The rook sailed southward, its black wings spread wide against the blue sky while Lee Sung-Ki watched it go from the earth below. He did not know what kind of bird it was — he knew little of birds at all — but he knew that it could fly, and as it disappeared from his sight into the backdrop of green trees on distant hills, he wished that he could follow. To be away from the stone and steel, to see forbidden cities — that’d be truly something, Sung-Ki thought.
Not today, though. Today was school, and hunger, as yesterday was, as tomorrow would likely be, and it was not his lot to complain. As he turned and blinked, his eyes dazed from gazing upward into the bright blue of the morning, someone’s fist bumped him, not lightly, on the shoulder.
“Heads up, kid,” another boy said, wheeling around from behind to the front of him.
“Oh. Good morning, Woo-Yung,” Sung-Ki said. Ahn Woo-Yung was the other boy’s full name, and Sung-Ki regarded him as he hopped from one foot to the other, restlessly, his lanky limbs dangling at his sides. He was a year older than Sung-Ki, perhaps less, but easily two heads taller. His face, more ugly and red-dotted from day to day, was set, as was typical, in the expression of a lazy grin. Both his shirt and his skin looked dirty, at least three days into needing a vigorous wash — not that it seemed much to concern him.
“What’re you doing, staring at up there,” asked Woo-Yung. “See a balloon?”
“I didn’t see you at school yesterday,” Sung-Ki said, ignoring the question. “Did something happen?”
“No, everything’s great,” Woo-Yung said, dismissively, as he dug something out of his nose with his thumb. “I found something better to do, though. You should come with me.” Woo-Yung had a worn and torn old baseball with him, which he was tossing high in the air with one hand and catching in the other, casually, while he talked.
“Come with you?” Sung-Ki looked at his feet, and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Now?”
Woo-Yung nodded, lobbed up the ball again. “Right now.”
“What for?”
“Guess.”
“To… play baseball?”
“No, stupid,” Woo-Yung said. “Where would we play baseball at?”
Sung-Ki wrapped his thumbs around the straps of his knapsack, growing anxious at the thought of skipping school. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, especially for you,” he said. “You can’t miss two days. You’ll get in trouble. I’ll get in trouble.”
“No, you’ll get in trouble if you don’t come with me,” Woo-Yung retorted, in a teasing tone. “Because what I’ll do, if you don’t come? I’ll tell everyone we know that Lee Sung-Ki was too cowardly, too scared, too much of a teensy shrimp to go on an adventure. And that’ll be who you are. Forever.”
“Please don’t.”
“Then come with me.”
Sung-Ki looked around warily, as though he would only be able to join the older boy if he slinked away with no one seeing him. He had, of course, already made up his mind.
“Where are we going?” he asked the other one, a devious smile dawning on his face.
Woo-Yung threw the baseball terrifically high in the air, skipped backwards into the street, and caught it in both hands, just above his eyes. “It’s a bit of a walk,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
~~~
Kim Yu-Ri was shifting her weight from foot to foot as she stood by the unshaded aisle in Chongjin Market, eyeing the burlap sacks across the way. Inside the tops of them, just beneath their folds, she could spy little white grains of rice piled high, amounting to twenty pounds a bag, or maybe more. Her legs were sore, the bones and muscles both, her ankles creaky and her calves tight from the strain of standing up so long, after so little sleep, so soon after yesterday. But she refused to sit down, knowing that her best chances of being noticed by passing shoppers required being seen — her, and her baby both. The child was strapped up in a swaddling cloth held taut around Yu-Ri’s shoulders and cradled in her arms, swaying side to side, asleep. Her name was Lee Su-Dae.
Yu-Ri knew that she could easily set the baby down; that if she did, she’d likely go on resting, not be fussy, and also be one less burden for her weary body — but she could not chance looking so relaxed. It would ruin the picture.
“Eggs,” she said aloud, to the walkers, walking by. “Fresh eggs.”
No one looked up — some were on way elsewhere; some were drawn instead to the rice grains bagged in burlap. Another group approached, and she repeated her pitch toward them.
“Eggs? Fresh eggs.”
Beside her, her two chickens clucked, and bawked, and flapped their wings within their cages impotently. She had a dozen eggs cloth-cushioned on a barrel above them, arranged together in a clean and neat display.
“Eggs,” she said again, to no one. “Fresh eggs.”
~~~
Far from the streets and garbage-clogged gutters, the two boys walked, more than an hour then into their journey — Woo-Yung’s grand adventure. The older one had remained obstinate all the while, refusing as yet to explain to Sung-Ki where their endpoint was, beyond an assurance that, yes, there was one. Then again, Sung-Ki had not pressed the question too vigorously. Woo-Yung, after all, was older, surely wiser, possessing of a casual self-assurance that opposed all of Sung-Ki’s reservations, and made his worries seem trivial. Maybe it was because he was so tall. Still though, despite the older boy’s confidence, Sung-Ki was inwardly becoming more and more irresolute, the further they walked through trees and brush increasingly tangled, up the uneven rocky mountainside that bordered the city’s south.
About Sarah Szabo
