyun had told her that they look nothing like their old selves to others. Soyeon’s always been too afraid to find out what she looks like in someone else’s eyes.
Suzy’s reflection checks her watch. “Break’s almost over,” she sighs. “Time to sell more vitamins.” Soyeon rinses the soap out of her hands. “See you there!” Suzy calls from the door.
Eighteen-year-old Soyeon is still staring back at her from within the mirror. She averts her eyes and focuses on the water swirling down the drain instead. It is soapy but clear, white like the porcelain sink beneath it. Clear, unlike the decaying soul that’s resting somewhere inside her, quiet and calm now. Licks the roof of her mouth again. It still tastes disgusting.
The number you have called is not available right now. Please leave a message after the tone.
Beep. Hongbin, it’s your father. I hope you’re doing well. Are you sleeping these days? Call me back if you get this message, if you’re not too busy. Come visit me sometime.
(Pause). That’s right. Your mother wanted you to go back to Gwangju for Chuseok. Talk to her about that.
The window’s closed. It’s Saturday and rain pelts against the panes, so loud that Hongbin wonders if the force could crack glass. The cicadas are drowned out for once. He wonders where they go when it pours.
Woori rests her head against his shoulder, laces her fingers with his. Myungsoo, her husband, is on a business trip for the weekend, so she lingers in his bed. Without the reality of an unhappy marriage waiting for her at home, she whispers a fantasy into Hongbin’s ear.
“Gangnim the Mortal had escaped the Underworld,” she smiles wide against his neck, the way she always does when she gets to her favorite part of the story. “But that wouldn’t do. Yeomra, god of the dead, was not pleased. ‘Give me Gangnim the Mortal,’ he demanded of the King of Gwayang, whom Gangnim served. The King refused. After all, Gangnim had figured out what happened to the three sons and cheated death.”
Hongbin tilts his head so it keeps hers there, on his shoulder. She swats him away and he just laughs. “And what happened next?”
“Just these two items, miss?” the boy at the counter asks her. He can’t be more than twenty-one. Soyeon can see acne still blooming on his cheeks. She nods, smiles, and tries hard not to stare.
The seats looking out the window of the convenience store are all empty today. Her yellow raincoat is dripping on the linoleum floor in the seat beside her. Good thing she managed to get out of the station and into the store right before the rain started pouring harder.
Halfway between her apartment and the department store. Half the package of seasoning goes into her ramen, the other half remains forgotten until all that’s left is the soup. Deep down, she gets the feeling that her habits are inconvenient. Why stop here, specifically, every day when there is another store exactly like this one on her street? The other part of her tells her no - you’re here, waiting for something. Something to happen.
Rain streaks down the window. Sometimes she catches faces in the patterns of raindrops, but they’re washed away just as quickly, falling onto the street. The red tail lights of cars and motorcycles waiting at the intersection blur in the downpour. It is hard for her to watch them. She looks back at the raindrops instead. Only they are in focus.
July
Yeomra, tricky Yeomra, offered the King a bargain. One of them would take Gangnim the Mortal’s body, the other the soul. Of course the King chose the body - what was a soul back then? Gangnim’s body immediately collapsed. His soul went to Yeomra, who made him the new Jeosung Chasa, reaper of the dead.
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, green stems reaching toward the sky - cloudless and an endless blue. Buried could be the word for it, but she’s not far enough beneath the earth. There are buds at the ends of each stem, light green and waiting to bloom. Waiting like she does at the convenience store. But the buds have a definite end, unlike her. She’s almost jealous.
She reaches an arm up. It’s lost between the stalks in her vision. This must be a dream. She lets her arm fall to her side. The picture remains the same, she’s still looking up. Did she move at all? If you don’t know the answer to that question, Soyeon remembers her older sister telling her once, then you’re not in the real world.
The thing is - it’s hard to know what’s real or not real when you’re dead and everything bleeds into each other. The rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon realizes. This is either a dream or reality, but both feel the same to her now.
The sky is blue, blue for miles. Even back home, where not as many buildings rise into the clouds, she’s never seen a sky so infinite, like an ocean above her head. You’re not alive, she tells herself. The wind shakes the stems. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. She closes her eyes.
You’re not alive, but this, this feels like a dream.
Rare quiet night in his apartment. All the lights are off and Hongbin lays on top of the covers of his bed, sweating into the blankets. The bed’s only good for two things - sex and sweating - and horrible for everything else. His eyes are closed but he sees the darkness behind them. Sleep is not waiting for him at the end of it.
He doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to dream. Hongbin’s will is so strong, his mother used to joke, that he doesn’t even get sick when everyone around him is. Maybe that’s why he’s still awake. Opens his eyes. Hates it - sleeping, dreaming, being at the mercy of his subconscious, the part of him that remembers even though he doesn’t want to. He turns to his side and stares into the darkness. Lets his eyes adjust to the shift in the shadows.
Most of all, Hongbin hates the memories, the ones that threaten to drown out all his other thoughts every day, at any moment. They hold him at bay - and there in the shallow water, force him under the surface. He holds his breath and doesn’t fall asleep.
“Do we dream?” she asks Yujeong as the crosswalk signal turns green. The older girl pauses and looks at Soyeon before she begins to walk again. Floods of people, men and women on their way to work, students running to catch the bus, seem to pass around them - paths in flux, engulfing them until they are the little larvae at the center of an egg. Living in a hurry, there’s not enough time, never enough time. Soyeon feels leisurely and lethargic all at once in comparison.
“Why do you ask?” Yujeong counters. Question for a question. They all do that a lot. Alive, maybe they’d try to find an answer that they could believe in. But in death, not everything had an answer. Maybe this was one of those non-answers. Soyeon shrugs.
The older girl cranes her neck, scanning through the crowds of people. Looking for death? Jaehwan joked once, when he tagged along. Soyeon didn’t think much of it when he first said it, but the more she thought about it, it was an apt remark.
Yujeong sighs when they reach the next crosswalk. The signal is red. “Have you ever thought about this? That we’ve been dreaming all this time?” Soyeon looks at her, but Yujeong is staring straight ahead, at some point across the street. “That this feels real, we feel, but at the same time, we don’t really. That it all seems fake, but when you’re told to point out what’s surreal about it, nothing comes to mind.”
“I don’t know,” Soyeon replies. Yujeong glances at her for a moment, then looks back ahead. The crosswalk sign goes green. They’re in the middle of the street when Yujeong bumps into a stranger - a woman with a polite smile when Yujeong apologizes. Maybe she has children, a husband waiting at home, her husband’s parents to take care of. Soyeon watches the woman go, pale purple shirt like a beacon in the crowd. Yujeong pats her on the back to get her to face forward again.
Then are all the other bodies in the ground just sleeping? Car tires skid loudly somewhere on the street behind them. Yujeong opens her palm and the silver ghost of the woman’s soul shoots up into the sky. Soyeon watches as she smiles sadly. They keep walking.
There’s a heart, still but raw and red, waiting for her the first time she closes her eyes again. You’ll see some things when you think you’re sleeping sometimes, Soohyun told her once she came to.
Like dreams?
Like dreams.
The heart is disturbingly still. Soyeon waits for it to start beating, to heart the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum in her chest - that must be her heart, can feel that it’s her heart, but her chest has been quiet since she last opened her eyes, for the second time.
Spouts of blood in the form of flesh - the blood neutralizes the tar, the decaying things, the things she swallows. Her heart is with Death now, proper noun, a failed muscle, alone without her body, but a vital muscle all the same. And she is still here, where she thinks she’s sleeping, thinks she’s dreaming - but she’s not. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am.
A cloud of dust, ashy like cinders, swirls in her chest cavity, replacing the motionless heart. An idea in the shape of an organ. The irony of it hits her then. She’s heartless - quite literally.
The rain starts up unexpectedly. Hongbin waits out the downpour until midnight. His co-workers wave goodbye to him at his spot under the awning before pulling their coats over their heads and running, loafers splashing through the puddles. Hongbin wonders how their wives will think about rain-soaked, un-ironed suit jackets.
When are you going to get married? he hears a lot. Before I die, he’ll chuckle and they’ll laugh about it, not take it seriously. But when Hongbin thinks of marriage, he thinks of wives yelling at husbands and husbands yelling at wives, all over the little things but they’re just so tired of compromise and giving in. The way Hongbin stared at the popcorn ceiling, bumpy like the curdled milk his father forgot to throw away. They fought over that, too. Always fighting and Hongbin was always home and everyone was always tired of one another.
Sometimes, when Hongbin thinks of marriage, he thinks of Woori. Woori and Myungsoo. He couldn’t get married to Woori, or someone like Woori - no, at some point in between the sex and children, he would stop listening to her stories and start telling his own. Insincere, she would joke, scoff, scream. And they would fight.
Five minutes past twelve. He pulls his suit jacket over his head and runs to the station, loafers splashing through the puddles. Sopping all over the floor of the subway, but the person sitting closest to him is all the way at the other end of the car. Maybe he could just melt into the seat, become one with the blue plastic, sink down into the beige floor. He wouldn’t have to worry about getting married, then. It’s a nice image. His hair keeps dripping.
“So,” Woori said, breathless from kissing. Her hand was splayed over his cheek. “Tell me a story, Hongbin.” This was in the period of their relationship Hongbin relates to as the “before” - before Woori lost patience with his terse memories, when he asked her why she always had to talk about something after they fucked.
She had thought about it, cupped a palm over her chin. “You look like someone who listens.” When he had laughed in confusion, she amended the statement. “Not someone who listens to anyone or anything, you know? Just someone who listens,” Woori paused again. “Someone who listens to stories.”
He turned his head toward her, the hand she placed on his face caught beneath his cheek. He laughed. “You don’t have anything else to tell me?”
Woori drew back her hand and his head knocked against the mattress. “Tell me about your first love,” she suggested, propping herself up with her elbows so she had to look down to meet his eyes. When Hongbin remained silent, her expression morphed into one of horror. “Don’t tell me that I’m your first love,” she groaned. “We met in graduate school, that is not a first love, Lee Hongbin.”
Hongbin thought about it. “No,” he said, turning onto his back. First love. There were a couple - the girl he liked in first grade whose name he can’t even remember. His older sister’s friend that he had a huge crush on. She is what he remembers most when he thinks back on the time he was twelve. But they were just attractions - it was all just infatuation until -
He had to screw his eyes shut to keep out the memories.
This was the only time Hongbin ever told her a real story.
“Just these two items, miss?” Acne boy is replaced by a girl who looks about the same age. Her eyes are ringed with black, an ashy black. Soyeon nods, smiles, and tries not to stare.
She sits in front of the convenience store window, on the seat to the far right. A man, suit jacket balled into his lap, slurping his noodles, sits to her far left. The dusk outside turns what boxes she can see of the sky an uneven mix of navy and gold. The cars and motorcycles outside already have their headlights on, cutting through the premature darkness.
No rain in Seoul today. There’s a streak of cleaning agent on the window right in front of her seat, not wiped off completely. It distorts the traffic, license plates curling at strange places. It’ll wash off tomorrow, when the rain starts back up again. She bites the straw of her drink. She’ll be here tomorrow, too, after all. Waiting.
“What am I?” Soyeon remembers asking Soohyun once she had gotten used to the emptiness in her chest cavity. Her body felt lighter, like her bones were hollow or something - but she was no bird. For all she knew, the only that changed about her was that someone had taken her failed heart.
Someone, the god of the dead. Hoonmin referred to him as Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls of the deceased. Soohyun just said Death - proper noun, capital D. He’s why they’re all here, still here, when they should either be ashes in a drawer at a temple or locked shut six feet under the ground.
Soohyun chewed his nail thoughtfully as she waited for him to answer. “The ones like me, those who reap the souls of the dead are souls themselves. We feel human, breath like humans, hearts beat like humans, but we aren’t,” he placed her hand over his wrist. Sure enough, she felt a heartbeat beneath her fingertips.
He exhaled. Winter then, his breath white puffs in the air. They trailed up, up, up until they blended in with the icy gray sky and she could not see them anymore. “Your lot swallow the souls that leave the body before death. That’s why they’re tar, decaying, rotting things. But Death needs those souls, too,” Soohyun started. He took the seat on the bench beside Soyeon.
“But why me?” she whispered. Body in the ground, heart useless, gone so young - she had so much life in her. How had her parents taken the news? Walking home from school and then her heart just gave out. Dead right then, right there, heart taken by death, Death, Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls. “Why?”
Soohyun’s eyes looked pained. Soyeon wondered how many times he’d had to do this already. Did Jaehwan, Yujeong, Hoonmin, and Haein cry about it? Or was this all just a dream, something that felt like a dream that would be over before they knew it? “Death needs you, too,” he said softly. It was not the least bit comforting, but in that moment, Soohyun pretended it was enough. Soyeon pretended it was enough, too.
His father moved back to Seoul right before Hongbin finished high school. Right back to Jayang-dong, into an apartment not far from the one they used to live in. His mother had her head in her hands a lot then, running her fingers through her hair. It was so gray then - Hongbin had always remembered his mother with dark, dark black hair. He wondered then how long it had been since he stopped looking.
“It’s not working out between us,” his mother told him. I know, I’ve heard the yelling. Even the neighbors know. “It’s better this way, Hongbin. It’ll be better this way,” she smiled, as if trying to convince herself along with him.
It’ll be better this way. The neighbors still gave them weird looks whenever they walked past them. The window in his room above his desk was still boarded up - no one can come to put in a new pane yet. Just be patient. But Hongbin had been patient all his life - staring at the popcorn ceiling when his parents both left for work at five in the morning, already yelling and fighting then. Waiting for them to stop. Waiting for things to be ok again. Waiting in the music store, between the new releases and the classics, waiting for the bus to come. Waiting even as the bus left.
There was a vase of white lilies on a second year’s desk when Hongbin passed by every morning until the end of the school year.
“Is it insomnia?” Jaeseop asks. They’re walking through the park on the way to the office. They happened to see each other once they got off the subway.
“Not sure,” Hongbin replies. It’s pouring again, sky a suffocating gray, the summer heat still humid and stifling. They both have their umbrellas this time.
Jaeseop looks at him carefully, maybe even watches him, before looking back up at the trees. Fat drops slide off their leaves, creating an uneven rhythm of rain on Hongbin’s umbrella. “I worry for you, sometimes,” Jaeseop says, shaking his head. “Do you even have a girlfriend?”
Woori. Does what they have count as a relationship? Maybe. “Kind of,” Hongbin settles for. He closes his umbrella underneath the awning, shakes off the extra raindrops. Some of them create spots on Jaeseop’s pants. Jaeseop, playing the part of the concerned boss - or is he serious? Hongbin can’t tell - sighs.
Their shoes are soaked, socks squishing uncomfortably as they climb the stairs to their office. The soles squeak with each step, and the air conditioner - finally fixed - hums in the stairway. His heart beats in his chest, loud and pounding, painful. Must be the heat. Jaeseop sighs again. “I worry for you, sometimes.”
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, green stems reaching toward the sky - cloudless and an endless blue. Buried maybe, but there’s blood in her veins, blood in her flesh. That’s her - spouts of blood in the form of flesh - swallows the decayed souls and they settle down in her belly.
It’s the same place as before, all those nights before, when she reached up an arm and it was lost between the stalks in her vision. If it happens twice, maybe it is a dream. The thing is - it’s hard to know what’s real or not real when you’re dead and everything starts to feel the same.
Buds at the ends of each stem, light green and waiting to bloom. Waiting like she does at the convenience store, like Yujeong, Hoonmin, Jaehwan, Haein are to take their last soul, so they can close their eyes for good this time. But these buds are waiting for life. Life, death, Death, Yeomra - the rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon realizes.
The picture is a little different. Her arms aren’t there, still, but the buds have started to open, slowly. Orange peeks out from beneath the light green. What flowers are those? They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. Blue for miles.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind shakes the stems. But why, where, or how is not clear to me. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. Thus, I am not in the real world. She closes her eyes.
This must be a dream.
The only story Lee Hongbin ever told Go Woori:
“She was in the school choir. I don’t remember what her voice sounded like - I couldn’t tell you if it was high-pitched, or clear, or husky. I just remember how I heard it. You know, the feeling you get when you hear someone singing? That I remember. It was...warm. She was always practicing after school, and practices ran late. I would always wait in the music shop near the bus stop and try to catch the same bus as her. She got off a stop before mine.
She was younger than me by a year, but it didn’t feel that way. She was so much…more than me, you could say. Maybe because I liked her. Or maybe because she just was. She just was.
It was infatuation at first. A crush. I liked her smile before I found out that she sang. One day, she went home early - sore throat and couldn’t have it spreading to the other choir members. I remember I was waiting for the bus in the music shop next to it, listening to - I can’t remember. Some new release at the time, not very popular, but it was decent music. When I had nothing else to listen to, I’d listen to Park Hyoshin.
And she was there, the earbuds in her ear. I might have been staring. Sometimes you don’t realize you do things when you do them. That was probably one of those times. But she looked up, looked at me.”
She smiled. A lone dimple showed up on her right cheek. Asymmetrical. He liked that. Liked her. His heart pounded loudly in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Fast, as fast as it could.
“Wanna listen?” she said. Shook her hair away from her face so she could grab the earbud. She held it out for him. He looked at her, eyes flitting from her eyes, to the words that escaped her lips, to her hand, to the earbud. He took it. Placed it in his right ear.
Park Hyoshin’s voice. Did it always sound like this? Looked down at her, she was almost a head shorter than him. Was she always so tiny? The music sounded different, though Hongbin had listened to this song so many times before. Like he was listening to it through someone else’s perspective - her perspective. The notes seemed clearer, louder. Voice deeper but softer. He looked back down at her.
She looked up at him. His heart pounded even louder in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - if that was possible. Fast, as fast as it could. She didn’t smile this time, but she kept looking at him, the dim lights catching in her hair. And he at her.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, went his heart. He loved that then, right then. Loved her, too, then. Right then.
Still now.
August
“And what happened after that?” Woori asked, the ends of her hair tickling his cheek. He sighed, and the strands swayed.
“Nothing,” he said. It sounded sad to his own ears. But this was not a sad story, or at least Hongbin didn’t think of it that way. It could be if he dwelled on it, let it consume him. But he didn’t. It was simply just the way things turned out and didn’t turn out. He shut out the memories instead. “She’s dead.”
Woori sat up. The sheets covering her breasts fell away. He watched her, but he wasn’t looking - it wasn’t looking like the way he had looked at her in the music store, earbuds in her ear, her eyes looking at him, his eyes looking at her. Woori leaned over him, and her breath warmed his mouth. Replaced that breath with her lips and he felt them on his - felt them there, the idea of them - but truthfully, he wasn’t feeling anything at all.
It’s seven o’clock and bossa nova plays in the bar. Soyeon’s not a regular, but the music seems oddly out of place. Some couple sways along to the sleepy beat, forms hazy in the dark, an unsteady rhythm of movement. They already look tipsy.
The faint yellow lights catch on the ice cubes in her drink. They sparkle like diamonds. The times she’s been here before, it’s always been jazz. Jazz puts her into the mood to drink, even though she hates the taste of alcohol. Jazz, Soyeon, the ice cubes in her drink floating like islands in a round sea. It sounds poetic when the words are in her head. But if she tried to say them out loud, they would lose all meaning.
It’s always then, after the sip that makes the ice clink against her teeth, that Soyeon thinks about sex. Physical intimacy, carnal thoughts. Lust. What it would feel like to have someone that close to you. Would she like it? She remembers the year her class had a lesson on sexual education, the girls sitting next to her whispering to each other - I heard it hurts, don’t you bleed the first time? She wasn’t particularly curious about it then. But were they right? Swirls her tongue around an ice cube. Then why would it be so human to crave it when humans cannot tolerate pain?
She could try it - go to a club and find someone to spend the night with - but even if someone sucked her breast or kissed the insides of her thighs, Soyeon would feel nothing, absolutely nothing. She chips away at the ice with her teeth. She’s not human - not anymore, at least. But she wants to be, wants to know what it feels like even if it hurts, because it must feel better than the lethargic, filmy way sensations come to her now.
The bossa nova keeps playing. The couple still sways to the same beat from two songs ago. Soyeon wonders how often they must have sex. When she looks back down at her drink, the ice cubes have melted. A reminder of their existence lies at the bottom of the glass.
Four thirty in the morning. The English program’s on again, volume so low it’s nearly on mute, his tax reports half-forgotten in his hand. This time, the objective is to “learn how to describe outer space.” Hongbin thinks it’s too broad to be a good one, but then again, how many others watch shitty television at this hour like he does? He sets the tax reports down.
Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. BLACK HOLE. English now. He speaks the words aloud, louder than the volume he has the television on, quieter than the downpour outside. BLACK HOLE. Hongbin thinks most basic textbooks start with the planets. The program goes right off the deep end. BLACK HOLE.
Woori hasn’t called him for weeks. They’re not strangers to indefinite pauses in their relationship, but Hongbin feels uneasy about it this time. BLACK HOLE. Maybe he should call her. Thinks about actually doing it, right then, but it’s not even five yet. Woori’s probably alone in bed, or sleeping with her back facing Myungsoo’s. Maybe she’s awake and thinking about the rain. Repeat after me.
He puts the tv on mute. Reaching for the remote makes his heart pound loudly in his ears - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Harsher now. Must be the heat, must be the lack of sleep. Maybe it is the rain. The pain in his chest lingers, falters, retreats. Hongbin settles back onto the couch.
The fan’s on, the tv is plugged in, and he’s staring at English words that mean nothing to him at odd hours in the dark. Nothing has overheated or blown a spark. Not yet.
They said it was heart failure. Walking home from school and then, bam, her heart gave out. Ceased to beat, breathe, contract, and push - and then she, his first love, maybe his only love, was just a corpse.
It sounded sad when he said it aloud, when the words took shape into sounds, and those sounds reached someone else’s ears. Their face would twist - into sadness, pity, empathy, one of those - or freeze. But this was not a sad story, or at least Hongbin didn’t want it to be. It could be if he dwelled on the ending - why her? why him? - but he doesn’t. He could think about what if - she was still alive, what would she look like, who would she be? Would she be dressed in a black business suit, trapped in a cubicle for forty hours a week? Or would she be frowning and married with one child too many without enough time for herself?
But this was simply the way things turned out and didn’t turn out. Sometimes, Hongbin remembered. Sometimes. Most of the time, he shut the memories out. That part of his heart, he liked to put it as, failed along with hers.
“How much farther?” Jaehwan asks from behind her. It sounds like he’s shouting, but that’s Jaehwan - an impossibly loud echo in an impossibly small space. The question isn’t meant to prod or rush her, Soyeon knows. He’s just, she has to search for the right word. Curious. Jaehwan’s always the one, anyway, who bothers with her the most, aside from Soohyun. Says what she does reminds him of some cartoon he used to watch.
“But reaping is pretty similar,” Soyeon mentioned when he brought it up. Jaehwan laughed and shook his head.
“Cartoons don’t warn you about all the death you have to see.” He was smiling, then, too, but sadly. His eyes looked tired. How many deaths had they seen? She stopped talking about it after that.
“I don’t know,” she tells him, honest, turning another corner. The sun is setting, a hazy pink sky peeking through the stocky apartment complexes, cutting the scene into definite boxes. They were on their way to get food from the convenience store when she felt a pulse, like she had a heart. But she didn’t. Sometimes, the sensation lingered for hours as she searched the streets, pounding loudly in her ears like the spouts of blood in her figurative flesh circulated. What would happen if she let the soul rot, decay, slink into nothingness just to keep this feeling? Would she die, for real this time? “This takes hours some days.”
Jaehwan quickens his pace to keep up with her. “So you have to look for it? Once you feel it?”
She licks the back of her teeth. “Sometimes.” She lies through them.
There were always flowers at Soohyun’s place. Pretty, colorless flowers - white stargazer lilies, drooping dark orchids. Carnations so pale that she thought the petals could be opaque when the light hit them just right. That day, there was a vase of white roses on the kitchen counter. Flowers for the dead. Death always colored a little bit of everything in their lives, existences - however she should put it - no matter how much they tried to shut it out.
The air was sweltering - sticky and humid, the cicadas deafening outside the open kitchen window. Just them two - Soohyun and Soyeon, Soyeon and Soohyun. Sometimes, Jaehwan said their names together really fast, one right after the other, until Soohyun started blending into Soyeon and vice versa. Soohyun or Soyeon emerged as one name in the end. Hoonmin was keeping tally on whose name showed up the most. It was all amusing to Jaehwan, but Soohyun usually knocked him on the back several times with a healthy, unamused laugh.
But it was quiet when it was just the two of them. What did you say to the man who knows who dies today and tells people to collect their souls? Soohyun got up to shut the window, silencing the cicadas. When he sat back down across from her, there was a contemplative look on his face, like he was trying to determine the best way to put a thought into words. She waited for him to proceed.
“Don’t just go - ” Soohyun paused. Thought about it some more. “Looking for souls, Soyeon.” She pressed her lips together in confusion. He did not rephrase the sentence.
“Looking,” she repeated. Silence. The cicadas were still there, faint, but chirping. He shook his head and inhaled sharply. Maybe he could smell the white roses from where he sat. The scent of death.
“You’ll get what I mean,” Soohyun said. He smiled. She smiled back, but the confusion was still there. If Soohyun’s mind lingered on the idea, he said nothing more about it.
The first time Hongbin met Woori, they were in graduate school, drunk, and sitting on the small balcony of someone’s apartment. She was five years older than him and her legs went on for miles. Her hair smelled faintly of shampoo when she leaned over him.
It was Hakyeon who introduced them. Hakyeon knew everyone back then. “This is Woori,” he said. “And this is Hongbin.”
“What do you study?” Hongbin asked. Woori opened her mouth to answer, but Hakyeon cut in. “Literature.” Woori slapped him on the shoulder.
“Can’t you let me pretend to be something else?” but she was laughing. Hakyeon laughed with her. Maybe Hongbin’s mouth was pulled up at the corners, too. The memory is vague and blurred with alcohol.
“And that’s why you guys are perfect for each other,” Hakyeon said, rubbing the shoulder Woori had hit. “People who like to read.”
And that’s how they ended up on the balcony an hour later, her straddling him. She tossed her hair over her shoulder so she could meet Hongbin’s eyes.
“Do you want to hear a story about how someone cheated death?” In the hour that preceded, Woori had spoken endlessly about her fascination for Korean mythology. Hongbin felt bad for being so horny when they were “just getting to know each other.”
Maybe she was just playing with him then. Maybe she just wanted someone to listen. Hongbin leaned closer, their lips almost touching, and whispered, “Sure.”
Her hair is cut to her shoulders when she’s standing in front of his apartment again. She looks different, more different than a haircut could make her look. He can’t place what changed and where. Maybe it’s because they haven’t seen each other in a while. The last time she came over was a month ago.
“Hey,” she says with a small smile. Hongbin mirrors it. They’re standing right next to his shoe rack, right behind his closed door. Woori usually leaves her shoes in the empty space beside it. Walks into his place like it is her own. But today, they’re still right next to the door, like she has no intention to do so.
He tries. “I missed you.” No response. “You and your stories.” Woori adjusts the strap of her bag hanging over her shoulder. She looks down, behind him, at him, down again. There’s no make up over her eyes.
Woori looks at him again. This time, she is the one trying. Chews her lip thoughtfully. “I can’t keep seeing you anymore,” she says.
“Oh.” She goes back to looking behind him, like she will find a ghost there if she watches close enough. No easy way to put those words. “Did Myungsoo find out?”
Woori shakes her head. “No. I don’t think so.” She picks at the bump on her thumb with her index finger. Writer’s thumb, she called it. “No.”
They’re quiet for a while. The fan whirs behind them, face turned toward the place on the couch where he was reading the newspaper. It lifts the pages, pushes them off the coffee table. They’re still silent.
Woori sighs and pulls back her hair with her hands. It falls back down once her hands have run through it, swings against her shoulders. “I’m pregnant, Hongbin,” she says, looking at him now.
Hongbin’s the one who looks down this time. “And it’s,” he tries to think of the best way to say it. Ends up stating the facts instead. “His.” Woori looks Hongbin in the eye. “Myungsoo’s.”
“We’re trying to make it work,” she starts. “Or at least, he’s trying. He’s been home a lot recently. Comes back from work earlier.” Hongbin hears her voice, hears her talking, but it takes him longer to process the words. Make it work. Trying. Home. He nods.
“If we’re going to be a family, I don’t see how I can just keep doing this, Hongbin,” Woori continues, her voice taking on the edge that it does when she points out all the flaws in a movie. When had they stopped watching those? “This, this thing. I mean, I have to try too, you know? That’s marriage, isn’t it?” Her voice shakes, like she is about to cry, but her eyes are dry and looking into his.
Marriage. Is this what his parents thought when he and his sisters came along? Make it work, try, try, try and we can make it work. But it didn’t in the end - it’s not working between us, it’s better this way - and the neighbors still gave them weird looks and Hongbin was the youngest, saw all the yelling, kept waiting for it to stop and it did, but by that point he was so, so tired of it all -
His heart pounds in his chest, hot and full of blood, harsh. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. He wonders if Woori can hear it. The pain burns. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s her.
She’s wiping her eyes now. They’re a little wet, a little red. No devastation there. It was going to end some day, after all. “It’s not easy for me to do this, Hongbin,” but he doesn’t know what part of it she’s talking about.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Searing in his chest. He tries to smile. “Whatever’s best for you.” This is the last time he meets her.
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, in her body. She can feel it in her throat - dry, so dry - like the first soul she swallowed. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. She’s not buried, no, rather, she’s one with the dirt, the soil the stems are rooted in.
It’s the same place. Here is where she reached up an arm and it was lost between the stalks in her vision. If it happens more than twice, is that still a dream? She’s not sure what’s real or not real anymore. The thing is - when you’re dead, everything starts to feel the same.
The buds at the ends of each stem are gone. Orange petals reach out toward the sky, spreading out, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. It is a fathomless blue through the spaces the petals reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
She can feel their roots looking for water - water in her veins. Am I alive, then? They reach deep down, in the crevices between her flesh, find the blood there. Blood, thicker than water, these flowers, growing with blood. But they are alive, unlike her, some kind of dead. It doesn’t make sense. The rules of the living don’t apply here.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind shakes the stems. And they are alive but they are taking blood from me, who is not. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. Am I alive, then? She closes her eyes.
This must be a dream. This is a dream.
They found the soul near the Han. By that time, the day was dipped with night, blue dusk pushing the day into the water, drowning the sun. The pulsing in her fingertips reached a fervent rhythm - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. She felt human.
It was a thin, small thing. Almost translucent. She blinked and it disappeared, blinked again and it was there, right there, surely there. She walked toward it, reached out for it.
“Are they usually that bright?” Jaehwan called out behind her. His voice sounded faint, though he was there, right there, surely there. The pulsing quickened with every step closer and she was human, she had a heart, it was beating - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum -
The soul tasted like just that - clear. Tasteless. Like water, water after running laps around the field during physical education, water when she had sweated her own out. Didn’t stick to the roof of her mouth - unwilling - nor did it claw at her throat.
Swallow. She did.
All the lights are off. Hongbin lays on top of the covers of his bed, sweating into the blankets. His eyes are closed, it’s dark but all he sees is the pink of his eyelids. Opens them. Coughs once, twice. He swears that smoke escapes his parted lips - slender white fingers reaching for the ceiling. They fade away into darkness.
His heart beats, pounds, aches, begs for him to let it out of his chest cavity. Burns his chest with its pulsing, angry and tense - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. The pain is scalding. Inhales. He closes his eyes again, the pink behind them raw, like the pink flesh in his body, in his chest. Burning black from the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum of his heart beat. Exhales.
Swallows.
“Just these two items, miss?” the boy at the counter asks her. It’s the same boy as before, the one who can’t be more than twenty-one, the acne still blooming on his cheeks. Soyeon nods, smiles, and tries to breathe.
Her head is spinning when she sits down in front of the convenience store window. She went to work like this, selling vitamins she couldn’t remember the names of no matter how much she thought about it. Suzy had to help her. There’s a girl on her cell phone sitting to Soyeon’s left, bright nail polish catching the lights as she taps away on the screen. Bright - kind of like the dim lights in between the new releases and the classics, catching on the plastic covers of CD cases. He looked down at her, so, so much taller. She looked up at him - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - the pulsing of a heart - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum -
Licks the roof of her mouth, but there’s nothing there. Tasteless. Everything blurs together - life, death, the pulsing, beating heart that failed on her. She looks outside but nothing’s in focus, nothing except the deep dimples when he smiled, and she feels sick, so sick, like she’ll throw up. But she’s a concept, an idea of a human, and concepts don’t throw up, don’t sit in front of convenience store windows, waiting for something they can’t even remember what they’re waiting for. Everything feels the same and Soyeon thinks. Soyeon thinks she’s going to vomit, sure that she will but there’s no taste in her mouth, there’s nothing -
And then she does.
( part two)
~16,500w; r (hongbin/soyeon, some hongbin/woori)
it takes thirty years to cheat death.
a/n: written for kpop olymfics 2015, with the prompt Lyn and Leo "Blossom Tears." probably one of my most ambitious fics (the longest!!), but definitely not one of the best. this is literally a slow-paced, 16.5k fic about supernatural heartburn. somewhat a Dead Like Me AU, reworked with elements of Korean death mythology. quotes "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae.
warnings: for death and mentions of sex.
June
The window’s open. The air is humid, the cicadas are screaming, and Woori’s trying to finish the story she started after they were done fucking as she pulls on her jeans. Hongbin listens, or at least he thinks he tries, but the cicadas create a static in the background that can’t be ignored. He stares out the window, still shirtless, cold glass of water numbing his hand, listening. It is too dark outside to see anything but a tinted mirror of his bedroom.
“And then he just leaves the next morning before I wake up. Doesn’t even buy breakfast or leave a note. No ‘I’ll be back late. Don’t wait for me.’ Nothing.” She sits back on his bed. Shakes her head. Hongbin sees her reflection from where he’s looking out the window. Watches her walk up behind him, press her clothed body against his bare back. He flinches, though he saw her coming. Her body is warm, the air is humid, and the glass in his hand is sweating, water all over his fingers. If Woori notices, she says nothing. She has always been good at that.
Her arms snake over his torso, welcome parasite encircling his skin. He’s attached to her - has been ever since they made out that one time in graduate school. “What would I do without you?” she murmurs, chin resting on his shoulder jabbing the desperate syllables into his flesh. Hongbin doesn’t know.
“You should just leave him,” he swallows. She shifts her position so her head rests against the nape of his neck. Inhales. “Myungsoo.” Exhales. Repeat.
Laughter bubbles in her chest but doesn’t fully escape her mouth. Or maybe it does, drowned out by the cicadas. “So insincere.” She reaches over him and pulls the window closed. The glass pane muffles the noise from outside.
“This is why I tell the stories,” she whispers, breath cold against his back. They have this conversation every time, and it always ends the same way, in a different position. Tonight, her lips press against his spine. They are colder than expected. He shivers.
A dark silhouette among many other shadows, walking in the same direction, but only she is in focus. The occasional motorbike weaving through the crowd illuminates half of her face in lemon-peel yellow. Then, she’s a shade in the darkness once more.
Her work clothes have long become a raised, second skin upon her first. The pencil skirt and white dress shirt stick to her uncomfortably, the heat from her body rushing out of a little hole in her stockings above her right knee. The humid summer air only pushes it back in. Her blazer, easy enough to throw on and off her shoulders, crumples into a wrinkled mass between her arms. Short black heels click, click, click against the street.
The night clings to the backs of apartment complexes. Yellow lights ooze out of resident’s open windows and back doors, chasing the darkness away. It slinks down the corners, plummets straight down into the shadows. She stops breathing. The scent of burning tar hangs in the air. She blinks, but there is no evidence of smoke.
It is here. Turns another corner into a backstreet, her silhouette unfocused. All the other shadows are gone now. Short black heels splash, splash, splash in the alley, the ground damp. The leaking sewage is scentless compared to the burning, smokeless combustion. She stops breathing.
The tar black thing is sticking to the back wall, pulsing, rotting, hers to swallow. Waiting to be swallowed. It hardly resists when she pries it off the concrete, hissing in her palm. She opens her mouth, inhales, catching the decaying soul with her tongue. Swallows. It claws down her throat, looking for a pocket in the flesh to burrow, before falling into the pit. She screws her eyes shut and swallows again.
Short black heels go back the way they came from - click, click, click. She walks down the street, the headlights of a motorbike illuminating half her face a lemon-peel yellow. Now she smells the sewage clinging to her heels, ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes.
The soul is in her belly - ruined thing, decayed thing - was her soul to take. Reminds herself this on the subway home, blazer crumpled across her lap like a lifeless body.
Gershwin builds up. The triumphant blares of trumpets blend in well with the honking of early morning traffic. Hongbin doesn’t remember putting this song into his MP3 player, doesn't remember the last time he even listened to Gershwin. "Rhapsody in Blue" continues to provide dramatic background music to his morning, anyway.
The sun is out, beating down on his back. It is not an unbearable heat just yet. The day has just blinked open at seven thirty, sunny after a week of non-stop rain. He takes a shortcut through the park next to his office. The trees create inconsistent patterns of shadows over his face when he looks up at their tops. The sky is blindingly white through the spaces the leaves reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
This is when "Rhapsody in Blue" ends. The beginning notes of a Park Hyoshin song starts up - his soft voice follows suit. This was the song that Hongbin loved, and it sounded so much clearer through someone else’s earphones, like Hongbin was hearing the song the way -
Cicadas chirp, a chorus in the trees. Hongbin turns his face up, the sky blindingly white through the spaces the leaves reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover. He tries to look for one in the trees. When he looks back down, there are dark spots in his vision. He blinks repeatedly, but they persist, like the cicadas - deafening summer bugs, lost in the trees. Hongbin welcomes the distraction.
“Another sleepless night?” Jaeseop asks with a raised eyebrow, leaning against Hongbin’s desk. The office is sweltering - doesn’t help that the air conditioning isn’t going to be fixed until next week. When Hongbin runs an absentminded hand through his hair, it comes back slightly damp. He pats it on his pants.
Hongbin gets up to refill his glass of water. The cold air of the refrigerator cools the slightly damp spots on his trousers. “That obvious?” he jokes, a friendly-enough smile on his lips. Last time Hongbin checked in the mirror, his dark circles looked about the same - no marked improvement, but no signs of deepening, either.
Jaeseop sighs. He digs his hands into his pockets. “I know you’re dedicated to seeing our magazine succeed, but don’t kill yourself over it, ok?” Hongbin doesn’t shake his head or hum in approval, but he looks at his boss as he sips his water. The years Jaeseop spent in America for college must have really influenced his outlook on the workplace.
Hongbin offers him another smile, amicable, but silent. Jaeseop claps him on the shoulder before they return to their respective positions. The files sitting on Hongbin’s desk are stacked high enough to keep him company for the rest of the week. Don’t think, just work. Shakes the mouse to wake up his computer.
The cicadas scream from the park, so loud the vibrations catch in Hongbin’s fingertips. The feeling is an afterthought, the kind that fails to come into consciousness. He’s too distracted to notice.
Soohyun’s the first one she sees when her eyes finally open, the second time. They shifted frantically - up, right, down, left - and she gasped for breath, the breath that she couldn’t take when her heart started slowing, slowing, slowing. She was thirsty for oxygen then, too.
That’s when she found him in her area of vision. A cheek there, an ear here. Eyes, far from merciful - keen, dark eyes, that knew, knew what she’d been through. She blinked and the image went unclear, looked down just as his lips moved.
“It’s ok,” he said. Stood up straight, still looking at her. “You’re dead.”
Something hitched in her throat and she coughed, coughed and felt how empty her chest was, how light it was. It was not a good emptiness. She coughed again. He held out a hand. “It’s ok.”
She took it.
Soyeon wakes up in her bed, stockings rolled off. She vaguely remembers throwing them into the trash before falling asleep. Her work clothes still stick to her skin, and the sheets smell faintly of sweat when she turns in them. Half-awake, she lifts a leg up. Inspects the ankle, wiggles her toes. Puts it down and does the same with the other. The scar she got from jumping off the swing set in fourth grade is still there - a sliver of childish ignorance on her skin.
She closes her eyes again. The space beneath her lids is now peach, the morning wiping out the pitch black of sleep. They say she’s spouts of blood in the form of flesh - the iron taste so human that it neutralizes the souls, tar black most of the time, rotting outside from the body - her kind, that is, the ones that take care of the loose souls. She’s no longer a body - just a concept, an idea in the shape of a human. Masquerades as a person, someone, when she’s anything but.
That’s why she wiggles her toes. They feel like her toes, look like her toes, though she never really paid attention to what her toes looked like exactly until she became spouts of blood. She feels; she thinks. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am.
I think, therefore I am, I think, I think, I think.
The last time Hongbin fell asleep, he dreamed of a beating heart. Raw and red muscle - the bones and flesh that were supposed to be protecting the heart not in his field of vision, as if everything was cut away and only this image was left, palpitating. Steady, strong beats, like the ones he felt when he pressed a thumb against his wrist. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Slower. Ba. Dum. Ba. Dum. Struggling. Ba - Dum. Failing. The beginning notes of the Park Hyoshin song they listened to with the same pair of earphones floods into the cavity, as if ushering in an end. Stopping, stopping, stopping -
And then the heart ceased to beat.
The light of the television screen cuts through the dark, English-teaching program on cells casting an alien glow over Hongbin’s face. His eyes have long adjusted to the brightness, burning into his vision, casting long shadows over the black print on the loose leaf papers scattered over his lap. Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. VI-RUS. English now. He speaks the words aloud, the V weak. VI-RUS. VI-RUS. Another infected cell emerges on the screen.
Four fifty-seven in the morning. The fan’s on, the tv is plugged in, he’s learning English at odd hours in the dark and nothing has overheated or blown a spark.
Thirty minutes into the program when it tries to get them to say: THE VI-RUS MU-TATES. Hongbin’s tongue catches on all the wrong syllables. THE VI-RUS MU-TATES. Thousands of infected cells decorate the screen, silently multiplying behind the words.
Viruses remind him of her. Woori. Woori and her parasitic arms that snake over his torso. Vi-rus, Woori. They don’t sound as similar aloud as they did in his head. He won’t see her again until Saturday, when Hongbin has the day off. Will it be raining again then? Thundering so loud that they can’t hear each other take labored breaths? Repeat after me. The way her hands ghost over his skin then press, hold him where he wants them to hold him. THE VI-RUS IN-FECTS A-NO-THER CELL.
Hongbin gathers up the papers, stacking them neatly on the uneven coffee table he props his legs on. Repeat after me. The program goes too fast for anyone with little to no knowledge of English to follow along. THE VI-RUS IN-FECTS A-NO-THER CELL. No one wants to watch this shit.
He repeats the sentence. The pronunciation sounds more accurate to his ears than anything else he tried saying that night.
They all watched her the first time she swallowed a soul. The others like Soohyun - the ones who made sure those who were supposed to die died, that their souls were sent to Death, the proper noun rather than the state of un-living - Yujeong, Jaehwan, Hoonmin, and Haein.
Take the soul. This one was gray, gray like dust rather than pitch dark, flat against the sidewalk. If Soyeon didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t have given it a second glance. Grab the soul. She scraped the thing off the ground, placed it in her palm. It was there, but it didn’t feel like it existed. It wasn’t supposed to exist there in the first place.
Inhale. She heard Haein in the background - is this supposed to happen? Is she supposed to - ? The soul trailed into her mouth. She curled it onto her tongue. Swallow. She did.
Swallow. The soul was like powder in her mouth, rolling off her tongue, dry, so dry, she couldn’t push it down. Swallow. She did, she pushed it down. What now? The soul choked her on its way down and she gasped for air that she didn’t need, air that wouldn’t fill her lungs - you’re not human so you’re ok, Soyeon. You’re ok. Yujeong’s hand in hers is the last thing she remembers about the incident.
She leans over the toilet, sure that she’ll throw up. She doesn’t. The taste of burning tar is still there when she licks the roof of her mouth, swears the smoke curls up her throat and works its way out her mouth. Licks the top of her mouth to make sure the sensation remains. It makes her cough, but nothing else. She flushes the toilet though she hasn’t touched it.
Suzy, her co-worker, is washing her hands at the sink. “Are you ok?” she asks, dialect coming out. Suzy smiles sheepishly when she realizes her mistake, but Soyeon laughs. Both of them came from Gwangju - dialect was bound to slip out in some form whenever they spoke. “You’ve been going to the bathroom every thirty minutes since this morning.”
“It’s nothing,” Soyeon replies, waving a hand. When she reaches to turn the faucet, she catches her reflection in the mirror. Eighteen-year-old Soyeon looks back at her. What would she look like if she wasn’t frozen in time? Soohyun had told her that they look nothing like their old selves to others. Soyeon’s always been too afraid to find out what she looks like in someone else’s eyes.
Suzy’s reflection checks her watch. “Break’s almost over,” she sighs. “Time to sell more vitamins.” Soyeon rinses the soap out of her hands. “See you there!” Suzy calls from the door.
Eighteen-year-old Soyeon is still staring back at her from within the mirror. She averts her eyes and focuses on the water swirling down the drain instead. It is soapy but clear, white like the porcelain sink beneath it. Clear, unlike the decaying soul that’s resting somewhere inside her, quiet and calm now. Licks the roof of her mouth again. It still tastes disgusting.
The number you have called is not available right now. Please leave a message after the tone.
Beep. Hongbin, it’s your father. I hope you’re doing well. Are you sleeping these days? Call me back if you get this message, if you’re not too busy. Come visit me sometime.
(Pause). That’s right. Your mother wanted you to go back to Gwangju for Chuseok. Talk to her about that.
The window’s closed. It’s Saturday and rain pelts against the panes, so loud that Hongbin wonders if the force could crack glass. The cicadas are drowned out for once. He wonders where they go when it pours.
Woori rests her head against his shoulder, laces her fingers with his. Myungsoo, her husband, is on a business trip for the weekend, so she lingers in his bed. Without the reality of an unhappy marriage waiting for her at home, she whispers a fantasy into Hongbin’s ear.
“Gangnim the Mortal had escaped the Underworld,” she smiles wide against his neck, the way she always does when she gets to her favorite part of the story. “But that wouldn’t do. Yeomra, god of the dead, was not pleased. ‘Give me Gangnim the Mortal,’ he demanded of the King of Gwayang, whom Gangnim served. The King refused. After all, Gangnim had figured out what happened to the three sons and cheated death.”
Hongbin tilts his head so it keeps hers there, on his shoulder. She swats him away and he just laughs. “And what happened next?”
“Just these two items, miss?” the boy at the counter asks her. He can’t be more than twenty-one. Soyeon can see acne still blooming on his cheeks. She nods, smiles, and tries hard not to stare.
The seats looking out the window of the convenience store are all empty today. Her yellow raincoat is dripping on the linoleum floor in the seat beside her. Good thing she managed to get out of the station and into the store right before the rain started pouring harder.
Halfway between her apartment and the department store. Half the package of seasoning goes into her ramen, the other half remains forgotten until all that’s left is the soup. Deep down, she gets the feeling that her habits are inconvenient. Why stop here, specifically, every day when there is another store exactly like this one on her street? The other part of her tells her no - you’re here, waiting for something. Something to happen.
Rain streaks down the window. Sometimes she catches faces in the patterns of raindrops, but they’re washed away just as quickly, falling onto the street. The red tail lights of cars and motorcycles waiting at the intersection blur in the downpour. It is hard for her to watch them. She looks back at the raindrops instead. Only they are in focus.
July
Yeomra, tricky Yeomra, offered the King a bargain. One of them would take Gangnim the Mortal’s body, the other the soul. Of course the King chose the body - what was a soul back then? Gangnim’s body immediately collapsed. His soul went to Yeomra, who made him the new Jeosung Chasa, reaper of the dead.
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, green stems reaching toward the sky - cloudless and an endless blue. Buried could be the word for it, but she’s not far enough beneath the earth. There are buds at the ends of each stem, light green and waiting to bloom. Waiting like she does at the convenience store. But the buds have a definite end, unlike her. She’s almost jealous.
She reaches an arm up. It’s lost between the stalks in her vision. This must be a dream. She lets her arm fall to her side. The picture remains the same, she’s still looking up. Did she move at all? If you don’t know the answer to that question, Soyeon remembers her older sister telling her once, then you’re not in the real world.
The thing is - it’s hard to know what’s real or not real when you’re dead and everything bleeds into each other. The rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon realizes. This is either a dream or reality, but both feel the same to her now.
The sky is blue, blue for miles. Even back home, where not as many buildings rise into the clouds, she’s never seen a sky so infinite, like an ocean above her head. You’re not alive, she tells herself. The wind shakes the stems. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. She closes her eyes.
You’re not alive, but this, this feels like a dream.
Rare quiet night in his apartment. All the lights are off and Hongbin lays on top of the covers of his bed, sweating into the blankets. The bed’s only good for two things - sex and sweating - and horrible for everything else. His eyes are closed but he sees the darkness behind them. Sleep is not waiting for him at the end of it.
He doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to dream. Hongbin’s will is so strong, his mother used to joke, that he doesn’t even get sick when everyone around him is. Maybe that’s why he’s still awake. Opens his eyes. Hates it - sleeping, dreaming, being at the mercy of his subconscious, the part of him that remembers even though he doesn’t want to. He turns to his side and stares into the darkness. Lets his eyes adjust to the shift in the shadows.
Most of all, Hongbin hates the memories, the ones that threaten to drown out all his other thoughts every day, at any moment. They hold him at bay - and there in the shallow water, force him under the surface. He holds his breath and doesn’t fall asleep.
“Do we dream?” she asks Yujeong as the crosswalk signal turns green. The older girl pauses and looks at Soyeon before she begins to walk again. Floods of people, men and women on their way to work, students running to catch the bus, seem to pass around them - paths in flux, engulfing them until they are the little larvae at the center of an egg. Living in a hurry, there’s not enough time, never enough time. Soyeon feels leisurely and lethargic all at once in comparison.
“Why do you ask?” Yujeong counters. Question for a question. They all do that a lot. Alive, maybe they’d try to find an answer that they could believe in. But in death, not everything had an answer. Maybe this was one of those non-answers. Soyeon shrugs.
The older girl cranes her neck, scanning through the crowds of people. Looking for death? Jaehwan joked once, when he tagged along. Soyeon didn’t think much of it when he first said it, but the more she thought about it, it was an apt remark.
Yujeong sighs when they reach the next crosswalk. The signal is red. “Have you ever thought about this? That we’ve been dreaming all this time?” Soyeon looks at her, but Yujeong is staring straight ahead, at some point across the street. “That this feels real, we feel, but at the same time, we don’t really. That it all seems fake, but when you’re told to point out what’s surreal about it, nothing comes to mind.”
“I don’t know,” Soyeon replies. Yujeong glances at her for a moment, then looks back ahead. The crosswalk sign goes green. They’re in the middle of the street when Yujeong bumps into a stranger - a woman with a polite smile when Yujeong apologizes. Maybe she has children, a husband waiting at home, her husband’s parents to take care of. Soyeon watches the woman go, pale purple shirt like a beacon in the crowd. Yujeong pats her on the back to get her to face forward again.
Then are all the other bodies in the ground just sleeping? Car tires skid loudly somewhere on the street behind them. Yujeong opens her palm and the silver ghost of the woman’s soul shoots up into the sky. Soyeon watches as she smiles sadly. They keep walking.
There’s a heart, still but raw and red, waiting for her the first time she closes her eyes again. You’ll see some things when you think you’re sleeping sometimes, Soohyun told her once she came to.
Like dreams?
Like dreams.
The heart is disturbingly still. Soyeon waits for it to start beating, to heart the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum in her chest - that must be her heart, can feel that it’s her heart, but her chest has been quiet since she last opened her eyes, for the second time.
Spouts of blood in the form of flesh - the blood neutralizes the tar, the decaying things, the things she swallows. Her heart is with Death now, proper noun, a failed muscle, alone without her body, but a vital muscle all the same. And she is still here, where she thinks she’s sleeping, thinks she’s dreaming - but she’s not. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am.
A cloud of dust, ashy like cinders, swirls in her chest cavity, replacing the motionless heart. An idea in the shape of an organ. The irony of it hits her then. She’s heartless - quite literally.
The rain starts up unexpectedly. Hongbin waits out the downpour until midnight. His co-workers wave goodbye to him at his spot under the awning before pulling their coats over their heads and running, loafers splashing through the puddles. Hongbin wonders how their wives will think about rain-soaked, un-ironed suit jackets.
When are you going to get married? he hears a lot. Before I die, he’ll chuckle and they’ll laugh about it, not take it seriously. But when Hongbin thinks of marriage, he thinks of wives yelling at husbands and husbands yelling at wives, all over the little things but they’re just so tired of compromise and giving in. The way Hongbin stared at the popcorn ceiling, bumpy like the curdled milk his father forgot to throw away. They fought over that, too. Always fighting and Hongbin was always home and everyone was always tired of one another.
Sometimes, when Hongbin thinks of marriage, he thinks of Woori. Woori and Myungsoo. He couldn’t get married to Woori, or someone like Woori - no, at some point in between the sex and children, he would stop listening to her stories and start telling his own. Insincere, she would joke, scoff, scream. And they would fight.
Five minutes past twelve. He pulls his suit jacket over his head and runs to the station, loafers splashing through the puddles. Sopping all over the floor of the subway, but the person sitting closest to him is all the way at the other end of the car. Maybe he could just melt into the seat, become one with the blue plastic, sink down into the beige floor. He wouldn’t have to worry about getting married, then. It’s a nice image. His hair keeps dripping.
“So,” Woori said, breathless from kissing. Her hand was splayed over his cheek. “Tell me a story, Hongbin.” This was in the period of their relationship Hongbin relates to as the “before” - before Woori lost patience with his terse memories, when he asked her why she always had to talk about something after they fucked.
She had thought about it, cupped a palm over her chin. “You look like someone who listens.” When he had laughed in confusion, she amended the statement. “Not someone who listens to anyone or anything, you know? Just someone who listens,” Woori paused again. “Someone who listens to stories.”
He turned his head toward her, the hand she placed on his face caught beneath his cheek. He laughed. “You don’t have anything else to tell me?”
Woori drew back her hand and his head knocked against the mattress. “Tell me about your first love,” she suggested, propping herself up with her elbows so she had to look down to meet his eyes. When Hongbin remained silent, her expression morphed into one of horror. “Don’t tell me that I’m your first love,” she groaned. “We met in graduate school, that is not a first love, Lee Hongbin.”
Hongbin thought about it. “No,” he said, turning onto his back. First love. There were a couple - the girl he liked in first grade whose name he can’t even remember. His older sister’s friend that he had a huge crush on. She is what he remembers most when he thinks back on the time he was twelve. But they were just attractions - it was all just infatuation until -
He had to screw his eyes shut to keep out the memories.
This was the only time Hongbin ever told her a real story.
“Just these two items, miss?” Acne boy is replaced by a girl who looks about the same age. Her eyes are ringed with black, an ashy black. Soyeon nods, smiles, and tries not to stare.
She sits in front of the convenience store window, on the seat to the far right. A man, suit jacket balled into his lap, slurping his noodles, sits to her far left. The dusk outside turns what boxes she can see of the sky an uneven mix of navy and gold. The cars and motorcycles outside already have their headlights on, cutting through the premature darkness.
No rain in Seoul today. There’s a streak of cleaning agent on the window right in front of her seat, not wiped off completely. It distorts the traffic, license plates curling at strange places. It’ll wash off tomorrow, when the rain starts back up again. She bites the straw of her drink. She’ll be here tomorrow, too, after all. Waiting.
“What am I?” Soyeon remembers asking Soohyun once she had gotten used to the emptiness in her chest cavity. Her body felt lighter, like her bones were hollow or something - but she was no bird. For all she knew, the only that changed about her was that someone had taken her failed heart.
Someone, the god of the dead. Hoonmin referred to him as Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls of the deceased. Soohyun just said Death - proper noun, capital D. He’s why they’re all here, still here, when they should either be ashes in a drawer at a temple or locked shut six feet under the ground.
Soohyun chewed his nail thoughtfully as she waited for him to answer. “The ones like me, those who reap the souls of the dead are souls themselves. We feel human, breath like humans, hearts beat like humans, but we aren’t,” he placed her hand over his wrist. Sure enough, she felt a heartbeat beneath her fingertips.
He exhaled. Winter then, his breath white puffs in the air. They trailed up, up, up until they blended in with the icy gray sky and she could not see them anymore. “Your lot swallow the souls that leave the body before death. That’s why they’re tar, decaying, rotting things. But Death needs those souls, too,” Soohyun started. He took the seat on the bench beside Soyeon.
“But why me?” she whispered. Body in the ground, heart useless, gone so young - she had so much life in her. How had her parents taken the news? Walking home from school and then her heart just gave out. Dead right then, right there, heart taken by death, Death, Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls. “Why?”
Soohyun’s eyes looked pained. Soyeon wondered how many times he’d had to do this already. Did Jaehwan, Yujeong, Hoonmin, and Haein cry about it? Or was this all just a dream, something that felt like a dream that would be over before they knew it? “Death needs you, too,” he said softly. It was not the least bit comforting, but in that moment, Soohyun pretended it was enough. Soyeon pretended it was enough, too.
His father moved back to Seoul right before Hongbin finished high school. Right back to Jayang-dong, into an apartment not far from the one they used to live in. His mother had her head in her hands a lot then, running her fingers through her hair. It was so gray then - Hongbin had always remembered his mother with dark, dark black hair. He wondered then how long it had been since he stopped looking.
“It’s not working out between us,” his mother told him. I know, I’ve heard the yelling. Even the neighbors know. “It’s better this way, Hongbin. It’ll be better this way,” she smiled, as if trying to convince herself along with him.
It’ll be better this way. The neighbors still gave them weird looks whenever they walked past them. The window in his room above his desk was still boarded up - no one can come to put in a new pane yet. Just be patient. But Hongbin had been patient all his life - staring at the popcorn ceiling when his parents both left for work at five in the morning, already yelling and fighting then. Waiting for them to stop. Waiting for things to be ok again. Waiting in the music store, between the new releases and the classics, waiting for the bus to come. Waiting even as the bus left.
There was a vase of white lilies on a second year’s desk when Hongbin passed by every morning until the end of the school year.
“Is it insomnia?” Jaeseop asks. They’re walking through the park on the way to the office. They happened to see each other once they got off the subway.
“Not sure,” Hongbin replies. It’s pouring again, sky a suffocating gray, the summer heat still humid and stifling. They both have their umbrellas this time.
Jaeseop looks at him carefully, maybe even watches him, before looking back up at the trees. Fat drops slide off their leaves, creating an uneven rhythm of rain on Hongbin’s umbrella. “I worry for you, sometimes,” Jaeseop says, shaking his head. “Do you even have a girlfriend?”
Woori. Does what they have count as a relationship? Maybe. “Kind of,” Hongbin settles for. He closes his umbrella underneath the awning, shakes off the extra raindrops. Some of them create spots on Jaeseop’s pants. Jaeseop, playing the part of the concerned boss - or is he serious? Hongbin can’t tell - sighs.
Their shoes are soaked, socks squishing uncomfortably as they climb the stairs to their office. The soles squeak with each step, and the air conditioner - finally fixed - hums in the stairway. His heart beats in his chest, loud and pounding, painful. Must be the heat. Jaeseop sighs again. “I worry for you, sometimes.”
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, green stems reaching toward the sky - cloudless and an endless blue. Buried maybe, but there’s blood in her veins, blood in her flesh. That’s her - spouts of blood in the form of flesh - swallows the decayed souls and they settle down in her belly.
It’s the same place as before, all those nights before, when she reached up an arm and it was lost between the stalks in her vision. If it happens twice, maybe it is a dream. The thing is - it’s hard to know what’s real or not real when you’re dead and everything starts to feel the same.
Buds at the ends of each stem, light green and waiting to bloom. Waiting like she does at the convenience store, like Yujeong, Hoonmin, Jaehwan, Haein are to take their last soul, so they can close their eyes for good this time. But these buds are waiting for life. Life, death, Death, Yeomra - the rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon realizes.
The picture is a little different. Her arms aren’t there, still, but the buds have started to open, slowly. Orange peeks out from beneath the light green. What flowers are those? They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. Blue for miles.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind shakes the stems. But why, where, or how is not clear to me. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. Thus, I am not in the real world. She closes her eyes.
This must be a dream.
The only story Lee Hongbin ever told Go Woori:
“She was in the school choir. I don’t remember what her voice sounded like - I couldn’t tell you if it was high-pitched, or clear, or husky. I just remember how I heard it. You know, the feeling you get when you hear someone singing? That I remember. It was...warm. She was always practicing after school, and practices ran late. I would always wait in the music shop near the bus stop and try to catch the same bus as her. She got off a stop before mine.
She was younger than me by a year, but it didn’t feel that way. She was so much…more than me, you could say. Maybe because I liked her. Or maybe because she just was. She just was.
It was infatuation at first. A crush. I liked her smile before I found out that she sang. One day, she went home early - sore throat and couldn’t have it spreading to the other choir members. I remember I was waiting for the bus in the music shop next to it, listening to - I can’t remember. Some new release at the time, not very popular, but it was decent music. When I had nothing else to listen to, I’d listen to Park Hyoshin.
And she was there, the earbuds in her ear. I might have been staring. Sometimes you don’t realize you do things when you do them. That was probably one of those times. But she looked up, looked at me.”
She smiled. A lone dimple showed up on her right cheek. Asymmetrical. He liked that. Liked her. His heart pounded loudly in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Fast, as fast as it could.
“Wanna listen?” she said. Shook her hair away from her face so she could grab the earbud. She held it out for him. He looked at her, eyes flitting from her eyes, to the words that escaped her lips, to her hand, to the earbud. He took it. Placed it in his right ear.
Park Hyoshin’s voice. Did it always sound like this? Looked down at her, she was almost a head shorter than him. Was she always so tiny? The music sounded different, though Hongbin had listened to this song so many times before. Like he was listening to it through someone else’s perspective - her perspective. The notes seemed clearer, louder. Voice deeper but softer. He looked back down at her.
She looked up at him. His heart pounded even louder in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - if that was possible. Fast, as fast as it could. She didn’t smile this time, but she kept looking at him, the dim lights catching in her hair. And he at her.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, went his heart. He loved that then, right then. Loved her, too, then. Right then.
Still now.
August
“And what happened after that?” Woori asked, the ends of her hair tickling his cheek. He sighed, and the strands swayed.
“Nothing,” he said. It sounded sad to his own ears. But this was not a sad story, or at least Hongbin didn’t think of it that way. It could be if he dwelled on it, let it consume him. But he didn’t. It was simply just the way things turned out and didn’t turn out. He shut out the memories instead. “She’s dead.”
Woori sat up. The sheets covering her breasts fell away. He watched her, but he wasn’t looking - it wasn’t looking like the way he had looked at her in the music store, earbuds in her ear, her eyes looking at him, his eyes looking at her. Woori leaned over him, and her breath warmed his mouth. Replaced that breath with her lips and he felt them on his - felt them there, the idea of them - but truthfully, he wasn’t feeling anything at all.
It’s seven o’clock and bossa nova plays in the bar. Soyeon’s not a regular, but the music seems oddly out of place. Some couple sways along to the sleepy beat, forms hazy in the dark, an unsteady rhythm of movement. They already look tipsy.
The faint yellow lights catch on the ice cubes in her drink. They sparkle like diamonds. The times she’s been here before, it’s always been jazz. Jazz puts her into the mood to drink, even though she hates the taste of alcohol. Jazz, Soyeon, the ice cubes in her drink floating like islands in a round sea. It sounds poetic when the words are in her head. But if she tried to say them out loud, they would lose all meaning.
It’s always then, after the sip that makes the ice clink against her teeth, that Soyeon thinks about sex. Physical intimacy, carnal thoughts. Lust. What it would feel like to have someone that close to you. Would she like it? She remembers the year her class had a lesson on sexual education, the girls sitting next to her whispering to each other - I heard it hurts, don’t you bleed the first time? She wasn’t particularly curious about it then. But were they right? Swirls her tongue around an ice cube. Then why would it be so human to crave it when humans cannot tolerate pain?
She could try it - go to a club and find someone to spend the night with - but even if someone sucked her breast or kissed the insides of her thighs, Soyeon would feel nothing, absolutely nothing. She chips away at the ice with her teeth. She’s not human - not anymore, at least. But she wants to be, wants to know what it feels like even if it hurts, because it must feel better than the lethargic, filmy way sensations come to her now.
The bossa nova keeps playing. The couple still sways to the same beat from two songs ago. Soyeon wonders how often they must have sex. When she looks back down at her drink, the ice cubes have melted. A reminder of their existence lies at the bottom of the glass.
Four thirty in the morning. The English program’s on again, volume so low it’s nearly on mute, his tax reports half-forgotten in his hand. This time, the objective is to “learn how to describe outer space.” Hongbin thinks it’s too broad to be a good one, but then again, how many others watch shitty television at this hour like he does? He sets the tax reports down.
Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. BLACK HOLE. English now. He speaks the words aloud, louder than the volume he has the television on, quieter than the downpour outside. BLACK HOLE. Hongbin thinks most basic textbooks start with the planets. The program goes right off the deep end. BLACK HOLE.
Woori hasn’t called him for weeks. They’re not strangers to indefinite pauses in their relationship, but Hongbin feels uneasy about it this time. BLACK HOLE. Maybe he should call her. Thinks about actually doing it, right then, but it’s not even five yet. Woori’s probably alone in bed, or sleeping with her back facing Myungsoo’s. Maybe she’s awake and thinking about the rain. Repeat after me.
He puts the tv on mute. Reaching for the remote makes his heart pound loudly in his ears - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Harsher now. Must be the heat, must be the lack of sleep. Maybe it is the rain. The pain in his chest lingers, falters, retreats. Hongbin settles back onto the couch.
The fan’s on, the tv is plugged in, and he’s staring at English words that mean nothing to him at odd hours in the dark. Nothing has overheated or blown a spark. Not yet.
They said it was heart failure. Walking home from school and then, bam, her heart gave out. Ceased to beat, breathe, contract, and push - and then she, his first love, maybe his only love, was just a corpse.
It sounded sad when he said it aloud, when the words took shape into sounds, and those sounds reached someone else’s ears. Their face would twist - into sadness, pity, empathy, one of those - or freeze. But this was not a sad story, or at least Hongbin didn’t want it to be. It could be if he dwelled on the ending - why her? why him? - but he doesn’t. He could think about what if - she was still alive, what would she look like, who would she be? Would she be dressed in a black business suit, trapped in a cubicle for forty hours a week? Or would she be frowning and married with one child too many without enough time for herself?
But this was simply the way things turned out and didn’t turn out. Sometimes, Hongbin remembered. Sometimes. Most of the time, he shut the memories out. That part of his heart, he liked to put it as, failed along with hers.
“How much farther?” Jaehwan asks from behind her. It sounds like he’s shouting, but that’s Jaehwan - an impossibly loud echo in an impossibly small space. The question isn’t meant to prod or rush her, Soyeon knows. He’s just, she has to search for the right word. Curious. Jaehwan’s always the one, anyway, who bothers with her the most, aside from Soohyun. Says what she does reminds him of some cartoon he used to watch.
“But reaping is pretty similar,” Soyeon mentioned when he brought it up. Jaehwan laughed and shook his head.
“Cartoons don’t warn you about all the death you have to see.” He was smiling, then, too, but sadly. His eyes looked tired. How many deaths had they seen? She stopped talking about it after that.
“I don’t know,” she tells him, honest, turning another corner. The sun is setting, a hazy pink sky peeking through the stocky apartment complexes, cutting the scene into definite boxes. They were on their way to get food from the convenience store when she felt a pulse, like she had a heart. But she didn’t. Sometimes, the sensation lingered for hours as she searched the streets, pounding loudly in her ears like the spouts of blood in her figurative flesh circulated. What would happen if she let the soul rot, decay, slink into nothingness just to keep this feeling? Would she die, for real this time? “This takes hours some days.”
Jaehwan quickens his pace to keep up with her. “So you have to look for it? Once you feel it?”
She licks the back of her teeth. “Sometimes.” She lies through them.
There were always flowers at Soohyun’s place. Pretty, colorless flowers - white stargazer lilies, drooping dark orchids. Carnations so pale that she thought the petals could be opaque when the light hit them just right. That day, there was a vase of white roses on the kitchen counter. Flowers for the dead. Death always colored a little bit of everything in their lives, existences - however she should put it - no matter how much they tried to shut it out.
The air was sweltering - sticky and humid, the cicadas deafening outside the open kitchen window. Just them two - Soohyun and Soyeon, Soyeon and Soohyun. Sometimes, Jaehwan said their names together really fast, one right after the other, until Soohyun started blending into Soyeon and vice versa. Soohyun or Soyeon emerged as one name in the end. Hoonmin was keeping tally on whose name showed up the most. It was all amusing to Jaehwan, but Soohyun usually knocked him on the back several times with a healthy, unamused laugh.
But it was quiet when it was just the two of them. What did you say to the man who knows who dies today and tells people to collect their souls? Soohyun got up to shut the window, silencing the cicadas. When he sat back down across from her, there was a contemplative look on his face, like he was trying to determine the best way to put a thought into words. She waited for him to proceed.
“Don’t just go - ” Soohyun paused. Thought about it some more. “Looking for souls, Soyeon.” She pressed her lips together in confusion. He did not rephrase the sentence.
“Looking,” she repeated. Silence. The cicadas were still there, faint, but chirping. He shook his head and inhaled sharply. Maybe he could smell the white roses from where he sat. The scent of death.
“You’ll get what I mean,” Soohyun said. He smiled. She smiled back, but the confusion was still there. If Soohyun’s mind lingered on the idea, he said nothing more about it.
The first time Hongbin met Woori, they were in graduate school, drunk, and sitting on the small balcony of someone’s apartment. She was five years older than him and her legs went on for miles. Her hair smelled faintly of shampoo when she leaned over him.
It was Hakyeon who introduced them. Hakyeon knew everyone back then. “This is Woori,” he said. “And this is Hongbin.”
“What do you study?” Hongbin asked. Woori opened her mouth to answer, but Hakyeon cut in. “Literature.” Woori slapped him on the shoulder.
“Can’t you let me pretend to be something else?” but she was laughing. Hakyeon laughed with her. Maybe Hongbin’s mouth was pulled up at the corners, too. The memory is vague and blurred with alcohol.
“And that’s why you guys are perfect for each other,” Hakyeon said, rubbing the shoulder Woori had hit. “People who like to read.”
And that’s how they ended up on the balcony an hour later, her straddling him. She tossed her hair over her shoulder so she could meet Hongbin’s eyes.
“Do you want to hear a story about how someone cheated death?” In the hour that preceded, Woori had spoken endlessly about her fascination for Korean mythology. Hongbin felt bad for being so horny when they were “just getting to know each other.”
Maybe she was just playing with him then. Maybe she just wanted someone to listen. Hongbin leaned closer, their lips almost touching, and whispered, “Sure.”
Her hair is cut to her shoulders when she’s standing in front of his apartment again. She looks different, more different than a haircut could make her look. He can’t place what changed and where. Maybe it’s because they haven’t seen each other in a while. The last time she came over was a month ago.
“Hey,” she says with a small smile. Hongbin mirrors it. They’re standing right next to his shoe rack, right behind his closed door. Woori usually leaves her shoes in the empty space beside it. Walks into his place like it is her own. But today, they’re still right next to the door, like she has no intention to do so.
He tries. “I missed you.” No response. “You and your stories.” Woori adjusts the strap of her bag hanging over her shoulder. She looks down, behind him, at him, down again. There’s no make up over her eyes.
Woori looks at him again. This time, she is the one trying. Chews her lip thoughtfully. “I can’t keep seeing you anymore,” she says.
“Oh.” She goes back to looking behind him, like she will find a ghost there if she watches close enough. No easy way to put those words. “Did Myungsoo find out?”
Woori shakes her head. “No. I don’t think so.” She picks at the bump on her thumb with her index finger. Writer’s thumb, she called it. “No.”
They’re quiet for a while. The fan whirs behind them, face turned toward the place on the couch where he was reading the newspaper. It lifts the pages, pushes them off the coffee table. They’re still silent.
Woori sighs and pulls back her hair with her hands. It falls back down once her hands have run through it, swings against her shoulders. “I’m pregnant, Hongbin,” she says, looking at him now.
Hongbin’s the one who looks down this time. “And it’s,” he tries to think of the best way to say it. Ends up stating the facts instead. “His.” Woori looks Hongbin in the eye. “Myungsoo’s.”
“We’re trying to make it work,” she starts. “Or at least, he’s trying. He’s been home a lot recently. Comes back from work earlier.” Hongbin hears her voice, hears her talking, but it takes him longer to process the words. Make it work. Trying. Home. He nods.
“If we’re going to be a family, I don’t see how I can just keep doing this, Hongbin,” Woori continues, her voice taking on the edge that it does when she points out all the flaws in a movie. When had they stopped watching those? “This, this thing. I mean, I have to try too, you know? That’s marriage, isn’t it?” Her voice shakes, like she is about to cry, but her eyes are dry and looking into his.
Marriage. Is this what his parents thought when he and his sisters came along? Make it work, try, try, try and we can make it work. But it didn’t in the end - it’s not working between us, it’s better this way - and the neighbors still gave them weird looks and Hongbin was the youngest, saw all the yelling, kept waiting for it to stop and it did, but by that point he was so, so tired of it all -
His heart pounds in his chest, hot and full of blood, harsh. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. He wonders if Woori can hear it. The pain burns. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s her.
She’s wiping her eyes now. They’re a little wet, a little red. No devastation there. It was going to end some day, after all. “It’s not easy for me to do this, Hongbin,” but he doesn’t know what part of it she’s talking about.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Searing in his chest. He tries to smile. “Whatever’s best for you.” This is the last time he meets her.
She’s one with the ground, the dirt over her body, in her body. She can feel it in her throat - dry, so dry - like the first soul she swallowed. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. She’s not buried, no, rather, she’s one with the dirt, the soil the stems are rooted in.
It’s the same place. Here is where she reached up an arm and it was lost between the stalks in her vision. If it happens more than twice, is that still a dream? She’s not sure what’s real or not real anymore. The thing is - when you’re dead, everything starts to feel the same.
The buds at the ends of each stem are gone. Orange petals reach out toward the sky, spreading out, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. It is a fathomless blue through the spaces the petals reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
She can feel their roots looking for water - water in her veins. Am I alive, then? They reach deep down, in the crevices between her flesh, find the blood there. Blood, thicker than water, these flowers, growing with blood. But they are alive, unlike her, some kind of dead. It doesn’t make sense. The rules of the living don’t apply here.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind shakes the stems. And they are alive but they are taking blood from me, who is not. They bend over her body before standing tall once more. Am I alive, then? She closes her eyes.
This must be a dream. This is a dream.
They found the soul near the Han. By that time, the day was dipped with night, blue dusk pushing the day into the water, drowning the sun. The pulsing in her fingertips reached a fervent rhythm - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. She felt human.
It was a thin, small thing. Almost translucent. She blinked and it disappeared, blinked again and it was there, right there, surely there. She walked toward it, reached out for it.
“Are they usually that bright?” Jaehwan called out behind her. His voice sounded faint, though he was there, right there, surely there. The pulsing quickened with every step closer and she was human, she had a heart, it was beating - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum -
The soul tasted like just that - clear. Tasteless. Like water, water after running laps around the field during physical education, water when she had sweated her own out. Didn’t stick to the roof of her mouth - unwilling - nor did it claw at her throat.
Swallow. She did.
All the lights are off. Hongbin lays on top of the covers of his bed, sweating into the blankets. His eyes are closed, it’s dark but all he sees is the pink of his eyelids. Opens them. Coughs once, twice. He swears that smoke escapes his parted lips - slender white fingers reaching for the ceiling. They fade away into darkness.
His heart beats, pounds, aches, begs for him to let it out of his chest cavity. Burns his chest with its pulsing, angry and tense - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. The pain is scalding. Inhales. He closes his eyes again, the pink behind them raw, like the pink flesh in his body, in his chest. Burning black from the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum of his heart beat. Exhales.
Swallows.
“Just these two items, miss?” the boy at the counter asks her. It’s the same boy as before, the one who can’t be more than twenty-one, the acne still blooming on his cheeks. Soyeon nods, smiles, and tries to breathe.
Her head is spinning when she sits down in front of the convenience store window. She went to work like this, selling vitamins she couldn’t remember the names of no matter how much she thought about it. Suzy had to help her. There’s a girl on her cell phone sitting to Soyeon’s left, bright nail polish catching the lights as she taps away on the screen. Bright - kind of like the dim lights in between the new releases and the classics, catching on the plastic covers of CD cases. He looked down at her, so, so much taller. She looked up at him - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - the pulsing of a heart - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum -
Licks the roof of her mouth, but there’s nothing there. Tasteless. Everything blurs together - life, death, the pulsing, beating heart that failed on her. She looks outside but nothing’s in focus, nothing except the deep dimples when he smiled, and she feels sick, so sick, like she’ll throw up. But she’s a concept, an idea of a human, and concepts don’t throw up, don’t sit in front of convenience store windows, waiting for something they can’t even remember what they’re waiting for. Everything feels the same and Soyeon thinks. Soyeon thinks she’s going to vomit, sure that she will but there’s no taste in her mouth, there’s nothing -
And then she does.
( part two)