“-an. kang yohan, are you listening to me?”
his grandmother’s favorite words always fell upon his deaf ears, every summer evening, sweat still cooling on his nape and the watermelon between his teeth like sweet nirvana against the stifling heat. nothing has changed.
even now, fifteen years later in the height of winter, her nagging croon slips into his conscious as he feeds the flames of the fire pit, crouched to absorb its warmth. baram’s wrapped about his ankle, a rust colored leg warmer yipping in slumber.
“must be nice,” he grunts, lamenting his furlessness and not for the first time. the night is clear, and the bite of the air is hard to ignore, but he concludes he’ll find no peace here.
yohan ignores his grandmother’s distant calling as he zips the black parka up to his chin, disappearing through the red gate and down the barely lit path just outside. for all his blatant disregard, yohan’s glad to see she has the energy to ramble. no doubt, she wants to recant her tales of spring everlasting and the breathing orchids from her childhood, the violet-gold ones that were soft and downy as velvet and laughed like bells in the wind. he’s heard it a hundred times. he’ll hear it a hundred more. missing out tonight won’t change a thing.
instead, yohan finds familiarity in the slow burn of a cigarette nestled neat between the grim, cold-bitten set of his lips. it glows bright in the impending darkness — all vermillion fires and ashes trickling into the wintry drizzle. it doesn’t change the frost that settles into his cheeks, shades of carmine blooming across his nose, but the nicotine burn is just shy of enough. its nice, the peace he’s sought making the hike of his shoulders loosen like a badly tied knot.
that is until he hears a bang. loud and abrupt in the silent night. yohan nearly chokes as he skids to a stop on the steep decline, eyes wide ( wider ) as he cautiously rounds the descending brick wall.
dozens of paper scraps spill from metal cans, the culprit, he assumes, illuminated by the single street light the county could afford, apparently. at a bus stop, no less, which yohan assumes the stranger may or may not have missed.
he checks his watch to make sure. its five past eleven.
“you missed it.” yohan offers with no consolation, gruff and muffled. “the bus,” he points down the road that leads down the side of the mountain towards the more populated areas of jeju. “you missed it.”
only belatedly, as he watches one of the metal cans roll noisily down the hillside and newspaper scraps turn to slush in the snow-sodden gutters, does he ask. “are…you okay?”
