IN THE HOLLOWS LIVES A HARE—
he has been promised to a god, and yet seong jungil has lived to see thirty-one. while the being slumbers forgotten in the forest, he works as an associate professor and researcher. but when those antlers break free, they will see he is patient and sarcastic. they will see he belongs in the trees.
jungil can’t exactly pinpoint the moment he realized that he had to go back to onyang. was it the hour he spent chatting with his mother on the phone, so many kilometers dividing the affection by the distance, last sunday? was it the tragic end to his four-month long experiment, where his lab’s latest insecure and frankly daft grad student had killed off all the tests in the agar dishes when she decided to leave the fridge door open for the entire weekend? should he call that defeat?
or was it the way he hadn’t slept well for a really, really long time; was it the ash-grey beneath his eyes? was it the heartbreak? or the loud-and-clear wheezing coming somewhere from behind the tail end of his mother’s voice, distant but unmistakable in the dark, even through the static?
“dad sounds haggard today. is he listening?” he’s fine. do you want to talk to him? “yeah. put him on.”
rumor has it that strange and unkind things have been stirring in the belly of onyang’s cradle. rumor has it that the shapeless nightmares have begun to grow some teeth. that there isn’t anything benevolent waiting in the unmitigated fog. rumor has it that the line between certainty and inevitability blurs when you look at it sideways. rumor has it that seong juwon, history teacher and father to one seong jungil, is fine.
jungil has been thinking in circles now and none of it is of any use. this way and that, the single son born to a pair of parents that loved him without remorse or difficulty— well, they would probably want him back at some point, if only to see the product of their interminable support before mr. seong starts to gasp for air again.
it wasn’t like jungil was running—at least not within the concept of urgency. there’s a billion other voices outside of onyang and that inimitable call by the inauspicious four to sink into the quicksand could just as easily be eclipsed with an invitation to the bar ten minutes from his apartment, or by the possibility of an all-night stint at an approximation to academics, if jungil was certain that he had the stamina for it.
every-single-thing feels like a test of strength these days. what is there at the end of the line for him when nostalgia encroaches like a conflagration at midnight and you’re sleeping soundly in bed, stirred only by the scorching heat that singes your fingertips?