She cut off the road into an alley, away from the market, heading home. The walk and the weight were already making her vision swim with dizziness, so she resolved to take the shortest path to her apartment, out of the alleys, through unpaved mud, and the old train station.
At first glance, the dead man looked like he was only sleeping, and as Yu-Ri regarded him from footsteps away, the world went quiet around her. Her chickens ceased to rustle, and the evening breeze went still, leaving nothing for her ears to hear but the squish and squelch of her shoes in the mud as she continued to approach him. He smelled… more or less the same as a living man, at least with all his clothes intact. It was his face that told it most—his tongue, a putrid purple, lolled out between teeth in a too-tight grip, his mouth emitting neither air nor water. A statue made of bones and flesh, newly dead.
Su-Dae stirred in her swaddling cloth while Yu-Ri crouched beside the dead man, transfixed. Mechanically, the woman placed her hand inside the folds of the man’s jacket, fishing for their contents, but the pockets yielded little more than a redolent grime. Around his neck there looped a worthless chain of metal, painted gold, whatever bauble it had once held long gone, and in his lap, between his legs, there rested three basic stones from the earth worn smooth from frequent sucking—a classic trick to keep hunger at bay. Su-Dae reached her hand out, conscious now and rooting, and traced her fingers around a thread of the man’s corroded, crumbling hair, and Yu-Ri stood, drawing her away. “Just a dead man,” she said, above her daughter’s ear. “No more.”
When she arrived home at her fifth floor tenement, her legs were seized nearly to failure by a wave of pulsating agony. She dropped the chicken cages as soon as she got the door shut, and sank to the floor of the kitchen, breathless. Su-Dae stirred, but did not protest, putting her fingers to her mouth in silence and suckling off the salt.
She hasn’t had a thing to eat today, you know.
With this bleak sentiment echoing in her mind, Yu-Ri gradually stripped herself of her weights, from her shoes to the cloth she held the baby in, and rose wearily to draw water for a meal, with Su-Dae on a chair beside her.
The door opened soon after she had finally managed to trick the hot plate into working. “Hiya, Mom,” said Sung-Ki, as he entered.
“Watch for the birds,” she said back to him, listlessly, despite how pleased she was to see him. “How was school?”
“Oh… Good. This is my friend, Woo-Yung…”
Adjusting the pot on the hot plate, she turned, flustered to be caught off guard; she hadn’t heard another person enter. The other boy was tall, taller than her, but more shocking than anything else was the long gash on his cheek, clotted but clearly uncleaned, with red blood residue smeared from his jaw to chin along one side of his face. She gasped, stammered. “What? I… Hello. Are you okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, with a bow of his head. “I’m Ahn Woo-Yung.”
“Come here,” Yu-Ri said, wetting a towel with cold water from the tap. “That looks terrible. What happened, Sung-Ki?”
“We, I, he — he was up, in the hills —”
“Just some creep,” Woo-Yung said.
Yu-Ri looked from the boy, to her son, and back as she dabbed at the cut, deeper and more severe than it had seemed from afar. She fixed her gaze on Sung-Ki. “You weren’t at school today,” she said, accusingly — and his silence spoke the truth.
Sung-Ki sunk his head low, and stared at his shoes. His eyes watered. “I’m sorry. It was important…”
“It’s my doing, ma’am,” Woo-Yung said. “I swear I won’t do it again.”
“We swear.”
Yu-Ri shook her head. Her mind had been tried enough today, and there was nothing obvious to say. “Whatever you did, I hope you got the message that it was a bad idea,” she said eventually, holding the bloody towel up high, for both of the boys to see. And then she sighed. The water was boiling now.
“…Can Woo-Yung stay for dinner,” mumbled Sung-Ki, clearly hesitant.
And Yu-Ri paused. She looked over the boiling broth, the meager contents of her bowl. Grass, she thought. A chicken egg, and grass.
She heard herself say, “Of course he can.” And then she gestured to Woo-Yung’s injury and told him, “That’s as good as I can do. I’m sorry, I do not have a bandage.”
Woo-Yung put his hands up, and insinuated it was fine. “No, thank you, you’ve done enough,” he said. “Thanks very much, for letting me stay this evening.”
The boys helped her set the table with bowls of broth and drinking water, moved Su-Dae to a comfortable spot, and even put away the chickens. Yu-Ri was the last to sit, and for a time, they ate in silence. There was little to discuss. Yu-Ri wondered where the boys had been today, and Sung-Ki wondered how his mother had done at the market, but neither wanted to raise the subjects unbidden. It was not until mid-meal that Sung-Ki paused, with evident nervousness, and raised his voice to ask Yu-Ri a question. There was something weighing on his mind that had gone undiscussed for days now.
“Mother, do you know…” He stopped, bit his lip. Yu-Ri waited at the table’s other end, unsure of what to expect. Sung-Ki drew in a deep breath. “Mother, do you think that Ok-Sun’s coming back?”
Yu-Ri glared. “I’m sorry,” she said to the boy. “Who?”
“Your sister?” inquired Woo-Yung, loudly, oblivious to Yu-Ri’s tension.
“His sister is right here,” Yu-Ri said, sternly, quietly, gesturing toward the baby. With her other hand, she pressed a finger to her lips.
She could feel Sung-Ki’s legs shaking, beneath the table — a long-standing nervous tic. He reached into one of his pockets, and withdrew a folded piece of paper. “She left this, when she left,” he said, his voice notably quieter.
Even from across the table, she could recognize Ok-Sun’s handwriting, thin and ghostly, as though her daughter were hesitant to commit her words, thoughts and goodbyes to anything physical, even that which could be easily torn, and burned.
“Ok-Sun said she would come back for us,” Sung-Ki proceeded, whispering. “She says it right here. She says she’ll come back for me. But she didn’t tell me when…”
Calmly, slowly, Yu-Ri stood to her feet, and reached across the table to her son, while Woo-Yung looked on, perplexed. She patted the backs of Sung-Ki’s hands, smiled, then snatched the letter from his grip and tore it to pieces above her bowl, pocketing every scrap of it to destroy when she was done. “I don’t think we’ll ever see her again,” she said, at normal volume. But as she sat, she leaned in close, and her voice when she spoke then was but a measure above silence. “Sung-Ki, you must never speak of her… She loved you very much… But now she is dead to us. You must think of her as a forgotten one… If anyone hears you speaking of her, we could all be taken away, do you understand? The walls are thin…”
Tears beaded in the corners of Sung-Ki’s eyes as he gestured that he understood. He stared straight through the table. “I just hope she made it,” he whispered.
And Yu-Ri said, “So do I.”
Woo-Yung waited for a moment before he moved to speak, after the palpable tension had been allowed a moment to linger in the air, after the others had resumed to sipping their soup. He cleared his throat. “We got some things today, Sung-Ki and I,” he said. Across the table, Sung-Ki sniffed, and smiled.
“Oh?” said Yu-Ri, more than mildly nervous. “What’s that, then?”
“Show her, Sung-Ki.”
And Sung-Ki grabbed his bag beside the table, drew it up to his lap, and reached his hand in, his face indicating that the remaining apricots within had congealed by now into a swampy, sticky mire. Yu-Ri watched, an eyebrow cocked, waiting, until Sung-Ki finally withdrew one whole fruit, the firmest of them all, warm and sticky like the others, but comparably whole.
“A peach?” asked Yu-Ri, a youthful smile dawning on her face as she beheld it.
“No, an apricot,” said Sung-Ki.
Yu-Ri nodded slowly, and laughed beneath her breath. She rose from the table and moved toward the kitchen, knowing as she went that the mysterious fruit and the older boy’s wound were surely connected, and silently deciding not to say anything about it. What’s done is done, she said to herself. And at least it wasn’t Sung-Ki who got cut. She returned with a knife, and three small plates.
“No,” said Sung-Ki, pushing his plate away toward her. “We got a bunch, Woo-Yung and I, but this one’s for you and the baby. It’s the only one that made it down the mountain in one piece.”
“The others were rotten.”
“They melted.”
“And we ate them on the way.”
Yu-Ri looked at the two boys, upright and proud of their present, and quietly cut the slimy apricot into four pieces on her plate. It was soft, and overripe, but beside the cooling bowl of empty broth it looked as sweet as candy and as precious as gold. Su-Dae stirred beside her, cooing wordlessly, and stretched her tiny hand out towards the table.
Cherish the moment, Yu-Ri thought, as she held a tiny portion of the fruit up to Su-Dae’s smiling mouth. This is your family — your daughter, your son and his newfound friend. And here is an apricot from some far-flung mountain, the first fruit you’ve had in… I’ve forgotten how long. Cherish it, share it, be thankful… It’s not long til tomorrow.
~~~
High atop a nearby mountain, in a copse of fragrant green trees, a plump red-billed starling came to rest on a lofty branch. It sank its beak into the flesh of a ripe and perfect apricot, and the juices flowed out of the punctured flesh over the starling’s plumage, dripping down by meager drops onto the dirt of the earth below.
About Sarah Szabo
