1953 awaits you.
Across the entrance, a large banner hung. Two people stood by the doors, ready to greet visitors. Right beside it, the ticket booth. I ran up, hesitating. I was late. Got on the wrong train, heading in the opposite direction. Half-asleep, I had jerked awake, realizing too late. My cell phone was dead—I had forgotten to charge it last night.
The manager came out of the booth.
“Are you Min’s friend?”
“I’m so sorry, I got on the wrong train.”
He gestured toward the entrance.
“We’re opening in a few minutes. Come, follow me.”
The museum was larger than I’d expected. A three-story building with a simple structure. It held the exhibition of the Korean modern periods—I passed through the glass displays on the first and second floors. No time to glance at them, too busy following the manager’s heels. The manager pointed, waved, and told me: This is after 1945. The millennial. This is the war. The basement held the rest, the highlight of the museum. He pointed at his watch. Have to hurry. The museum was opening soon. He paired me with one of the other part-time staffers, Hyun-in, asking him to give me instructions, since I was covering for Min. The manager walked away. Commanding and ordering the rest of the staff who were waiting for him at the entrance. Hyun-in took me to the changing room.
“You heard about the special event?”
“No.” I shook my head.
“When you go in, you’ll see two outfits on the rack. It’s the museum’s ten-year anniversary this month, so just for this month, the staff has to wear them. You can choose one of the two. After you change, come out to the office. I’ll tell you about what you’ll be doing today.”
Hyun-in closed the door behind him, leaving me to choose. The room was small. Two lockers, a clothing rack, and a hanging wall mirror. One of the uniforms was a checkered dress that came down just above the knees. Paired with black stockings and red shoes with a low heel. Tight around the waist. The other one was blue, high-waisted denim, a plain oversized white t-shirt, and a baseball jacket. Fashions from the nineties or maybe the eighties, seventies. Clothes I wouldn’t wear now. I picked the jeans, pulling them up to my waist, wishing there was a belt. The shirt was a medium but it was too big for me, extra room in the arms. I looked like a kid, swallowed up in the clothes. When I came out of the room, Hyun-in looked up, holding a basket.
“So, you’re covering for Min?”
“I am,” I said.
“She must have caught that flu that’s been going around.”
Min hadn’t told him. Hyun-in rifled through the basket.
“So, um—” I cleared my throat. “Every staff member has to wear these clothes?”
“It’s for the event,” he said.
I rolled up my sleeves.
“Not just us, though. Many people come dressed up. Visitors get a discount if they come dressed in a fashion from the sixties, seventies, or really any other time period.”
I looked down at my jacket. Probably nineties era. Hyun-in was wearing a bright yellow shirt and navy bell-bottom jeans. Maybe the seventies? He handed me a red badge.
“Pin this on, so that the visitors know who you are.”
“Are there a lot of visitors?” I asked.
“Not really, but since we’ve been holding the event, there have been more than usual.”
I pinned the badge on the jacket.
“Every staff member takes a turn monitoring each floor, but you’ll be in the basement most of the time. I’ll get you a map.”
I tied up my hair.
“Most people will just ask you where the bathroom is, so memorize where the bathrooms are for each floor. If you run out of maps, you can find more of them in the storage room on the first floor. I will show you where that is.”
I nodded.
“Keep the children from touching things. Yesterday, there was this kid who tore the posters off the walls. You’ll find them running around the whole place, so we have to keep an eye on them.”
“Do people ask us questions?”
“Questions?” he asked.
“About history or artifacts. About the exhibitions.”
Hyun-in shook his head.
“You saw the basement floor, right? Just think of the exhibition, the museum, as one large photo background. A stage set. That’s the highlight.”
I nodded.
“If they ask a question you can’t answer, guide them to a staff member in a blue badge. You saw those people in the lobby?”
The people the manager had been commanding.
“Yes,” I said.
“They will take care of the questions.”
“Blue badge,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Here, pick one.”
He held out the basket.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I told you, a special event.”
Inside the basket, there were small pieces of shiny paper. They held the smudges of someone else’s fingerprints.
“Take one.”
I picked up a piece.
“Who did you get?” Hyun-in asked, leaning over. “What’s the name?”
I looked down at the paper.
Name: Park Jeong-sun
Birth: 1931.05.03.
Code: X98TN
“Park Jeong-sun.”
The name stuck to my tongue. Park Jeong-sun, born in 1931. Hyun-in smiled.
“It’s a real person. There’s a machine on the second floor. If you put in that code, you can find out what happened to her. Discover her fate.”
I put the paper in my pocket.
“It kind of feels like having your fortune read, doesn’t it?” He grabbed another basket. “You ever had your fortune told?”
I shook my head. Hyun-in took the two baskets, murmuring. There was a bin by the machine, where people put their papers after they were done. When the baskets were full, we needed to take them and refill the draw box at the entrance. Hyun-in grabbed a stack of maps and pulled up his sleeves, revealing a bird tattooed across his wrist. A tiny bird, fluttering along his flesh. The outfit didn’t look too strange on him. Hyun-in’s hair was dyed ash-gray, combed back and slick. He looked like a person who wore vintage clothes, matching them to the current style. Hyun-in gestured at me to follow him.
We hurried out to the lobby, where the manager was still waving his hands. The staff with the blue badges stood listening, and Hyun-in gestured at me to follow, passing through the entrance to the 1950s exhibition hall.
“1953 awaits you.”
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
Hyun-in handed the baskets to the staff who stood by the entrance. We entered a long hall of glass displays. I felt the sharp edges of the coated paper inside my pocket as I hurried after him. Hyun-in pointed at the storage room halfway through the hall—if I needed to get something from there, the key was in the office.
“The basement floor gets really crowded. We’ll probably have to go down there soon. Maybe in two hours. You’re going to run out of maps pretty quickly. Don’t forget that storage room, and on your way, make sure you check the first and second floors. There aren’t many people on those floors, but we make sure the area is kept clean.”
As we reached the far back, Hyun-in finally stopped. He stood near a staircase, by a glass display. There was a mounted projector on the ceiling shooting black-and-white footage onto a wall. We leaned against the glass display and watched the flashing images. Collage films. A photo of the peninsula with a line across the 38th Parallel. Military men looking through the binoculars at a bridge across the Han River. Two young girls in their white hanbok, jumping up and down on a wooden seesaw. A man holding up both his arms, crawling out of a trench. Mothers reaching for their sons’ hands as the trains carried them away. Men dragging bodies from fallen structures. A naked child crying beside a corpse. The bridge exploding.
“There’s no sound?”
“The sound system’s been broken for a few days,” Hyun-in said. “The manager has a mechanic coming to fix it today.”
It had been years since I’d been to a museum. The last time I visited one, it was for a school field trip. I had to memorize numbers, dates, and names for a report. I glanced back at the glass display—behind the thick pane, a male mannequin stood, his khaki military uniform pressed and ironed, his helmet glinting under the bright light. His boots were polished. At his feet were rifles, revolvers, backpack radio receivers, food rations. His dog tags had been laid out. The Korean War, the description read. Long known as the Forgotten War. At 4:00 a.m. on June 25, 1950, some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel. So unexpected, this war.
Hyun-in cleared his throat.
“They’re coming.”
A couple walked into the hall, both of them wearing denim jackets over denim pants, like teen models from a nineties magazine, their hair combed back with wax. They hurried past the glass displays, the girl laughing, holding out a map. The girl suddenly grabbed her boyfriend’s arm and jerked him back. I think this is the spot. A photograph of a grandmother tying a baby around her daughter’s back with a blanket. No one’s here. Let’s take a photo. The couple walked up to the wall, tilting and positioning the cell phone. They looked up at the light and pointed. Here, the girl said, here, the lighting is so good here. Should we take out the selfie stick?
“You know that girl who does mukbang?” Hyun-in whispered. “She eats like fifty burgers but is super skinny?”
I didn’t know.
“I forgot her name, but she came here two weeks ago.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She came dressed up in full costume and live streamed here,” he said. “I didn’t know she had so many fans. Have you heard of her?”
“No.”
The wall was gray, the flashing screen of black-and-white footage creating a somber and serious tone. It was a good photo spot. Projector photography was currently trending too. I remembered seeing photos on SNS. Hashtag, unreal. Hashtag, projector photography. Hashtag, aesthetic. Hashtag, illusion. The real and the unreal, merging together. A colorful, glittering layer of skin. A photo of the universe and the startling number of shimmering stars. A photo of aurora emitting a spectrum of blue to purple, or ethereal green. War. They wore the war. The couple laughed. A soldier with a burst stomach reflected across their smiling faces. The city up in flames, projecting onto their flesh. Their faces becoming one with the photos, the image quickly passing. The refugees, pushing carts of bodies. A girl carrying a boy on her back. The footage flashed. The couple slipped out of the war.
It hadn’t even been two hours.
The walkie-talkie rang. Hey, Hyun-in, can you come down here? the voice was out of breath. The light bulb in the school is out. Hyun-in ran for the stairs. The voice groaned. I followed.
If I were a visitor, I would have liked the basement. Nothing from the exhibit breathed alive on the first or second floor, but the basement, its entire space, was a set, a re-creation of different time periods. The dirt roads changed to brick, then to concrete as you kept walking. The roads took you through the seventies, the eighties, and finally, to the nineties. As I followed Hyun-in down the stairs, I saw roofs. The thatched roofs and the tiled roofs and the concrete roofs, crowded next together. I couldn’t see the ground, the streets, or the people. Sounds of chatter and laughter filled the air. As we reached the basement, Hyun-in and I mumbled excuse me and sorry as we pushed past. The re-created streets were bustling with people. We walked through the narrow alleys of the past, slowly pulled back in time.
Most of the boys and men came dressed in school or military uniforms. Some had even put on some dirt-brown makeup, as if they had been crawling on the ground, through ashes. Trying to make themselves believable, like real soldiers. Some uniforms had bullet holes. Gun wounds. They trudged through the basement’s makeshift streets, trying to find a place to sit, to rest. I turned to look at the seventies. Here, most of the buildings were just storefronts, but there were a few you could enter, like Myeong-dong Salon. A few girls in tight miniskirts and high heels walked toward it, their hair loose and swishing, their hoop earrings swinging. The salon door was low, and the girls bent down to enter. They posed in front of the pink walls, taking photos with the plastered black-and-white models from the seventies. Make sure people don’t touch or damage anything, Hyun-in had said. He had disappeared into the street. He told me to stay here by the Myeong-dong Salon, next to a wax figure of a man selling ice. The ice was cut from the Han River and the man’s mouth was wide open, yelling a silent scream. Hyun-in had promised: Ten minutes, I’ll be back in ten minutes.
A few feet away, there was a coffee shop, selling actual coffee. People came out with cups of Americano or iced-blended chocolate frappe with whipped cream on top. The coffee machine hissed. A soldier wiped cream from his lips. Children were peeking out from the alleyway, playing at the entrance to a shuttered watch shop. Next door was a small house, where a family of seven mannequins lived in one room, huddled over a dinner of boiled potatoes and corn. A shoe-repair shop. Children touched the fliers posted on the walls. As proud patriots, we must work hard. Their fingerprints smudged the already faded letters. Laziness is the enemy of patriotism. Their fingernails scratching. We must not forget the bloodshed of June 25th. Wash, dry, and rub! Frostbite prevention. Let’s catch the mice together with pesticides!
What time was it? I tapped on my cell phone, forgetting that it was dead. There was no clock here. It felt like I had been here for hours. I picked up some empty water bottles, crumpled maps, and brochures from the floor, putting them in the garbage can. I felt nauseated, like I was on an uncontrollable ride. I wanted to take a break, but people kept stopping me, asking for directions. Asking if I could take a photo. Another man in a military uniform, his girlfriend wearing an oversized sweater over tight leggings. They stood in front of the posters and smiled. Report the Reds. Deep in red and black colors. Catch the mice! Catch the mice!
I felt the push. A woman in a chic black jumpsuit posing to lift up a burnt charcoal briquette with tongs. A man in a leather jacket, stepping into a thatched-roof lodging, pointing at a mannequin, stirring a large iron pot. A young boy running around in a white 1988 Summer Olympics t-shirt. A woman in hanbok blowing large pink bubbles with her gum. I felt the push of the time. Men with bullet holes in their uniforms taking out their cigarettes, asking me about the smoking room. I smiled, guiding. Three young men in military uniforms came up to me and asked if I could take a photo for them. Sipping their iced Americanos, one of them holding a peace sign behind his friend’s head as I took the photo. A man picked up a paper his girlfriend had dropped on the floor, calling her by the name she was given, teasing her. How old-fashioned it sounded. Choon-ja, Choon-ja. The girlfriend blushed and told him to stop. Her red hanbok fluttering into the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the new millennium. I could see all the years here. The motion, rolling forward.
“Excuse me.”
Someone tapped my shoulder.
“Is there some place to sit here?”
An elderly man wiped his face with a handkerchief. His skin was bloodless like a wax figure. I nodded at a nearby bench.
“Please, follow me.”
When he sat down, it looked more like collapsing. He heaved, fanning his face and sighing. Had he come alone?
“Thank you,” he said.
I bowed. The elderly man wore thick magnifying lenses, which his eyes looked too tired to see through. His legs were shaking badly. I was about to ask him if he was lost, when a little girl came running. She wore a white shirt with a blue peace sign and boot-cut jeans. She grabbed the elderly man’s hands.
“Grandpa, Grandpa!”
The man patted his chest.
“Your grandpa needs to rest a bit.”
“Can we go and do it together?”
“I—” His voice dropped low. “I.”
A middle-aged couple had appeared.
“Come,” the woman said. “Come here, your grandfather needs to rest.”
“But Grandpa promised! He said he was going to—”
Her mother grabbed the girl’s hand and dragged her away. Her grandpa was tired. The girl sounded like she was going to cry, not understanding, frustrated. The elderly man wiped his dry mouth and took in a deep breath, patting his chest and closing his eyes, trying to hold on to his escaping breaths.
“Dad, how are you feeling?”
They looked so alike.
“If you want, we can go home.”
“I’m fine,” the elderly man said. “I just need to sit down for a bit. Go, go, be with your daughter.”
“Call us if there’s anything wrong. You have your cell phone with you?”
The elderly man touched his pocket and nodded.
“You sure you’re going to be all right?”
He nodded.
“Don’t go anywhere. We’ll come back.”
The elderly man exhaled, his breaths steadying. His son handed him a bottle of water and walked away, looking back once more before he stepped into the crowd. The elderly man folded his arms, his head dropping, chest falling. Hyun-in, where was he? He should have been back by now. I walked closer to the salon and the wax figure, in case he returned.
At the school, there were three staff members. Through the window, they were busy erasing the names and hearts that had been drawn on the blackboard, rearranging the textbooks people had taken out from wooden shelves. Physics. Ethics. The strong aroma of roasted coffee mixed with the chalk dust. There were so many people inside, all huddled over the clothing rack where the school uniforms hung. Girls tried on black blazers with white collars. Vintage, one of them said. Isn’t vintage so pretty? They posed to take photos. Picking out an era from the rack, wearing it, and taking it off. In and out of a time they never knew. Boys took off their military helmets, put on black school hats, their rifles leaning against the walls or abandoned on the floor. Please take your rifle with you, a staff member called.
As Hyun-in said, it really was a huge set. The lines drawn between the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties—they had all been blurred here. Collapsed into this one single space, colliding, trying to make sense of each other. A boy in a modern military outfit sat alone at a desk. His uniform, the same one that Jae-hyun would be wearing now.
A whistle. I gawked. Everyone did.
Something was falling. Falling and exploding.
Everyone screamed.
Bombs, shrieking down.
Cries echoed along the entire floor. Flooding, voices crashing against the walls. I covered my ears, panicked, engulfed in the screams and shouts. The air-raid siren blared, louder than anything I’d ever heard. The siren was supposed to warn, but it sounded like bombs and bullets were already firing. I swore I could hear the smoke as it hissed. Flames rose. Tanks screeched. Bodies cracked under wheels.
The room was chaos. A man covered his ears and opened his mouth, but the whistling bullets shot through his words. A group of girls looked at each other’s faces. Terrified. Children ran shrieking back to their mothers, who took them in their arms. A few people were calm—some laughed, nudging each other. Wasn’t this a part of the museum’s event? It had to be. It couldn’t be real. Not war, not here. One woman screamed louder than the others, her voice ripping out of her throat, the sound shaking all of us. Only our eyes moved. She was kneeling by the bench—the elderly man had gotten up, and he was pushing past her now. He was standing straight, his eyes keen. He searched through the stricken faces, the rush of the crowd, searching. Quickly, he snatched his granddaughter’s hand. The elderly man called, loud and forceful.
“Out! We have to get out of here now!”
People stirred.
“Out! Now! Run!”
Hyun-in. Finally, I saw Hyun-in.
“The sound system.” Hyun-in grabbed my arm. “The sound system, there’s an error with the sound system.”
Children were still screaming, louder than the blaring sirens. I breathed out, my head spinning. The elderly man ran up the stairs, gesturing at his son to hurry, hurry. His son carried his daughter on his back, the daughter flailing and kicking. Out, the elderly man was still yelling, out now. With their heads lowered, the family followed the elderly man up the stairs.
Hyun-in stood up on the bench.
“I’m so sorry, everyone,” he yelled. “There’s a problem with the sound system. The mechanics are trying to fix it as soon as possible. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience.”
Inconvenience.
“You okay?”
That couldn’t describe it.
“Everything’s fine.”
All our faces. All our expressions.
“See? It’s nothing.”
This was not inconvenience. The room had quieted.
“You should have seen your face.”
Someone laughed.
“Wow, that was so loud.”
Everyone started to move again. Slowly, trying to adjust back to the world before. Their stiff movements, starting to loosen. Nothing, it was nothing. How shocked we all looked, though. How much panic we held in our faces. Something had stirred awake in all of us. The elderly man and his family were already gone, probably out of the museum by now. The speaker’s volume was lowered, but not completely turned off. The sound of war played in the background, like white noise or background music in a coffee shop. The war was now as quiet as a whisper, but if I stopped to listen, I could still hear it.
“That was crazy,” Hyun-in said, flustered. “Could you monitor the second floor? Empty out the baskets, too, if they’re full. I have to go find the manager. What a mess.”
The second floor was almost empty. Only about two or three people looking into displays. I walked past black-and-white photos of American and Korean soldiers who looked nothing like the mannequins from the basement. Their uniforms didn’t fit. They looked too thin. Young faces, dragged from their homes and schools. Little to no training. Jammed rifles, frozen tanks, a shortage of supplies. I almost stopped at a display of colorful flags. The flags of sixteen nations that sent their men and women to the burning peninsula. A coalition of South Korea and the United Nations. My eyes quickly skimmed the letters. The war against the North Korean Army. The capital city captured. General Douglas MacArthur and the Incheon Landing pushing them back to the 38th Parallel. Every man believing they’d be home by Christmas.
How do you shoot a person?
The click, click of bullets loading.
Fifty bullets, we only get fifty bullets.
I could hear blunt boots marching as they kicked into the carpet. The hotel echoing with the sounds of clanging bullets, rifle straps squeaking, the marching cadence. Someone screeching, Incoming! I shook my head. These days, the dream of the hotel kept stepping in, and not only when I was asleep. Taking over my time, my space.
I tried desperately to stay awake inside this hall, the museum. It could not come for me now. I murmured, reading the descriptions. The armistice, signed at 10:00 a.m. on July 27, 1953. A cessation of hostilities. A cessation of time. A cessation until the end.
I remembered the slip of paper in my pocket, the machine that would tell me who my character was. My fate. It was here, on the second floor, a queue of people lined up. Park Jeong-sun. When it was my turn, I pushed in the code on my slip, pressing enter. A loading page. A large hourglass. No button to cancel or turn back.
Park Jeong-sun was the youngest daughter of the Park family, who lived in Seoul. On June 25th in 1950, the North Korean People’s Army began advancing toward the capital city. Within days, Seoul fell. Park Jeong-sun and her parents hurried to the Seoul National University Hospital, where the South Korean soldiers were being treated. They had hoped to find their youngest son, who had been conscripted to the military. That very day, on June 28th, the North Korean troops barged into the hospital. They shot people. They buried people alive. About 700 to 900 doctors, nurses, patient civilians, and wounded soldiers were massacred, including Park Jeong-sun, her parents, and her brother. She was nineteen years old.
Leave, the elderly man had told us. Get out. Run. Was there a different fate? A fate that did not end in war? The screen turned off. I bent over, gathering the scattered slips of paper from the floor, picking them up one by one and putting them into the basket, staring at the names I held in my fingers. I knew this weight. These were the men and women who lived in our bathtubs. The names that Grandmother used to teach me. Mi-sook as she picked up a femur. Hwa-ja as she handed me a rib. Hwa-yun as she handed me a collarbone. Jung-woong as she picked up a shoulder blade. Remember them. Wash their bodies. Pray for them. She grabbed my hands. Don’t forget. The war you were born into. The war that you’ll have to live.
Grandmother’s story was just one of those many war stories. A bedtime story. Tossed from one mouth to another in the warmth of our home. The names and the stories were carried down to the ground as the people who had lived them died. Growing up, soon and quickly, I forgot what had never been mine. The bones were only an interruption to my study schedule, a day of cleaning that took too long—until a year ago, when we received Father in our mailbox.
A death certificate.
Without Father’s body, they mailed us his name, sex, birthday, and address. At home, we tore the paper, scattering the shreds over the bones in the bathtub. As I watched the letters alight on the bones, all I could think was, was that all he was? And was this going to be all that would be left of me? But he wasn’t. I wasn’t. The bones, we were so much more.
I hugged the basket, clawing at its rubber plastic. I put my slip inside with the others, burying Park Jeon-sun, when my eye caught a small glass display case in the corner. It was a few feet away from the machine, oddly placed, unlike all the other exhibit displays. It stood alone, looking abandoned.
I stepped over, trying to get a closer look. When I breathed on the glass, I could see a photo—black-and-white, of a grandmother standing alone in a pile of ruins. Everywhere around her, waste. The building that had once been here was shattered, devastated, the horizon jagged with the destruction of the structures. Smoke rose from the ashes. In the distance, behind the grandmother, there was a single building standing, still intact.
A hotel, I read. It was the oldest hotel in Korea.
In 1914, the Chosun Hotel opened its doors. As the oldest hotel in Korea, it housed many firsts—the first hotel elevator in the country, the first French restaurant and buffet, the first ice cream bar, the first dance party. Located in the heart of Seoul, the Chosun Hotel stood throughout Korea’s colonial and modern periods, times of great chaos. Its crisis arrived in the late 1940s, with the end of the Japanese Occupation, the start and the end of the World War II, and tensions heightening between the US and the Soviet Union. Many foreigners began to leave the peninsula, eventually leaving the hotel empty—leaving its rooms to the hands of war. On June 25th, 1950, the North Korean Army stormed Seoul. For a brief time, the hotel was taken, and the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Mao Zedong were hung on the walls. Throughout its century-long standing, and despite having held the terror of turbulent times within its walls, the Chosun Hotel still stands today as one of the most iconic hotels in South Korea. It has hosted many famous guests, such as former US presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, General Douglas MacArthur, and Marilyn Monroe and Bob Hope. To any guests traveling far from home, the hotel promises an individual key for a luxurious, temporary stay.
I am there, again.
Standing inside the familiar hallway that stretches without an end. The linoleum floor, now battered red carpet. The glass displays have also disappeared, turned into walls, that yellow wallpaper. Reeking of dust, wet mold. The museum—it is now the hotel.
Window!
Hysterical laughter.
Look for the window.
She is here. The woman from the street. The high pitch of her voice screeching out of her long bony throat. The woman who hangs windows on the clothesline.
I turn around to face a grandfather clock. Worn and wooden. On the surface of the glass, I see my contorted face, ripped of all color. The clock ticks, chiming strangely. Its hand is moving. Ticking from one number to another—but something is wrong. The time is pointed to ten. The long hand ticks to each number, but then it turns back. Swaying back and forth, to and from the same number. Unable to move, broken. Stopped. Always coming back to ten o’clock.
I shook my head. Suddenly pulled back into the museum, in the empty hall with the machines, the long stretch of exhibits. I put my hands on the glass display, catching my breath. My eyes settled slowly on the photo of the hotel.
The hotel had multiple chimneys. A baroque-style roof. A carport with an arched entrance. A fountain in the courtyard. What would have been lush flowers, trees, and grass, was now scorched and barren land in the photo, bombed. Black-and-white, the hotel was charred of all its colors. Covered in the ashes of lost breath, the shred of bodies. Smelling of fire, sulfur. Bones.
I clung onto my sleeves, noticing something else. Something odd, strange about the hotel. Every facade was laid with bricks that climbed to the very roof—but there were no windows. Not a single one. I searched the photograph’s walls for an opening. A glass pane. And finally, I spotted one. Just one window. On the side of the building, above the flat roof of the carport. A large window that looked out to the hours of the war.
A shadow.
In the frame of window, there was a looming shadow. Someone was there. In the hotel window, a person. They were moving, frantic, as they beat their hands against the window. I leaned closer, my forehead, my lips almost touching the display. I stared in, examining my own face, terrified from the inside. Banging my hands on the glass, screaming. It is me.