i heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too (2/2)
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.
( part one)
September
Soyeon sits on her bed cross-legged. There’s a trash can in front of her, the plastic garbage bag inside it empty. The more she stares at it, the more she feels like she’ll throw up. But she can’t stop herself from looking.
“I have some kind of stomach virus,” she told Suzy when the other girl asked her why she hadn’t shown up at work for the past week. “It’s pretty bad.” Suzy told her to get better soon, but Soyeon isn’t sure if that’s even possible. The entire encounter felt so human that it was surreal - as surreal as someone already dead can feel.
This sickness, as Soyeon’s deciding to call it, must have been from that soul she swallowed - the translucent one that was tasteless. Was she wrong to swallow it? What kind of body did it come from if it wasn’t rotting by the time she found it? She imagines it humming in her belly, seemingly harmless. Now it was in her body - the term used lightly - her spouts of blood in the form of flesh body that neutralized decaying souls. Maybe that was why this one made her feel so sick instead. Uncrosses her legs. Maybe it was fresh from within the body.
But what was a soul, a soul that had not yet decayed, doing without a body? The two were mutually inclusive things, like life and death, intertwined at birth. You cannot define one without the other. She leans over the trash can, holding her hair back because she can feel the thing surging, surging up her throat, refusing her blood.
It wants to escape, Soyeon realizes. It wants to leave, and find its body, and it wants to do this now.
What would a soul do without a body, and consequently, a body without a soul?
A man, this man, had bribed the reaper who came before Gangnim to let him live for forty thousand years. Gangnim was tasked to capture this man, but he did not know his name, or even what he looked like.
So how did he do it?
Gangnim started washing a piece of charcoal in the river every day. When people asked him why he did so, Gangnim replied, “After a hundred years, this piece of charcoal will turn white, white as snow.”
And it worked?
Yes. One day, an old man laughed and told him, “I have lived for forty thousand years, yet I have never heard of such a thing happening.” And that’s how Gangnim caught the man.
(Hongbin thought about it.) He made a careless mistake.
(Woori looked at him. She seemed to be trying to convey something to Hongbin in that look, but he could not catch the message.) Mistakes are often due to carelessness.
Soohyun told her it was heart failure. Unexpected, out-of-the-blue heart failure. She was walking home from school when, bam, her heart gave out, just like that. Ceased to beat, breathe, contract, push - and then she, Jung Soyeon, was just a corpse.
“But I was healthy,” she tried. She was still in a state of disbelief back then. It sounded sad when she said it aloud - aloud, the words took shape into sounds, the trembling of her voice, and these sounds reached Soohyun’s ears. He looked her in the eye - eyes are the windows to the soul, he had told her. You still have one, Soyeon. Even if you aren’t alive right now.
“Death doesn’t discriminate,” he said, the cold, hard truth. “Healthy, sick, young, old - someone has to die. Someone has to die every day.” Soyeon tried not to avert her eyes to let Soohyun’s words sink in, but ended up doing so anyway. When she looked back up, his eyes found hers again. A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes, he had said then, too. Soyeon remembered not understanding why.
“That day, it just happened to be you.” The wind blows. It was winter then. She wouldn’t be able to start the new term. Graduate. That had been her ending. Soyeon shivered. “This is simply the way things turned out. And didn’t turn out.”
Soyeon buries herself in her sheets. Creates a cocoon around herself, breaks out of it, and then retreats back inside. The trash can’s still there, by the side of her bed. Still unused.
She feels restless, like all her legs want to do is run, run, back to her body. But her body’s here, she has to remind herself. The soul continues to refuse her blood.
“Don’t just go looking for souls, Soyeon,” Soohyun had told her. The white roses, the scent of death. “You’ll get what I mean,” he said, too early for her to understand, so she was confused.
Spit, spit me up. Soyeon swallows instead. Spit. Swallow. She gets what Soohyun means now, but now, it’s too late.
And now she wants to spit.
Hongbin sees Jaeseop’s shadow leaning over his desk. He looks up at his boss. The main light is still on, but it’s already half-past eight. The floor is mostly empty. Hongbin puts down the article he was proofreading.
“You,” Jaeseop says. “Are getting the entire week off for Chuseok. I don’t want to see you here or anywhere near the office on Monday. Are we clear?”
Hongbin glances back at the article. He needs the distraction. “I don’t need the week off,” he says, opting for sorting the papers on his desk into orderly piles instead, trying not to get irritated. Jaeseop means well, cares about his employees, but Hongbin doesn’t need him interfering with his life like this. “I still have a lot of work to do -”
“Which I already reassigned to Sanghyuk,” Jaeseop cuts in. He raises an eyebrow, as if to challenge Hongbin. “Just,” he pauses. Sighs. “Go home and see your family. Sleep. You look like shit, Lee.”
The park outside is silent. Where have the cicadas gone? Just last week, Hongbin almost stepped on one, lying upside down in front of his apartment complex. Thought it was dead and kept walking, and then it scrambled back onto its feet. He flinched at the sudden movement and then laughed for a good minute about it - laughed because it was sudden and funny, like the bug had cheated death and he, he had made a mistake like that old man from the myth Woori told him all those years ago.
Jaeseop has his arms crossed, waiting for an answer when Hongbin looks at him again. He realizes he hasn’t said anything about Jaeseop’s proposal. “Guess I can’t say no, can I?” Hongbin laughs. It comes out dry. Forced. Jaeseop’s too distracted by the action itself to notice the connotation.
He calls his mother on the subway back to his apartment. It’s midnight and the car bumps sporadically against the rails. Causes his cell phone to bump against his ear, his mother’s voice sounding distorted through the receiver. Hongbin can’t remember the last time he called her. He feels a wave of guilt. Makes his heart start beating painfully. It’s been burning a lot more these days, searing his chest, hot and aching.
“I’m coming home for Chuseok,” Hongbin says, trying to sound like he’s fine. It feels weird to call Gwangju “home.” But maybe it is - most of his family lives there. Isn’t that what makes a home? The screaming and yelling come to mind. Maybe not.
“Ok,” his mother replies. She sounds happy even though the receiver distorts her voice. The last time he saw his mother was during Lunar New Year. Of what year? His sisters were there, too, and he was there, pretending he was fine. And he was. He was just - busy. There’s so much work I have to do, and his mother told him to take care of his liver and try some sleeping pills.
Don’t be bitter, Hongbin always has to tell himself, remind himself. But it just comes out - at some point when he’s back in Gwangju or when he sees his father once a month. It’s not their fault. Hongbin just wanted silence then. They had nothing to do with the window back then. Not their fault.
“I’m hanging up now. I’ll sleep soon,” he lies, before the bitterness crawls through the phone. “You sleep soon, too.” He hears his mother sigh on the other end. His heart beats - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - and the smoke threatens to crawl up his throat, gag him. Please hang up before that happens, Hongbin pleads. Or else she never will.
“Good night, Hongbin.” He ends the call immediately, melting against his seat. The fire in his chest makes his eyes water.
The window’s open. The air is cool, running over her bare feet from where she’s sitting on the floor. It hasn’t rained for a week now. That part about summer is ending, and now they’re just waiting in-between the seasons, waiting for the next one to come.
But Soyeon’s good at waiting. Waiting every day after work, sitting in front of the convenience store window with the same two items. Waiting to plug in her second-hand stereo for this day, this day in September, every year for the past ten. Eleven now. She lies down on the floor in front of it, listens to the CD she’s put in, and remembers.
The first track reminds her of her mother. I love this song, she would always say whenever it came on in the car.
“We know, we know,” her father or sister would reply, dismissive but fond. Sometimes both of them at the same time, if they all happened to be going somewhere together. Soyeon would smile, hum along. She loved this song, too. Loves this song now. It makes her feel warm inside even though it has a sad melody. Makes her think of her family, and how much she loved them and how much they loved her. What were they doing now? If Soyeon passed them on the street, would she recognize them? Would they recognize her?
The second track starts playing before her thoughts consume her, gnaw away at the streams of her consciousness until she gets carried away with the hypotheticals. You’re dead, she has to remind herself. There are no more hypotheticals. The memory ends just like that.
The opening bars always shock her into the next memory - it comes to her unexpectedly and full-force, like she is waking up from a daze. The tall boy that she was almost a head shorter than, the tall boy with fair skin that the girls in her class liked to talk about and giggle over. He’s just so handsome, her friend from choir would say when Soyeon asked why she liked him. Soyeon nodded back then but she didn’t really get it, or maybe she hadn’t been looking. When she finally did, watched for him in the corner of her eye when he passed by their classroom to get to his, he was walking with a friend and they were laughing about something. His smile reached his eyes. But there was something off about the whole picture - he was handsome, she took that in at face value. But there was something shiny and fake to it, like he was laughing and he was trying to mean it, but he wasn’t actually in the mood to laugh. No, Soyeon remembers thinking about it later. Rewords her statement. It’s insincerity. That was how she thought of it. Thought of him. She brought it up to her friend at some point.
“Well,” her friend had replied, shrugging her uniform coat off her shoulders. It was hot then - warm for a September bleeding into autumn. “He’s still handsome. There’s no shame in looking, is there?”
“I guess not.” But Soyeon disagreed.
From then on, she watched him, insincere boy, when he walked past her classroom to get to his. He was one year older than her - a third-year, probably stressed, and sleepless every night. Was that the reason for his insincerity - an obsessive preoccupation with his future? But she had to be careful when she looked. If her eyes lingered too long, her friend would think Soyeon agreed with her, about how there’s no shame in looking.
Soyeon didn’t consider herself looking, though. It was more like - observing. Waiting. Waiting for him to prove her idea wrong with a smile that reached his eyes and felt real, like he meant it.
Between the new releases and the classics. The dim lights caught on the plastic CD covers, reflected back into her eyes. This was the track she was listening to back then, too. Park Hyoshin’s “Good Person.” The tall boy was looking at her when she saw him. More like - waiting. Waiting for her to look at him. She found it funny: she was just waiting for him, and he was just waiting for her. Her heart pounded loud in her chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. It still worked back then.
“Wanna listen?” she asked him, offering him and earbud. She watched him as he took it, placed it in his right ear, like everything was happening in a slowed-down, fuzzy version of reality. Did he even like Park Hyoshin? Her heart pounded even louder in her chest, as fast as it could. Their arms were so close that they could brush against each other if she lifted hers. She didn’t.
At some point, she looked up at him. He looked down at her, the dim lights making a halo around his head. They didn’t smile at each other, but he kept looking at her, like he was observing her. And she, him.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, went her heart. Park Hyoshin sings the last note and the boy’s name comes to her. Lee Hongbin. That’s when the memory, abrupt and full-force, ends. It leaves her reeling, gasping for breath, every time.
Still now.
Hongbin takes the eight o’clock train from Seoul going south. By the time it pulls into the train station at Gwangju, it’s eleven and Hongbin’s heart is burning in his chest. It hasn’t stopped burning since he got on the train, even when he closed his eyes and thought about the time he ran around in the snow with sandals on and how ice cold his toes were when he could feel them again. He buys a bottle of water at the nearest vending machine before waiting for the bus, guessing it’ll probably take him another hour or so to get to his mother’s apartment. Takes a sip. The water does nothing to put out the fire.
September in Gwangju feels the same as it did back then. The pavement is wet, smell of fresh rain on the ground mixing with the taste of smoke when he licks the roof of his mouth. Hongbin realizes he shouldn’t have come here. Heart stutters, stops, stutters again. A September in Gwangju ten - no, eleven - years ago, and his first love became a corpse. Was it around Chuseok then, too? The less prominent, less important memories dissipate, pale next to it. Maybe that was how first loves were supposed to end - they became figurative corpses that you thought about once in a while, where, who, now, how? - except she, Hongbin’s first love was a corpse, quite literally.
Hongbin shouldn’t have come here. A bus, number two-fifty-two, passes by without stopping. Not his bus. The rain streaks down the windows, the entire image blurred in the downpour. It is hard for him to watch it. The lights inside are on, but the bus looks empty, utterly empty, and as dark as the overcast day outside.
Gwangju, the city of ghosts. Hongbin’s ghosts. The empty bus turns the corner, disappears behind a row of buildings. A ghost bus, he thinks, in this city full of ghosts and corpses.
The raindrops keep falling. Only they are in focus.
He didn’t go to the funeral. His classmates that did go said it was sad. Sad - generic word, everything’s sad. Hongbin wanted to say something about it, but when he opened his mouth, no sound was on the tip of his tongue. He sat there instead, in the middle of the classroom, drowning in a sea of desks and his heart pounded loudly, painfully in his chest. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - reached a fervent rhythm so loud that Hongbin swore everyone would hear it. If they did, no one said anything.
No one was saying anything then, at all. He wasn’t qualified to in the first place. She was his first love - they had only looked directly at each other that one time, Park Hyoshin’s voice setting the mood for the encounter. It was a sad song, “Good Person.” Maybe that should have been a sign. They looked at each other, and that was it. That was all they were destined to do.
Fuck destiny. His heart burned in his chest and Hongbin was so tired of hearing about sadness and sad stories that nothing felt sad to him anymore. His heart burned and he hated it, marriage and how it robbed him of a home, death and how it robbed him of his first love. Hated it so much that Hongbin just wanted to break - something.
Threw his pencil at his window first. It bounced back and landed on his desk. Harmless. He hated it. He wanted something to bleed, raw and red, loud and painful like the heart in his chest. Books next. Textbooks. His lamp. Anything he could get his hands on -
The window gave in before he stopped. Jagged hole in the middle, ruptured and shattered, like a stiff, bursted artery. The things Hongbin threw fell down, down from the fourth story where they lived. That must be at least six feet, he thought. More than six feet for sure. Six feet, like the six feet that put her coffin in the ground. She will never come back up again.
He panted. Looked out the window. Outside, the sky was blue, blue for miles. He tried to catch his breath, but it grew labored, distant, far away. Wet. Never had Hongbin seen a sky so infinite before, like an ocean above his head. His eyes, at the sight, burned.
She’s one with the ground, the soil the stems are rooted in. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. Their roots reach deep down, into the crevices between her flesh. They find the blood there. Carnivorous, these flowers, growing with blood. It doesn’t make sense.
It’s the same place. Orange petals extend toward the sky, toward each other, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. It is barely visible from where Soyeon lies. This is a dream, she reiterates. That dream.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind blows, but the stems are stiff, stiff with her blood. And they are alive but they are taking blood from me, who is not. The petals flutter in the breeze. The roots dig into her side, probing for a sign of life. I am waiting, then. Her blood is not enough for them. Soon she’ll just be a package of flesh, bloodless. I’ve been waiting for someone, all this time.
His name is on the tip of her tongue. It makes sense to her now. This is a dream. The rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon remembers. Only in a dream would she see him again. Lee Hongbin. They’ll plant him in the soil, next to her. Is he dead then? Soyeon squints when a patch of the sky, endlessly blue, shines into her eyes. He must be dead, if she - Soyeon and dead - is here, waiting for him, in this field of flowers. She closes her eyes.
Maybe, beneath the soil, she will turn her head to look at him. Maybe he will look at her. Maybe that was all they were destined to do - look at each other. Maybe. For now, she could only wait.
“You went looking, didn’t you, Soyeon?” Soohyun’s voice sounds quiet over the phone.
There’s no point in denying it. Jaehwan was with her. And she wanted to look for it, so she had. “I did.”
The flowers Yujeong brought over on Tuesday sit on her windowsill. From Soohyun, for your death day. Soyeon thought the whole thing was funny, but she could not bring herself to laugh about it. The soul might come up her throat then, trail out the window and look for its body. Like a cockroach with its head cut off.
Soyeon hears Soohyun sigh into the receiver. The breath could crush her underneath all its weight - the weight of the dead, only but a fraction of the weight Soohyun carries for them all. “It’s ok.”
But it’s not. She doesn’t know what to say other than sorry - generic word, everyone’s sorry. Is she even qualified to say anything? They sit like that, in silence, the static of the line punctuating their wordlessness.
Instead, she looks at the flowers on her windowsill, pretty, colorful flowers. Their petals are so, so orange. Their faces are turned out toward the window, breeze rustling their petals. Poppies, Yujeong told her when she asked what kind they were. The older girl did not look impressed by them. Flowers for your death day, from the dead, for the dead. Soyeon sniffs, trying to catch their scent, but they are odorless.
Tasteless. Licks the roof of her mouth. Poppies and souls, Soyeon thinks. What a menu. She coughs, trying to keep the translucent thing in. It gags her from the inside. “It’s ok,” Soohyun says again, voice quiet, far away over the phone. The implicit meaning being now that you’ve swallowed it, don’t you dare let the thing go.
Five thirty in the afternoon. The English program’s on - the shitty one - volume at level eleven. Hearing the English words aloud make them not sound like English to him anymore. Hongbin’s gotten so used to listening to the program at a volume so low that it’s nearly on mute that he’s just associated the language with a quietness in the midst of static during the darkest hours of the morning.
He didn’t get to his mother’s apartment until five. Turns out fewer buses stopped at the bus stop near their neighborhood now. All the lights were off when Hongbin reached the doorstep and no one answered when he rang the doorbell. Strange - even for this city of ghosts. He felt for the key underneath the welcome mat and let himself in. Maybe his mother was getting dinner from that restaurant they all liked so much when he was still in high school. He left his rain-slicked shoes outside and closed the door behind him. Darkness flooded the apartment.
His mother’s television is the same one from ten years ago - box-shaped but with a rather large screen. The images playing behind the glass seem brighter than Hongbin remembers. They cut through the dark, the rain still pounding outside. Pounding like his heart, beating, burning wretched thing. Smoke coming up his throat. Hongbin tries to keep it in but coughs instead.
Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. Grainy black and white pictures, zoomed in past their original resolutions, bleed into his vision. TRENCH WAR-FARE. English now. He tries to mouth the words. Coughs again in place of them. TRENCH WAR-FARE. The program goes right off the deep end. The smoke’s clawing up his throat now and he can feel the searing in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. It is so loud. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
His heart is going to break right out of his chest. Beat and burn all the way down to the floorboards, set fire to those and fall through the fiery fissures until it’s six feet under, in the soil, where his first love’s coffin lies. Hongbin shuts his eyes, coughs, wheezes. She can have his heart - his goddamn burning heart - quite literally this time.
And here, his body will lay, on the couch in his mother’s apartment, in the darkness, the English program on World War I illuminating the parts of his body it can find. He’ll die right in front of shitty television. It’s such a sad way to go that it’s funny when Hongbin thinks about it. Smoke escapes his throat instead of laughter, and then he doesn’t think anything’s funny anymore.
Soyeon’s eyes are closed. The soul still claws against her insides, but weaker now, tired out. It’s giving up, just as she’s found the will to wait. She’ll see him again, in a dream. Has to think about his name again. It does not come so easily to her when she’s awake.
The window’s open. Cicada season’s over. The silence gives her more space to think - to remember - but it is oddly out of place. Fall is coming, and then comes the thought.
Lee Hongbin.
Their silhouettes are black against the blue dusk, the yolk of the sun sinking to the bottom of the glass until it leaks out of the bottom and seeps into the earth. Hongbin faces her. He cannot see her face - features obscured by the blanket of night. But she feels familiar, there’s a fondness but grotesqueness there, like he has loved her all this time only to be reminded that she’s dead. The queen of this city of ghosts and corpses, his first love - Jung Soyeon. His heart stutters into action, stopping and starting like a machine in need of oiling before picking up a constant, burning rhythm. Bum, ba-dum, ba-dum, bum.
Things go bump in the night. But they have nothing to be afraid of - she’s dead and he feels close to death, which in turn is closest to the dark. He’s not afraid of the darkness or the saturated blue that reminds him of that sky - blue, blue for miles - peeking out from between the jagged hole he created in his window. Tried to catch his breath then, but it grew labored, distant, far away like it does now.
But Hongbin’s not afraid and neither is she - she leans closer, closer, closer until Hongbin can make out an outline of her face. The blue catches some eyes there, a nose here, her chin. His chest is burning, flames eating his heart, charring the pink flesh into black, black like their silhouettes against the blue dusk. Hongbin wheezes like he still needs to breathe, coughs though he shouldn’t feel the pain.
He feels her hands on the sides of his face, pinkies at the junction of where his jaw meets neck, thumbs at his cheekbones. Gentle hands, palms flush on his cheeks. “Shh,” she whispers and he tries to hold onto the sound, tries to remember her voice, but the sound flutters away before he can grasp it. Hongbin swears there’s smoke rising from between his ribs, swears that he’s breathing it out into her face. The soot coats her wrists and he’s choking - save me, save me please, save me - but the heart, his heart, still burns in his chest.
Her lips meet his and the blue dusk between them disappears. It’s just silhouette against silhouette as the smoke fills their mouths, barely making room for tongues. She reaches hers into his mouth, into the fire, before the burning tickles up his throat, and pulls. Hongbin’s heart - charred, useless thing, obstinately beating - tumbles up his throat, into his mouth. The momentum forces it into hers. She wraps her tongue around it before it can flee again.
Hongbin feels her swallow against his lips. Like swallowing a soul, but the heart was part of his body. The bum, ba-dum, ba-dum, bum is gone. All that’s left is their silhouettes, conjoined by the heads to form a distorted mirror image.
He doesn’t know who pulls away first, doesn’t want to pull away, but A and B somehow end up apart once more. The blue filters back in between them. A thin line of saliva remains between their lips, catching the dying gold of the sun. She looks into his eyes, and Hongbin sees them now, dark irises and the even darker pupils. Looking at him, like he is undoubtedly looking at her. We’re connected now, comes to mind. He thinks of his heart resting in her belly.
“I’m waiting for you,” he says, just to say it. They both know now. They’ve been looking for each other, even though they were not sure if the other still existed at all. “I’ve been waiting for you all this time,” he echoes. Soyeon hums in wordless agreement. Hongbin reaches for her hand -
And that’s when the connection splits. The thin line of saliva breaks and the sun bleeds into the earth, and then Hongbin’s back in his mother’s apartment, eyes opening, awake.
It is still dark in the room. His chest is silent. The English program is still on, pretty, colorful flowers on the screen, the orange saturating the pink of his skin. Everything else is as he left it, stagnant in life. But the beating, burning heart is gone.
October
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
They’re one with the ground, the soil the flowers are rooted in. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. Their roots reach deep down, into her flesh and his flesh, find whatever blood’s left there. Carnivorous, these flowers, growing with blood. It doesn’t make sense, but he’s with her now, his heart in her belly, beside her in the dirt, and that is enough.
“Am I dead?” he asks her. Now he does not cough, does not wheeze. Orange petals extend toward the sky, toward each other, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. The blue, blue sky peeks out through the spaces the petals reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
Soyeon thinks about it. “I don’t know,” and she doesn’t. All along, she has been dead, an extension of Death - capital D, Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls of the dead - where the rules of the living did not apply, but she does not know much more than that.
Is he a concept now? The wind blows, but the stems are stiff, stiff with their blood. An idea in the shape of a human? The petals flutter in the breeze. She sniffs, trying to catch their scent, but they are odorless and so, so orange.
He is looking at her. The sunshine through the petals hits a spot on his cheek, the rest of his face in the shadows of the soil. They’re lying in a field of poppies, one with the ground, the flowers filled with their blood and he is looking at her, sincere, and she at him, into his eyes.
A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes.
This is a dream.
They’re still searching.
There’s an emptiness in his chest when he gets on the twelve o’clock train to Seoul. An emptiness - a hunger - ever since Soyeon pulled his burning, useless heart up his throat and into hers. I need to find her. The train pulls into the station, doors sighing open. And she’s not here in Gwangju, in this city of ghosts and corpses.
“I have to go back tomorrow,” Hongbin told his mother the day after Chuseok. She looked up at him from where she was slicing carrots in the kitchen. She set down the knife, wiped her hands against her apron. Her hair was gray, even grayer than Hongbin remembered.
“But why?” she asked him, voice hoarse - choked, even. His mother looked like a ghost herself then. Tired and pale. Hongbin found it hard to believe that this was the woman who yelled and fought with his father all those years ago. He wondered if she ever thought about the damage she and his father had caused - how much he waited, hoped it would end before it did and how tired he was by that point - and regretted it.
He didn’t have to leave. He had four days left of his break. But Hongbin had to - had to see her, his first love, his only love. Find her, out of this city where her ghost and body lived, the dead things. She was alive somewhere, some part of her, and he felt so strongly that he had to find that part, like a man who desperately paddles toward land after drifting for decades on the sea.
Hongbin finds a place to stand in the middle of the train car. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” he told his mother then. Waited all his life - waited for his parents to stop fighting, waited for things to be ok again. Waited for her, in the music store, between the new releases and the classics. Waited so long that Hongbin forgot how to move on his own.
But he was remembering now. His mother’s bottom lip trembled. She picked up the knife again. “Ok,” she told him, and went back to slicing carrots. There was not much she could do when his will was that strong. “Ok.”
The train pulls away from the station, leaving Gwangju behind. Goodbye, city of ghosts. The train exits the tunnel, the sun shining outside. It is bright. Gwangju becomes smaller and smaller with the distance, until it is merely a dot on the horizon, then nothing. Hongbin doubts he’ll ever return.
Two oh-six. Two oh-seven. The hospital corridor is empty except for the occasional nurse exiting a patient’s room and the man walking down the hallway.
“Visiting hours are almost over, sir,” one of the nurses say. Two oh-eight. He smiles a smile of even, charming teeth. If she looked closer, she would see that those teeth clenched, stiff, like he was carrying something extremely heavy. The words written on the name tag stuck onto his breast pocket come to focus. Soohyun.
“I won’t be long,” he reassures her. He is very good at that. She nods.
They continue walking down the hallway, in opposite directions. The weight of death presses on Soohyun’s shoulders, but his steps are light.
Two oh-nine. Two ten.
Soyeon sits in front of the convenience store window, on the seat right in the middle of the five. No one sits to either side of her. Acne boy doesn’t spare her a second glance from his spot at the counter, flipping through an issue-old tabloid magazine. The table space in front of her is empty.
It is strangely sunny for an October evening. Rush hour on the street, the cars and motorcycles honking at one another, people eager to head home. A crowd waits for the crosswalk signal to change so they can flood the street. Soyeon feels leisurely and lethargic all at once in comparison.
The soul no longer claws at her insides. She can’t even feel it at all anymore - just Hongbin’s burning heart in her belly, cooling, silent and still. His heart was hers to take - figuratively and literally. Funny how that is, came to be. She drums her fingers on the table.
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. A man, about thirty, is walking toward the convenience store Soyeon sits in. He looks tall, so much taller than her. The streak distorts his face where her eyes are supposed to meet his. He walks toward her, on the other side of the window.
Jung Soyeon. His lips mouth. Lee Hongbin. She mouths back.
He is looking at her, and she at him. Their eyes are level for once. A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes. And after all this time, they finally found one another.
The main light flickers in coma patient Lee Junyoung’s room. Soohyun looms over him, shadow on the bed, back facing the door. A door not fully closed behind him. It is strangely sunny for an October evening.
Junyoung lays on the bed, under the covers. Other than his pale, pale lips and ashy complexion, Junyoung could be alive. Is alive. The machines he’s connected to keep his heart beating and organs functioning when his body is merely a hollow shell, fresh, translucent soul in Soyeon’s belly.
Soohyun looks longer than he should. Never has he taken a body before. But what would a body do without a soul, and consequently, a soul without a body? You need to do this, something tells him. And you need to this now. He reaches a steady hand out and places it over Junyoung’s heart. Inhales and exh -
A burst of light shoots him from behind. Bang. His hand slacks. He crumples over Junyoung’s body. Their conjoined silhouette looks like a monster, bleeding tar all over the sterile white bed sheets. The door is fully closed behind them.
“Are you happy?” Soyeon says. Her voice vibrates through Hongbin’s body from where she mutters the words against his shoulder, her breath warm even through his plaid shirt.
His cheek knocks gently against her forehead when he turns toward her. His chest still feels empty, too empty, and silent. You’ll get used to it, Soyeon told him. Soyeon, Jung Soyeon, his first love, his only real story, is with him now. Hongbin holds onto that fact.
Her Park Hyoshin CD is on in the background. The window’s open. It is eerily silent other than “Good Person,” which begins to play.
They stare out the window. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Hongbin laughs and this time it vibrates through his body to hers.
It is too bright outside to find their reflections in the glass.
Girl stares at Soohyun’s body, bloodless cadaver draped over Junyoung. A soul, an idea, in the shape of a human. Like a concept, it will fade over time. She does not worry about cleaning up. After all, her body will soon follow Yeomra’s reaper into death.
Thirty years waiting to acquire a new shell. So, so troublesome. She looms over Junyoung, shadow on the bed, eyes toward the door. Leans over and presses her lips to Junyoung’s pale, pale ones - inhales and opens his lips with her tongue, exhales and sends her soul inside him.
Her lips slack after the exchange. She crumples over Junyoung’s body.
It is strangely sunny for an October evening.
Two bloodless cadavers, boneless and eyes wide open, blanket coma patient Lee Junyoung’s body. They are dark silhouettes in the hues of the evening. Maybe he will see them when he wakes up. Or maybe, like concepts, they will have faded over time by then.
The soul burrows deep into Junyoung’s heart. Makes a home there, infecting his body.
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
~16,500w; r (hongbin/soyeon, some hongbin/woori)
it takes thirty years to cheat death.
( part one)
September
Soyeon sits on her bed cross-legged. There’s a trash can in front of her, the plastic garbage bag inside it empty. The more she stares at it, the more she feels like she’ll throw up. But she can’t stop herself from looking.
“I have some kind of stomach virus,” she told Suzy when the other girl asked her why she hadn’t shown up at work for the past week. “It’s pretty bad.” Suzy told her to get better soon, but Soyeon isn’t sure if that’s even possible. The entire encounter felt so human that it was surreal - as surreal as someone already dead can feel.
This sickness, as Soyeon’s deciding to call it, must have been from that soul she swallowed - the translucent one that was tasteless. Was she wrong to swallow it? What kind of body did it come from if it wasn’t rotting by the time she found it? She imagines it humming in her belly, seemingly harmless. Now it was in her body - the term used lightly - her spouts of blood in the form of flesh body that neutralized decaying souls. Maybe that was why this one made her feel so sick instead. Uncrosses her legs. Maybe it was fresh from within the body.
But what was a soul, a soul that had not yet decayed, doing without a body? The two were mutually inclusive things, like life and death, intertwined at birth. You cannot define one without the other. She leans over the trash can, holding her hair back because she can feel the thing surging, surging up her throat, refusing her blood.
It wants to escape, Soyeon realizes. It wants to leave, and find its body, and it wants to do this now.
What would a soul do without a body, and consequently, a body without a soul?
A man, this man, had bribed the reaper who came before Gangnim to let him live for forty thousand years. Gangnim was tasked to capture this man, but he did not know his name, or even what he looked like.
So how did he do it?
Gangnim started washing a piece of charcoal in the river every day. When people asked him why he did so, Gangnim replied, “After a hundred years, this piece of charcoal will turn white, white as snow.”
And it worked?
Yes. One day, an old man laughed and told him, “I have lived for forty thousand years, yet I have never heard of such a thing happening.” And that’s how Gangnim caught the man.
(Hongbin thought about it.) He made a careless mistake.
(Woori looked at him. She seemed to be trying to convey something to Hongbin in that look, but he could not catch the message.) Mistakes are often due to carelessness.
Soohyun told her it was heart failure. Unexpected, out-of-the-blue heart failure. She was walking home from school when, bam, her heart gave out, just like that. Ceased to beat, breathe, contract, push - and then she, Jung Soyeon, was just a corpse.
“But I was healthy,” she tried. She was still in a state of disbelief back then. It sounded sad when she said it aloud - aloud, the words took shape into sounds, the trembling of her voice, and these sounds reached Soohyun’s ears. He looked her in the eye - eyes are the windows to the soul, he had told her. You still have one, Soyeon. Even if you aren’t alive right now.
“Death doesn’t discriminate,” he said, the cold, hard truth. “Healthy, sick, young, old - someone has to die. Someone has to die every day.” Soyeon tried not to avert her eyes to let Soohyun’s words sink in, but ended up doing so anyway. When she looked back up, his eyes found hers again. A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes, he had said then, too. Soyeon remembered not understanding why.
“That day, it just happened to be you.” The wind blows. It was winter then. She wouldn’t be able to start the new term. Graduate. That had been her ending. Soyeon shivered. “This is simply the way things turned out. And didn’t turn out.”
Soyeon buries herself in her sheets. Creates a cocoon around herself, breaks out of it, and then retreats back inside. The trash can’s still there, by the side of her bed. Still unused.
She feels restless, like all her legs want to do is run, run, back to her body. But her body’s here, she has to remind herself. The soul continues to refuse her blood.
“Don’t just go looking for souls, Soyeon,” Soohyun had told her. The white roses, the scent of death. “You’ll get what I mean,” he said, too early for her to understand, so she was confused.
Spit, spit me up. Soyeon swallows instead. Spit. Swallow. She gets what Soohyun means now, but now, it’s too late.
And now she wants to spit.
Hongbin sees Jaeseop’s shadow leaning over his desk. He looks up at his boss. The main light is still on, but it’s already half-past eight. The floor is mostly empty. Hongbin puts down the article he was proofreading.
“You,” Jaeseop says. “Are getting the entire week off for Chuseok. I don’t want to see you here or anywhere near the office on Monday. Are we clear?”
Hongbin glances back at the article. He needs the distraction. “I don’t need the week off,” he says, opting for sorting the papers on his desk into orderly piles instead, trying not to get irritated. Jaeseop means well, cares about his employees, but Hongbin doesn’t need him interfering with his life like this. “I still have a lot of work to do -”
“Which I already reassigned to Sanghyuk,” Jaeseop cuts in. He raises an eyebrow, as if to challenge Hongbin. “Just,” he pauses. Sighs. “Go home and see your family. Sleep. You look like shit, Lee.”
The park outside is silent. Where have the cicadas gone? Just last week, Hongbin almost stepped on one, lying upside down in front of his apartment complex. Thought it was dead and kept walking, and then it scrambled back onto its feet. He flinched at the sudden movement and then laughed for a good minute about it - laughed because it was sudden and funny, like the bug had cheated death and he, he had made a mistake like that old man from the myth Woori told him all those years ago.
Jaeseop has his arms crossed, waiting for an answer when Hongbin looks at him again. He realizes he hasn’t said anything about Jaeseop’s proposal. “Guess I can’t say no, can I?” Hongbin laughs. It comes out dry. Forced. Jaeseop’s too distracted by the action itself to notice the connotation.
He calls his mother on the subway back to his apartment. It’s midnight and the car bumps sporadically against the rails. Causes his cell phone to bump against his ear, his mother’s voice sounding distorted through the receiver. Hongbin can’t remember the last time he called her. He feels a wave of guilt. Makes his heart start beating painfully. It’s been burning a lot more these days, searing his chest, hot and aching.
“I’m coming home for Chuseok,” Hongbin says, trying to sound like he’s fine. It feels weird to call Gwangju “home.” But maybe it is - most of his family lives there. Isn’t that what makes a home? The screaming and yelling come to mind. Maybe not.
“Ok,” his mother replies. She sounds happy even though the receiver distorts her voice. The last time he saw his mother was during Lunar New Year. Of what year? His sisters were there, too, and he was there, pretending he was fine. And he was. He was just - busy. There’s so much work I have to do, and his mother told him to take care of his liver and try some sleeping pills.
Don’t be bitter, Hongbin always has to tell himself, remind himself. But it just comes out - at some point when he’s back in Gwangju or when he sees his father once a month. It’s not their fault. Hongbin just wanted silence then. They had nothing to do with the window back then. Not their fault.
“I’m hanging up now. I’ll sleep soon,” he lies, before the bitterness crawls through the phone. “You sleep soon, too.” He hears his mother sigh on the other end. His heart beats - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - and the smoke threatens to crawl up his throat, gag him. Please hang up before that happens, Hongbin pleads. Or else she never will.
“Good night, Hongbin.” He ends the call immediately, melting against his seat. The fire in his chest makes his eyes water.
The window’s open. The air is cool, running over her bare feet from where she’s sitting on the floor. It hasn’t rained for a week now. That part about summer is ending, and now they’re just waiting in-between the seasons, waiting for the next one to come.
But Soyeon’s good at waiting. Waiting every day after work, sitting in front of the convenience store window with the same two items. Waiting to plug in her second-hand stereo for this day, this day in September, every year for the past ten. Eleven now. She lies down on the floor in front of it, listens to the CD she’s put in, and remembers.
The first track reminds her of her mother. I love this song, she would always say whenever it came on in the car.
“We know, we know,” her father or sister would reply, dismissive but fond. Sometimes both of them at the same time, if they all happened to be going somewhere together. Soyeon would smile, hum along. She loved this song, too. Loves this song now. It makes her feel warm inside even though it has a sad melody. Makes her think of her family, and how much she loved them and how much they loved her. What were they doing now? If Soyeon passed them on the street, would she recognize them? Would they recognize her?
The second track starts playing before her thoughts consume her, gnaw away at the streams of her consciousness until she gets carried away with the hypotheticals. You’re dead, she has to remind herself. There are no more hypotheticals. The memory ends just like that.
The opening bars always shock her into the next memory - it comes to her unexpectedly and full-force, like she is waking up from a daze. The tall boy that she was almost a head shorter than, the tall boy with fair skin that the girls in her class liked to talk about and giggle over. He’s just so handsome, her friend from choir would say when Soyeon asked why she liked him. Soyeon nodded back then but she didn’t really get it, or maybe she hadn’t been looking. When she finally did, watched for him in the corner of her eye when he passed by their classroom to get to his, he was walking with a friend and they were laughing about something. His smile reached his eyes. But there was something off about the whole picture - he was handsome, she took that in at face value. But there was something shiny and fake to it, like he was laughing and he was trying to mean it, but he wasn’t actually in the mood to laugh. No, Soyeon remembers thinking about it later. Rewords her statement. It’s insincerity. That was how she thought of it. Thought of him. She brought it up to her friend at some point.
“Well,” her friend had replied, shrugging her uniform coat off her shoulders. It was hot then - warm for a September bleeding into autumn. “He’s still handsome. There’s no shame in looking, is there?”
“I guess not.” But Soyeon disagreed.
From then on, she watched him, insincere boy, when he walked past her classroom to get to his. He was one year older than her - a third-year, probably stressed, and sleepless every night. Was that the reason for his insincerity - an obsessive preoccupation with his future? But she had to be careful when she looked. If her eyes lingered too long, her friend would think Soyeon agreed with her, about how there’s no shame in looking.
Soyeon didn’t consider herself looking, though. It was more like - observing. Waiting. Waiting for him to prove her idea wrong with a smile that reached his eyes and felt real, like he meant it.
Between the new releases and the classics. The dim lights caught on the plastic CD covers, reflected back into her eyes. This was the track she was listening to back then, too. Park Hyoshin’s “Good Person.” The tall boy was looking at her when she saw him. More like - waiting. Waiting for her to look at him. She found it funny: she was just waiting for him, and he was just waiting for her. Her heart pounded loud in her chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. It still worked back then.
“Wanna listen?” she asked him, offering him and earbud. She watched him as he took it, placed it in his right ear, like everything was happening in a slowed-down, fuzzy version of reality. Did he even like Park Hyoshin? Her heart pounded even louder in her chest, as fast as it could. Their arms were so close that they could brush against each other if she lifted hers. She didn’t.
At some point, she looked up at him. He looked down at her, the dim lights making a halo around his head. They didn’t smile at each other, but he kept looking at her, like he was observing her. And she, him.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, went her heart. Park Hyoshin sings the last note and the boy’s name comes to her. Lee Hongbin. That’s when the memory, abrupt and full-force, ends. It leaves her reeling, gasping for breath, every time.
Still now.
Hongbin takes the eight o’clock train from Seoul going south. By the time it pulls into the train station at Gwangju, it’s eleven and Hongbin’s heart is burning in his chest. It hasn’t stopped burning since he got on the train, even when he closed his eyes and thought about the time he ran around in the snow with sandals on and how ice cold his toes were when he could feel them again. He buys a bottle of water at the nearest vending machine before waiting for the bus, guessing it’ll probably take him another hour or so to get to his mother’s apartment. Takes a sip. The water does nothing to put out the fire.
September in Gwangju feels the same as it did back then. The pavement is wet, smell of fresh rain on the ground mixing with the taste of smoke when he licks the roof of his mouth. Hongbin realizes he shouldn’t have come here. Heart stutters, stops, stutters again. A September in Gwangju ten - no, eleven - years ago, and his first love became a corpse. Was it around Chuseok then, too? The less prominent, less important memories dissipate, pale next to it. Maybe that was how first loves were supposed to end - they became figurative corpses that you thought about once in a while, where, who, now, how? - except she, Hongbin’s first love was a corpse, quite literally.
Hongbin shouldn’t have come here. A bus, number two-fifty-two, passes by without stopping. Not his bus. The rain streaks down the windows, the entire image blurred in the downpour. It is hard for him to watch it. The lights inside are on, but the bus looks empty, utterly empty, and as dark as the overcast day outside.
Gwangju, the city of ghosts. Hongbin’s ghosts. The empty bus turns the corner, disappears behind a row of buildings. A ghost bus, he thinks, in this city full of ghosts and corpses.
The raindrops keep falling. Only they are in focus.
He didn’t go to the funeral. His classmates that did go said it was sad. Sad - generic word, everything’s sad. Hongbin wanted to say something about it, but when he opened his mouth, no sound was on the tip of his tongue. He sat there instead, in the middle of the classroom, drowning in a sea of desks and his heart pounded loudly, painfully in his chest. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum - reached a fervent rhythm so loud that Hongbin swore everyone would hear it. If they did, no one said anything.
No one was saying anything then, at all. He wasn’t qualified to in the first place. She was his first love - they had only looked directly at each other that one time, Park Hyoshin’s voice setting the mood for the encounter. It was a sad song, “Good Person.” Maybe that should have been a sign. They looked at each other, and that was it. That was all they were destined to do.
Fuck destiny. His heart burned in his chest and Hongbin was so tired of hearing about sadness and sad stories that nothing felt sad to him anymore. His heart burned and he hated it, marriage and how it robbed him of a home, death and how it robbed him of his first love. Hated it so much that Hongbin just wanted to break - something.
Threw his pencil at his window first. It bounced back and landed on his desk. Harmless. He hated it. He wanted something to bleed, raw and red, loud and painful like the heart in his chest. Books next. Textbooks. His lamp. Anything he could get his hands on -
The window gave in before he stopped. Jagged hole in the middle, ruptured and shattered, like a stiff, bursted artery. The things Hongbin threw fell down, down from the fourth story where they lived. That must be at least six feet, he thought. More than six feet for sure. Six feet, like the six feet that put her coffin in the ground. She will never come back up again.
He panted. Looked out the window. Outside, the sky was blue, blue for miles. He tried to catch his breath, but it grew labored, distant, far away. Wet. Never had Hongbin seen a sky so infinite before, like an ocean above his head. His eyes, at the sight, burned.
She’s one with the ground, the soil the stems are rooted in. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. Their roots reach deep down, into the crevices between her flesh. They find the blood there. Carnivorous, these flowers, growing with blood. It doesn’t make sense.
It’s the same place. Orange petals extend toward the sky, toward each other, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. They cut into the sky, the blue, blue sky. It is barely visible from where Soyeon lies. This is a dream, she reiterates. That dream.
I’m lying in a field of flowers. The wind blows, but the stems are stiff, stiff with her blood. And they are alive but they are taking blood from me, who is not. The petals flutter in the breeze. The roots dig into her side, probing for a sign of life. I am waiting, then. Her blood is not enough for them. Soon she’ll just be a package of flesh, bloodless. I’ve been waiting for someone, all this time.
His name is on the tip of her tongue. It makes sense to her now. This is a dream. The rules of the living don’t apply here, Soyeon remembers. Only in a dream would she see him again. Lee Hongbin. They’ll plant him in the soil, next to her. Is he dead then? Soyeon squints when a patch of the sky, endlessly blue, shines into her eyes. He must be dead, if she - Soyeon and dead - is here, waiting for him, in this field of flowers. She closes her eyes.
Maybe, beneath the soil, she will turn her head to look at him. Maybe he will look at her. Maybe that was all they were destined to do - look at each other. Maybe. For now, she could only wait.
“You went looking, didn’t you, Soyeon?” Soohyun’s voice sounds quiet over the phone.
There’s no point in denying it. Jaehwan was with her. And she wanted to look for it, so she had. “I did.”
The flowers Yujeong brought over on Tuesday sit on her windowsill. From Soohyun, for your death day. Soyeon thought the whole thing was funny, but she could not bring herself to laugh about it. The soul might come up her throat then, trail out the window and look for its body. Like a cockroach with its head cut off.
Soyeon hears Soohyun sigh into the receiver. The breath could crush her underneath all its weight - the weight of the dead, only but a fraction of the weight Soohyun carries for them all. “It’s ok.”
But it’s not. She doesn’t know what to say other than sorry - generic word, everyone’s sorry. Is she even qualified to say anything? They sit like that, in silence, the static of the line punctuating their wordlessness.
Instead, she looks at the flowers on her windowsill, pretty, colorful flowers. Their petals are so, so orange. Their faces are turned out toward the window, breeze rustling their petals. Poppies, Yujeong told her when she asked what kind they were. The older girl did not look impressed by them. Flowers for your death day, from the dead, for the dead. Soyeon sniffs, trying to catch their scent, but they are odorless.
Tasteless. Licks the roof of her mouth. Poppies and souls, Soyeon thinks. What a menu. She coughs, trying to keep the translucent thing in. It gags her from the inside. “It’s ok,” Soohyun says again, voice quiet, far away over the phone. The implicit meaning being now that you’ve swallowed it, don’t you dare let the thing go.
Five thirty in the afternoon. The English program’s on - the shitty one - volume at level eleven. Hearing the English words aloud make them not sound like English to him anymore. Hongbin’s gotten so used to listening to the program at a volume so low that it’s nearly on mute that he’s just associated the language with a quietness in the midst of static during the darkest hours of the morning.
He didn’t get to his mother’s apartment until five. Turns out fewer buses stopped at the bus stop near their neighborhood now. All the lights were off when Hongbin reached the doorstep and no one answered when he rang the doorbell. Strange - even for this city of ghosts. He felt for the key underneath the welcome mat and let himself in. Maybe his mother was getting dinner from that restaurant they all liked so much when he was still in high school. He left his rain-slicked shoes outside and closed the door behind him. Darkness flooded the apartment.
His mother’s television is the same one from ten years ago - box-shaped but with a rather large screen. The images playing behind the glass seem brighter than Hongbin remembers. They cut through the dark, the rain still pounding outside. Pounding like his heart, beating, burning wretched thing. Smoke coming up his throat. Hongbin tries to keep it in but coughs instead.
Repeat after me, the program tells him in Korean. Grainy black and white pictures, zoomed in past their original resolutions, bleed into his vision. TRENCH WAR-FARE. English now. He tries to mouth the words. Coughs again in place of them. TRENCH WAR-FARE. The program goes right off the deep end. The smoke’s clawing up his throat now and he can feel the searing in his chest - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. It is so loud. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
His heart is going to break right out of his chest. Beat and burn all the way down to the floorboards, set fire to those and fall through the fiery fissures until it’s six feet under, in the soil, where his first love’s coffin lies. Hongbin shuts his eyes, coughs, wheezes. She can have his heart - his goddamn burning heart - quite literally this time.
And here, his body will lay, on the couch in his mother’s apartment, in the darkness, the English program on World War I illuminating the parts of his body it can find. He’ll die right in front of shitty television. It’s such a sad way to go that it’s funny when Hongbin thinks about it. Smoke escapes his throat instead of laughter, and then he doesn’t think anything’s funny anymore.
Soyeon’s eyes are closed. The soul still claws against her insides, but weaker now, tired out. It’s giving up, just as she’s found the will to wait. She’ll see him again, in a dream. Has to think about his name again. It does not come so easily to her when she’s awake.
The window’s open. Cicada season’s over. The silence gives her more space to think - to remember - but it is oddly out of place. Fall is coming, and then comes the thought.
Lee Hongbin.
Their silhouettes are black against the blue dusk, the yolk of the sun sinking to the bottom of the glass until it leaks out of the bottom and seeps into the earth. Hongbin faces her. He cannot see her face - features obscured by the blanket of night. But she feels familiar, there’s a fondness but grotesqueness there, like he has loved her all this time only to be reminded that she’s dead. The queen of this city of ghosts and corpses, his first love - Jung Soyeon. His heart stutters into action, stopping and starting like a machine in need of oiling before picking up a constant, burning rhythm. Bum, ba-dum, ba-dum, bum.
Things go bump in the night. But they have nothing to be afraid of - she’s dead and he feels close to death, which in turn is closest to the dark. He’s not afraid of the darkness or the saturated blue that reminds him of that sky - blue, blue for miles - peeking out from between the jagged hole he created in his window. Tried to catch his breath then, but it grew labored, distant, far away like it does now.
But Hongbin’s not afraid and neither is she - she leans closer, closer, closer until Hongbin can make out an outline of her face. The blue catches some eyes there, a nose here, her chin. His chest is burning, flames eating his heart, charring the pink flesh into black, black like their silhouettes against the blue dusk. Hongbin wheezes like he still needs to breathe, coughs though he shouldn’t feel the pain.
He feels her hands on the sides of his face, pinkies at the junction of where his jaw meets neck, thumbs at his cheekbones. Gentle hands, palms flush on his cheeks. “Shh,” she whispers and he tries to hold onto the sound, tries to remember her voice, but the sound flutters away before he can grasp it. Hongbin swears there’s smoke rising from between his ribs, swears that he’s breathing it out into her face. The soot coats her wrists and he’s choking - save me, save me please, save me - but the heart, his heart, still burns in his chest.
Her lips meet his and the blue dusk between them disappears. It’s just silhouette against silhouette as the smoke fills their mouths, barely making room for tongues. She reaches hers into his mouth, into the fire, before the burning tickles up his throat, and pulls. Hongbin’s heart - charred, useless thing, obstinately beating - tumbles up his throat, into his mouth. The momentum forces it into hers. She wraps her tongue around it before it can flee again.
Hongbin feels her swallow against his lips. Like swallowing a soul, but the heart was part of his body. The bum, ba-dum, ba-dum, bum is gone. All that’s left is their silhouettes, conjoined by the heads to form a distorted mirror image.
He doesn’t know who pulls away first, doesn’t want to pull away, but A and B somehow end up apart once more. The blue filters back in between them. A thin line of saliva remains between their lips, catching the dying gold of the sun. She looks into his eyes, and Hongbin sees them now, dark irises and the even darker pupils. Looking at him, like he is undoubtedly looking at her. We’re connected now, comes to mind. He thinks of his heart resting in her belly.
“I’m waiting for you,” he says, just to say it. They both know now. They’ve been looking for each other, even though they were not sure if the other still existed at all. “I’ve been waiting for you all this time,” he echoes. Soyeon hums in wordless agreement. Hongbin reaches for her hand -
And that’s when the connection splits. The thin line of saliva breaks and the sun bleeds into the earth, and then Hongbin’s back in his mother’s apartment, eyes opening, awake.
It is still dark in the room. His chest is silent. The English program is still on, pretty, colorful flowers on the screen, the orange saturating the pink of his skin. Everything else is as he left it, stagnant in life. But the beating, burning heart is gone.
October
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
They’re one with the ground, the soil the flowers are rooted in. Green stems reach toward the sky - bright blue and cloudless. Their roots reach deep down, into her flesh and his flesh, find whatever blood’s left there. Carnivorous, these flowers, growing with blood. It doesn’t make sense, but he’s with her now, his heart in her belly, beside her in the dirt, and that is enough.
“Am I dead?” he asks her. Now he does not cough, does not wheeze. Orange petals extend toward the sky, toward each other, reaching for the blooms of the flowers next to them. The blue, blue sky peeks out through the spaces the petals reach, but cannot quite connect, to cover.
Soyeon thinks about it. “I don’t know,” and she doesn’t. All along, she has been dead, an extension of Death - capital D, Yeomra, like the one in the myths who judges the souls of the dead - where the rules of the living did not apply, but she does not know much more than that.
Is he a concept now? The wind blows, but the stems are stiff, stiff with their blood. An idea in the shape of a human? The petals flutter in the breeze. She sniffs, trying to catch their scent, but they are odorless and so, so orange.
He is looking at her. The sunshine through the petals hits a spot on his cheek, the rest of his face in the shadows of the soil. They’re lying in a field of poppies, one with the ground, the flowers filled with their blood and he is looking at her, sincere, and she at him, into his eyes.
A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes.
This is a dream.
They’re still searching.
There’s an emptiness in his chest when he gets on the twelve o’clock train to Seoul. An emptiness - a hunger - ever since Soyeon pulled his burning, useless heart up his throat and into hers. I need to find her. The train pulls into the station, doors sighing open. And she’s not here in Gwangju, in this city of ghosts and corpses.
“I have to go back tomorrow,” Hongbin told his mother the day after Chuseok. She looked up at him from where she was slicing carrots in the kitchen. She set down the knife, wiped her hands against her apron. Her hair was gray, even grayer than Hongbin remembered.
“But why?” she asked him, voice hoarse - choked, even. His mother looked like a ghost herself then. Tired and pale. Hongbin found it hard to believe that this was the woman who yelled and fought with his father all those years ago. He wondered if she ever thought about the damage she and his father had caused - how much he waited, hoped it would end before it did and how tired he was by that point - and regretted it.
He didn’t have to leave. He had four days left of his break. But Hongbin had to - had to see her, his first love, his only love. Find her, out of this city where her ghost and body lived, the dead things. She was alive somewhere, some part of her, and he felt so strongly that he had to find that part, like a man who desperately paddles toward land after drifting for decades on the sea.
Hongbin finds a place to stand in the middle of the train car. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” he told his mother then. Waited all his life - waited for his parents to stop fighting, waited for things to be ok again. Waited for her, in the music store, between the new releases and the classics. Waited so long that Hongbin forgot how to move on his own.
But he was remembering now. His mother’s bottom lip trembled. She picked up the knife again. “Ok,” she told him, and went back to slicing carrots. There was not much she could do when his will was that strong. “Ok.”
The train pulls away from the station, leaving Gwangju behind. Goodbye, city of ghosts. The train exits the tunnel, the sun shining outside. It is bright. Gwangju becomes smaller and smaller with the distance, until it is merely a dot on the horizon, then nothing. Hongbin doubts he’ll ever return.
Two oh-six. Two oh-seven. The hospital corridor is empty except for the occasional nurse exiting a patient’s room and the man walking down the hallway.
“Visiting hours are almost over, sir,” one of the nurses say. Two oh-eight. He smiles a smile of even, charming teeth. If she looked closer, she would see that those teeth clenched, stiff, like he was carrying something extremely heavy. The words written on the name tag stuck onto his breast pocket come to focus. Soohyun.
“I won’t be long,” he reassures her. He is very good at that. She nods.
They continue walking down the hallway, in opposite directions. The weight of death presses on Soohyun’s shoulders, but his steps are light.
Two oh-nine. Two ten.
Soyeon sits in front of the convenience store window, on the seat right in the middle of the five. No one sits to either side of her. Acne boy doesn’t spare her a second glance from his spot at the counter, flipping through an issue-old tabloid magazine. The table space in front of her is empty.
It is strangely sunny for an October evening. Rush hour on the street, the cars and motorcycles honking at one another, people eager to head home. A crowd waits for the crosswalk signal to change so they can flood the street. Soyeon feels leisurely and lethargic all at once in comparison.
The soul no longer claws at her insides. She can’t even feel it at all anymore - just Hongbin’s burning heart in her belly, cooling, silent and still. His heart was hers to take - figuratively and literally. Funny how that is, came to be. She drums her fingers on the table.
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. A man, about thirty, is walking toward the convenience store Soyeon sits in. He looks tall, so much taller than her. The streak distorts his face where her eyes are supposed to meet his. He walks toward her, on the other side of the window.
Jung Soyeon. His lips mouth. Lee Hongbin. She mouths back.
He is looking at her, and she at him. Their eyes are level for once. A pair of eyes will always look for another pair of eyes. And after all this time, they finally found one another.
The main light flickers in coma patient Lee Junyoung’s room. Soohyun looms over him, shadow on the bed, back facing the door. A door not fully closed behind him. It is strangely sunny for an October evening.
Junyoung lays on the bed, under the covers. Other than his pale, pale lips and ashy complexion, Junyoung could be alive. Is alive. The machines he’s connected to keep his heart beating and organs functioning when his body is merely a hollow shell, fresh, translucent soul in Soyeon’s belly.
Soohyun looks longer than he should. Never has he taken a body before. But what would a body do without a soul, and consequently, a soul without a body? You need to do this, something tells him. And you need to this now. He reaches a steady hand out and places it over Junyoung’s heart. Inhales and exh -
A burst of light shoots him from behind. Bang. His hand slacks. He crumples over Junyoung’s body. Their conjoined silhouette looks like a monster, bleeding tar all over the sterile white bed sheets. The door is fully closed behind them.
“Are you happy?” Soyeon says. Her voice vibrates through Hongbin’s body from where she mutters the words against his shoulder, her breath warm even through his plaid shirt.
His cheek knocks gently against her forehead when he turns toward her. His chest still feels empty, too empty, and silent. You’ll get used to it, Soyeon told him. Soyeon, Jung Soyeon, his first love, his only real story, is with him now. Hongbin holds onto that fact.
Her Park Hyoshin CD is on in the background. The window’s open. It is eerily silent other than “Good Person,” which begins to play.
They stare out the window. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Hongbin laughs and this time it vibrates through his body to hers.
It is too bright outside to find their reflections in the glass.
Girl stares at Soohyun’s body, bloodless cadaver draped over Junyoung. A soul, an idea, in the shape of a human. Like a concept, it will fade over time. She does not worry about cleaning up. After all, her body will soon follow Yeomra’s reaper into death.
Thirty years waiting to acquire a new shell. So, so troublesome. She looms over Junyoung, shadow on the bed, eyes toward the door. Leans over and presses her lips to Junyoung’s pale, pale ones - inhales and opens his lips with her tongue, exhales and sends her soul inside him.
Her lips slack after the exchange. She crumples over Junyoung’s body.
It is strangely sunny for an October evening.
Two bloodless cadavers, boneless and eyes wide open, blanket coma patient Lee Junyoung’s body. They are dark silhouettes in the hues of the evening. Maybe he will see them when he wakes up. Or maybe, like concepts, they will have faded over time by then.
The soul burrows deep into Junyoung’s heart. Makes a home there, infecting his body.
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.