A scream. The words as empty as the voice. Weightless, neither masculine nor feminine, wrung out. Scatters of dust, rising from the carpeted floor. Wandering feet stumbling. A single light flickers. A dying bulb encased in a glass dome. Casting its rapid net of light, then yanking it back. Revealing for only a short moment a spread of greenish mold on the ceiling. The voice echoes. Clearer and louder. Some desperate words that tumble from a closing throat. Impossible to tell who, or what. I stare down at my hands. My fingers are clutching a doorknob. Crumbs of rust stuck on my sweaty palms. Nausea clogging my throat. A foul stink. Its sticky fingers wrap around my neck and tighten their grip. Putrid as sewage water, reeking of decomposition. I try to pull my hand back when I see him. His eyes buried deep in bruises. His sunken cheeks, grim purple. Standing behind me, the old man mutters, You.
“You there?”
I blinked.
“Hello?”
My fingers felt numb and painful. Blood, rushing back. The grab handles were swinging. The announcement display at the front was blank. The window. There was a window. And behind the window, outside. Outside, trees, trees, and trees were passing. A lamppost after another lamppost.
The bus rattled.
“Yewon?”
I looked down at my tingling hand. Eleven seconds. The time ticked. Twelve seconds. I was on a call. I didn’t remember answering it or even hearing it ring, but I must have.
“Yewon, are you there? Hello?”
It was Sister’s voice.
“I,” I mumbled. “Here, I’m here.”
I pressed my ear to the phone.
“You home?”
I rubbed my eyes.
“No, not yet. I’m on the bus.”
“Wasn’t your last shift today?”
I sat up.
“I thought you might be able to get off early.”
A dream, it was only a bad dream. A nightmare.
“How are you?” Sister asked.
I grabbed my bag from the floor of the bus and put it on my lap, glimpsing at the narrow aisle that stretched before me. Every seat was empty. I was the only passenger. I clutched my bag, gripping it tightly and wiping off my sweaty hands. Still shaking. I leaned back into the seat, trying to rest in the tumbling motion of the bus and feeling relieved. The cool temperature. The sight of the outside world. I was awake.
“I’m good. I’m almost home now.”
I glanced out the window, hoping to see where I was, but there was only darkness. The same darkness that I had seen on my way home for the last few months, stretching from when I got on the bus until I arrived home. The passing lampposts created a thin wave of light beside the bus, but it quickly dissipated into the night. Soon, the bus would carry the only light on the road. Closer to Dalbit village and deeper into the mountains, there were fewer lampposts. In the sky, I saw a crescent moon.
The train is now arriving.
I could hear the train platform on the other end of the line, the sounds of her commute.
“I read your text,” Sister said. “You were asking about the car?”
Please wait behind the yellow line.
I hugged the bag.
“I was just wondering if you took the car back.”
The train bound for Cheongnyangni is now approaching.
“What?” she asked.
“I wanted to ask if your car is still here,” I said.
“I can’t hear you. Wh—”
The train was arriving, carrying a deafening shrill. Like that scream.
“What did you say?”
“A ride,” I said.
“A ride? What ride?”
“Mr. Kim told me about this woman who needs a ride. I was wondering if I could maybe take your car.”
I heard doors swish open.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Yeoju.”
“That’s far.”
It was. Yeoju was about one hundred and seventy kilometers away from Dalbit. When Mr. Kim told me that it would be a four-hour round trip, I thought it might be Seoul. Seoul was two hours from Dalbit. But then, I shouldn’t have assumed. Two hours from here could be anywhere, depending on which direction I drove. Driving east or west. South or north. It could even be the ocean.
“What’s her name?” she asked. “The woman you’re driving.”
“Ms. Han. I think her name is Han Myung-ja.”
“She’s a friend of Mr. Kim?”
“They work at the same nursing home.”
“Okay, sure, that’s fine with me. You still have my spare car key?”
Mother hadn’t taken it from me.
“I have it,” I said. “But your car, where is it?”
“It’s in Wontong, at my friend’s house. I’ll send you her address. When are you going?”
“This Saturday, but I’m still thinking about it.”
“All right, just let me know when you decide,” she said.
“Okay.”
I tugged my backpack strap, thinking. Sister still hadn’t taken back her car. She’d left it in Wontong that night, after that fight, a month ago. Determined to never come back. To never set foot in Dalbit again.
Sister cleared her throat. Her voice sounded hoarse. Worn out. It was past eleven. Sister had worked overtime again.
“I thought you were going to take some days off,” I said.
She sighed.
“The conference, it’s not finished?”
Sister let out another sigh, this time with a chuckle.
“No?” I asked.
“There’s another one. This time, it’s in Busan. Unbelievable, right?”
“Your checkup,” I remembered. “How did it go?”
“I didn’t go.”
“What? Why?”
“I couldn’t.”
“But the doctor said—”
“That’s what you get for being too good at a job,” she said. “You get more work.”
I swallowed.
“Honestly, if they don’t give me a raise this year, I’m going to quit.”
Sister would never. She was just stepping away. She always did this when she didn’t want to talk about something. She would give some light-hearted answer, or let out that sigh. That one long, deep breath to fill her silence. I picked at my lips. She didn’t want to talk about it, but shouldn’t I say something? Ask if everything was all right with her. With Eun-woo. With everything else.
“Hey, just to let you know, though, I’m going to sell the car. I’ve been looking for car dealers.”
“Why?”
“It’s becoming such a hassle to keep it. Next year, our apartment is going to charge the tenants for parking spaces. The gas, the insurance, and now, this. It’s unbelievable how much I have to spend on that car. It’s just not worth the money.”
I didn’t understand. Eun-woo’s work was far from where they lived. That was why they bought the car. They couldn’t move closer to his work, in central Seoul. They couldn’t afford to. Sister said it would also save time for her. Eun-woo could drop her off on his way to work. Sister would no longer need to walk, take a bus, walk again to take the train every morning. A car was a more affordable and reasonable option. That was what she’d told me.
“As soon as I can get a good price on the car, I’m going to sell it.”
“Eun-woo is okay with it?”
“You need the car just this once?”
“I think so,” I said. “Unless she asks me to drive her again.”
The train is now arriving.
“So, Mom knows?” she asked.
The bus swerved. Turning around a sharp corner. I grabbed the seat in front of me, trying to pull my body up from the window. I wanted to ask Sister the same question. Did Mother know about her selling the car? Or missing her check-up?
The train bound for Chuncheon is now approaching.
My cell phone vibrated.
“Mom’s fine with you driving?” she asked.
I took my cell phone from my ear and glanced at the notification. Two texts. One from Min: I’m coming to Dalbit tomorrow morning. Meet you at the hill? The other from Mother, asking if I was on my way home. If I had bought the sponges.
“Jae-hyun,” I said.
“What?” Sister asked.
“Have you talked to him recently?”
“I did,” she said. “Why?”
“How is he?”
“Trying too hard. You know what he’s like.”
No, I didn’t.
“He’s doing good,” she said.
The bus screeched to a sharp stop, lurching me forward. The door swished open, and I moved a little to watch it, picking myself up. Someone was coming on board. But it was so late at night and going where? The few remaining stops were remote villages. I turned my face to the window. Outside the bus was a red-brick shelter. Worn and crumbling, abandoned. A bus stop. Under its awning light, on the bench, there was no one.
“I have to hang up soon.”
Sister spoke closer to the phone.
“That’s my train.”
It was time for Sister to board.
“If Mom’s worried about him, you should just tell her to stop worrying,” Sister said. “Jae-hyun is getting along fine. Just remind her that he can use his phone only when they’re allowed. He’ll get back to her. She always worries too much for no reason.”
I moved closer to the window, pressed my face right up to the glass. There was someone on the road, either coming to the bus stop or walking away from it. I squinted, trying to see through the dark. A slip of a person. Thin, too thin. The bus headlight just missed them, straying off the road. I tried to see the bus driver, to figure out why the bus had stopped. If the driver was waiting. He, too, must have seen someone. Or maybe it was an animal. A water deer. The door swished closed. The bus started rolling again. I watched as we passed the bus stop, the lampposts, the trees, trees. And there. A bony figure. There was someone in the dark. Slumping away as he dragged a window. Its glass, glinting.
“I was actually planning to call Jae-hyun today. Ask him if he needed anything. If you want, I can ask him to call you guys.”
“Okay.”
“All right, I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later.”
Sister hung up. I turned off my cell phone.
In the dream, I was certain he was dead. But that silhouette outside. On the road carrying a window. It was him. Yet he had just been in my dream. A dead thing. It was how he moved, how he looked. His arm a stretched cover of skin over twig-like bones. Purple bruises where something heavy had pressed deep into his flesh. His footsteps, carrying no weight, drifting. In that dream, all I could do was watch. I was deep asleep in my own body, which had forgotten itself. Lost. I watched from an unknown distance.
The bus stopped, and I got off. The air had cooled. Soon, harvest. Soon, winter. I sniffled.
The bus rolled away, leaving me at the bus stop, disappearing. I headed up toward our house. There wasn’t much here. Lampposts stood where the road bent, peeling off only a very small portion of the dark. The paddy fields and the mountains all breathed quietly, tucked under the night. I turned right, tracing the path I had walked ever since I was born. This darkness, this quiet, so familiar. I took in a deep breath, the air fluctuating. It was no longer sticky and stifling, but summer heat still lingered. The days were caught in between, an echo of dying and decay already in the air. The days of rustling green leaves and the cicadas’ noisy songs, taken over by the sound of leaves falling. Cicadas’ dead bodies, falling. The sun, falling earlier. Soon, it would be cold.
I stopped before a bright circle of light cast on the road by a lamppost. My shoes just touched its rim. The next lamppost was some fifty meters away. I stepped in. Standing under the light, I could see the brick fence in the near distance that went around Mr. Kim’s house and toward ours. Bowed and bulging, almost bending over. I turned, stepping back into the darkness, back on the road. Toward home.
I pushed open the rusty gate. The dry ground cracking under my weight. I kicked the stones and dirt as I passed Mrs. Lim’s house, right across from ours. Forty steps or less, the distance no more than ten meters. Her house was half a house. Too big to be a shed, but too small for people to live in. Father had planned to rebuild it with her son, Mr. Kim. An expansion of the living space. A construction for the new bathroom. An order for a new customized bathtub. Everything was now on hold.
I flinched at the sight of a face. A head in Mrs. Lim’s window. But that wasn’t possible. The window was too high up for her to reach. Her body was too weak. But she would have heard me arrive, always listening. I hurried across the yard, slinging the bag around to the front. I stepped up to our door, waving my hand, waiting for the motion-sensor light on the ceiling to turn on. Nothing. It wasn’t working. Broken again. I unzipped the bag’s front pocket, shoving my hands in, searching for the house key.
The moon cast a pale light onto our yard. Around and behind the fence, wild trees stretched. They looked more horrifying as the coming autumn slowly began to pick at their leaves, and their scrawny branches began to show. They loomed, creating a shadow over the already dark ground, snatching away the sunlight, or any light, from the life Mother kept planting. Killing all the flowers and vegetables. Our yard, grassless and flowerless. The fence, soon to crumble.
I pushed the house key into the lock.
Across the dark hallway, there was a slant of light spilling out from the only open door. I took a step, testing the squeaky floorboards with my toes, fixing my eyes on my bedroom door at the end of the hallway. Ten, fifteen steps. Past the bathroom, and there, I’d reach my room. I felt for my earphones in my pocket. I thought of putting them in as I came near the photo, just three steps before the bathroom. The family portrait. Sister drawing a happy expression, curling her lips into a smile. Me with a startled face, my shoulders lifted up toward my ears, my eyes half-crinkled. Jae-hyun, a baby just out of the hospital, resting in Mother’s cradling arms. The light didn’t reach Mother and Father. Their smiles stayed tucked away in the dark. I stopped, putting my hand on the wall. It was the only formal family portrait we had before Jae-hyun jumped from Mother’s lap and saluted his goodbye. Before Sister walked out. Before Father’s face, body, and hands all went missing.
I could hear the squelching sponge, the screeching stool that scratched against the tiles, Mother’s loud heaving. I had to walk quietly in the hallway, without being heard, or she would stop me, make me stand by the bathroom.
My stomach began to thrash. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to smell it. Heat, breath, sweat, the odor that rose into the air and found no escape. Trapped inside for too long. Rotting. Decayed. The nauseating stench that rose from the bathtub. The stench that had become the skin of our home. That wet, sticky smell, as though someone were screaming to me: this is how you’d smell if you died.
“You’re home?”
Half of my body caught in the bathroom light.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Mother said. “You want to wash? I can wash them later.”
Three, four steps. Only a few more steps to my room.
“I’ll wash later,” I said.
Mother was watching me. Staring at me long and hard, as though she was waiting for me to tell her something. I clenched my fists, my back starting to sweat. What if Mr. Kim told her? What if Mother knew? If she knew that I was thinking of driving a stranger to prison and I hadn’t told her—
“Did you try calling Jae-hyun?” Mother asked.
“No.”
“He keeps saying everything’s good there.”
“I’m sure he’s fine then.”
Sister said she was going to talk to him. He would tell her if something was wrong. I rubbed my temple. The front line. That’s what Mother kept telling me. Your brother’s on the front line. Jae-hyun’s army base was less than an hour from the border to North Korea.
“I think he’s not telling us everyth—”
“Mom.”
“You know how he doesn’t want us to worry.”
“Mom.”
“He didn’t sound well. His voice.”
“Mom, you’re overreacting, I’m sure he’s fi—”
The basin clattered to the floor. I sighed, stepping into the full light. One of Mother’s eyes was swollen, her face dripping with sweat. Her neck, arms, feet were bloody red. Worryingly red, as if every vein in her body had burst. Mother picked up the basin and turned her wrist.
“I told you about the news.”
I tried hard not to frown.
“That poor boy shot himself. Your brother is so much closer to the border. I don’t know how we—”
“Mom, I’m tired.”
Mother shook her head. She knew I was not listening. I was, but not in the way she wanted. Not in the way I could ever figure out.
Mother winced as she grabbed the sponge. Both her hands were covered with small yellow shreds, pieces stuck in her hair and on her t-shirt. Mother squeezed and squeezed the torn sponge. I had forgotten. Three, she’d said. Can you buy me three? This week, she had asked me to buy sponges, and yesterday at the store, I had put them away, thoughtless. The manager had pointed at the boxes of supplies to pack away before the store closed. Tissues, toilet paper, and packs of sponges, but even as I held them in my hands, I’d forgotten.
“Again. You forgot again. How many times do I need to tell you?”
I used to help her. It was our family tradition. Early mornings, I stood here with the kettle. Slowly, she’d say. She would ask me to pour the water into the basin, and she would direct me. Slowly, very slowly. As I poured out the steaming water, I watched and listened as Mother taught me. The red basin was for washing, and the blue was for drying. The bigger basin was for bigger pieces, and the smaller basin was for smaller pieces. You have to be careful with them, she always told me. But her hands. Mother soaked the sponge. Wasn’t the water too hot? Mother dipped her hands into the steaming water. Didn’t her hands hurt? Yes, they hurt. Mother grabbed a blue towel from the blue basin and wiped her face. The blue towel for drying. I remembered. I glanced at the sink. A bath. The thought was coming again, aching. The thought of lying inside that bathtub. The warmth I would never feel.
“I’ll text him.”
Mother started to scrub.
“I’ll ask if he needs anything. If he’s well.”
The remaining sponge shredded.
“I’m sure he’s doing fine.”
Mother grabbed a collarbone from the bathtub. She turned it, looking for a spot she might have missed. She caressed it, carefully putting it into a small blue basin as if she were laying down a newborn. Pellets rolled, clattering and rattling. I stepped back into the dark. Some were tiny, as small as my pinkie. A phalanx. Maybe a toe. In the basin, what would have been a scapula. A shoulder blade. Or something of a spine, a sternum. Shattered pelvis, scarred ribs, and snapped femur. Too shattered, too burnt, destroyed. Not a single bone was whole. As many as a hundred lay inside the bathtub. Torn and shredded. Their born color, their born flesh, buried underneath. Hardened black powder coated each broken piece. They waited for Mother’s hands. Mother rocked as she started washing them again. She picked up the sponge, squeezing, finding a faster pace. Mother scrubbed the collarbone.
My back hit the wall, in the darkness of the hallway. I stared at Mother, but she did not see me. Her eyes were fixed on the collarbone. Her ears tuned to the quiet of the bones. She cupped the liquid, pouring the hot, soapy water onto the collarbone. I didn’t know what would stop her hands. These bones were never going to wash clean. They were and had always been the color of burnt crumbles. Painful black, Mother used to say. The bones are the color of painful black.
“I changed your blanket.”
Mother’s voice rang behind me.
“Night’s getting colder.”