[01] Moyo wa Jua: Heart of the Sun
go to prologue
01
He shifted his guitar uncomfortably on his shoulder and dropped the ratty bag that held all his worldly possessions at his feet. One flight, three train changes and a couple of long-ass bus rides, to find himself standing in front of a dilapidated house that looked like it was going to blow over in the wind. For a moment, he contemplated running away.
But he didn’t have any money.
He scratched at the wound on his shoulder idly, unsure whether to bang on the rusty metal door - there wasn’t a doorbell in sight. A clanging saved him the trouble, as the door swung open into his face.
Stepping back quickly, he came face to face with a boy who was around his age. Ugly, plump and square-jawed. The beady eyes set into the flabby face sized him up quickly and a glint of recognition set in.
“Kwon Jiyong?”
“Mmph,” he grunted in answer.
“Ma!” the boy turned his head back and yelled into the house. “He’s here!”
“And you are?”
“Im Taepung.”
A lady came to the door right then. She had the exact same nose and lips as his mother, but Taepung’s small beady eyes and an annoyed expression.
“Jiyong?” she barked, rather than asked.
“I-mo,” He greeted, grudgingly giving a small bow.
“Tsk,” she pursed her lips irritably and gave him a once-over. “Good that you’re here. Put your things down and go with Pung-I to get the oil from the shop. Pung-ah, show him to your room.”
The fat boy’s lips were curled in displeasure, but he stepped back into the house and flapped a chubby hand indicating that Jiyong should follow him. A tiny room with barely enough space on the floor for two mattresses and a messy desk had Jiyong inwardly rolling his eyes. They’d never been well off in Taiwan, but this was… he couldn’t find a word. He put the bag and his guitar bag down on the floor. Taepung waited outside the room, watching him with tiny eyes.
“C’mon, hurry up, we don’t have all day,” snapped the fat boy.
Apparently, unpacking could wait.
Jiyong followed Taepung out of the house, his aunt nowhere to be seen.
“How old are you?” asked Taepung.
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen or sixteen?”
Jiyong did a double take. He’d forgotten that they calculated ages differently in Korea.
“Sixteen in Korean age,” he corrected himself.
“You’ll have to call me hyung then,” the other boy declared imperiously. “And do everything I say. Cos I’m 17 this year.”
Jiyong didn’t answer. He disliked Taepung already.
Living in a small town wasn’t difficult, Jiyong discovered. It was just awfully boring. And when things got boring, teenagers amused themselves by picking on each other. The new kid was always fair game. And as it turned out, Jiyong just had to be rooming with the biggest bully in town.
School was lonely. But lonely, he could handle. It was the feeling of being slowly suffocated that was choking him. The betel nut stand had been a glassed-in box that he never loved, but now he found himself missing the unobstructed view of the highway that never slept, claustrophobic in the proximity to Taepung he had to maintain at home. Taepung forbade him to play his guitar at home - “you suck,” he had scoffed, as if he knew anything about music.
His aunt’s only communication with them was to bark orders and instructions between the jobs that earned their keep: seasoning and drying seafood, taking in washing jobs and making the endless amounts of kimchi that Taepung scarfed down daily. His mother had called to check on him every other day for the first couple of weeks, pointedly ignoring all his requests to be allowed back to Taiwan until he gave up altogether and refused to talk to her.
Fuck. He couldn’t even get his hands on a cigarette to relax.
Three weeks and four days.
Counting down to the end of the school day, he sprinted home, let himself in, threw the bookbag he’d been carrying onto the floor in his room and grabbed his guitar in its case. Without waiting to find out if there were new chores to be done, he scrambled. He bought a roll of kimbap with some of the pathetic allowance he’d been given, and hightailed it to the highest point in the tiny town - a lookout structure made of cracked concrete that he figured the townspeople had forgotten about. He had discovered it on the way home from school one day, and a couple of days loitering about suggested that no one went up there.
It was soothing as evening fell. The town actually looked picturesque bathed in the pinks and oranges of the sunset, and the temperature dropped rapidly. The moon had begun to show itself, promising its full beauty as it gained luminescence in contrast with the darkening sky. Jotting down the last of the notes in his notebook before the light faded, he went over the tune he had composed that afternoon, then picked up his guitar to strum it through. Satisfied with the result, he felt the most serene he ever had since he’d arrived in Korea, albeit a tad feverish. He brushed off the feeling - Jiyong knew he wasn’t homesick, not by a long shot.
The serenity didn’t last long. Footsteps and voices sounded nearby, and a beam of light found his face. He threw up a hand and cursed as he was blinded momentarily.
“Yah, watch who you’re talking to!” a familiar voice chided. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Jiyong let out a sigh and rolled his eyes behind his hand.
“Mum’s been looking for you, and here you are playing your guitar like you’ve nothing better to do,” Taepung ranted. “I had to go to the wharf twice just to get all the cartons there because you weren’t around to help, wasted a good hour of my time. You think you’re here on holiday, don’t you?”
“You need the exercise,” Jiyong retorted, annoyed at being nagged.
“What?” The torches aimed at his face shifted and hands grabbed his shirt. His eyes adjusting back to the darkness, he made out Taepung and another stocky guy from school - probably Donggun.
“Say that again,” challenged Taepung. “And don’t forget who you’re talking to.”
“I said you fucking need the exercise,” Jiyong wrenched his shirt back from Taepung and trying to back away from him, his guitar trapped between the both of them. “Why can’t you just leave me alone!”
“Leave you alone? Why didn’t you just stay in Taiwan and leave me alone?” Taepung snarled, eyes disappearing into a scowl that wrinkled his nose like a pig. “And I told you to call me hyung!” He grabbed the guitar and tossed it aside, swinging a punch at Jiyong’s face.
The sound of the guitar crashing onto the floor hurt more than the punch that connected with his cheekbone. “Yah, leave my fucking guitar alone!”
Taepung sniggered, “I told you to stop playing the damned thing. You suck at it, don’t bother.”
He saw Donggun kick the guitar over to Taepung, a sickening dragging sound across the rough concrete floor that could only mean scratches all down the varnished surface.
“Bastard,” Jiyong moved to snatch the guitar off the floor, but a kick from Taepung sent him reeling back. The fat boy picked the guitar up by its neck, taunting.
“You want this back, don’t you? C’mon, come and get it!” He held it from Jiyong, moving backwards and away, wiggling the fingers of his other hand in a beckoning gesture.
Jiyong rushed at him, but Taepung merely threw the guitar in Donggun's direction.
“Oops, missed!” shrugged Donggun as the instrument dropped to the floor, the hollow body of it producing an echoey ‘boing’ as the strings vibrated.
“Give it to me!” yelled Jiyong, changing the direction of his charge only to be tripped by Taepung. “Fucking give it to me, you bastards!”
“Such a great way to ask for things. I’d say something about his upbringing, but hey, he’s your family, Taepung,” smirked Donggun.
“Yeah, we have failed in teaching him manners,” mocked Taepung, retrieving the guitar from Donggun before Jiyong had managed to get up.
“Lesson number one,” he held up the guitar.
“Don’t you fucking dare, Taepung,” gritted Jiyong through his teeth, only halfway up from the floor where he had landed.
The moon had come into its full brightness by now, hovering just beside Taepung’s shoulder from Jiyong’s vantage point.
“Dare?” Taepung cocked an eyebrow as well as his flabby face would allow. A greasy smile filled his face, and he raised the guitar again, blocking out the moon.
“I would so. Fucking. Dare.”
The guitar swung down so fast, the moon dazzled Jiyong for a moment before he heard the crash of splintering wood and broken strings twang home. And suddenly Jiyong didn’t feel like Jiyong anymore and he rushed Taepung with a snarl he didn’t recognize as his own, leaping up and onto the plump teenager and felling him with a speed and agility he’d never known before. Every muscle bunched, he latched onto Taepung and did the next most natural thing he knew how -
He bit into Taepung’s jugular.
The look of utter horror on Taepung’s face under him filled Jiyong with a satisfaction he had never known in his life.
Shrieks of fear registered behind him, and he turned his head to see a pale, saucer-eyed Donggun scrabbling over the floor, trying to get up and run away.
Seeing Jiyong turn towards him, his legs seemed to jellify once more and he gasped out, “No, no, it wasn’t me, it was him! It was him! Don’t kill me, please, don’t kill me!”
Jiyong bounded over to the frightened man just as he found his feet and ran from the lookout. Snarling in satisfaction at the retreating back stumbling downhill, he decided not to give chase. Instead he whirled back around to see if Taepung was sufficiently cowed. A gruesome spectacle met his eyes.
Beside the splinters of a broken guitar, in the silver light of the moon, lay a motionless, bloodied Taepung, throat ripped and eyes staring straight up at the sky in terror.
Jiyong sank from his crouching position to a sitting one, closed his eyes and blinked hard. The scene didn’t change. He brought his hands up to his eyes to rub them - only to recoil in horror.
Instead of hands, two shaggy paws greeted him, dark claws unsheathed and leathery soft paw pads giving him pause. He looked down at himself in disbelief. It wasn’t just the paws. Pale fur covered his body and legs where he’d been wearing his school uniform before, reflecting the silver in the moonlight. The same dark claws and paw pads on his feet instead of his sneakers. He closed his eyes and shook his head, willing this all to be a strange hallucination that would go away.
Instead, he became conscious of how loud the sea was now, and the fishing boats offshore with their thrumming engines. The crickets were deafening, and the odd owl hoot from somewhere - there - he could pinpoint how far up the hill it was. And he could smell Taepung’s blood.
It actually smelt good. And tasted better.
He felt sick.
next chapter >>