The scent of vomit was the first perception Shin Hae had of the world around him. Still cloudy from his night of soju, he squinted his eyes to see that the sun had already risen. He picked his head up a little but found that it had become glued to the ground by resting in the regurgitated remains of his last meal. His head spun from pain that, like a bubble of air inside a bottle of water, seemed to flow with gravity whenever he tried to move. Quickly, a thought flashed into his mind - an image so horrific he knew it must be a dream. His father ran into the center of a crowd, and immediately loud bursts rippled the air above Shin Hae’s head. He raced after his father, but found that his arms were held back. He swung about violently, driven by anger - by fear - but his friends would not release him; “Come on Shin Hae, there’s nothing you can do. We have to get out of here.”

Oblivious to their warnings, Shin Hae lashed about until he was free and ran into the confusion; he felt like a swimmer lost underwater, not knowing which direction was forward or backward. When he finally found an opening, he was once again at the back of the crowd. “Father! Father!” He was caught in a panicked anthill of confusion, with no sight of his father in the constantly changing maze of bodies. All of a sudden, in the distance, he saw his father wrestling with a man in uniform - he rushed in that direction as quickly as he could, but everything seemed to move in slow motion. Another man in the same uniform was moving toward him too, much closer than Shin Hae, and as he watched, the man lifted a large polished wooden stick in his right hand and brought it down upon his father’s head. The other man quickly began to brutally beat his father just as Shin Hae slipped out of the maze and struck his own blow upon the man, in his blind rage striking him in the back. The other man quickly turned and caught the side of Shin Hae’s face with his stick. The blood from his forehead mixed in his eye with the blood on his father’s face as the world became blackness and he felt his body fall limp upon the hard cement.

When he came back to his senses, the streets by his old high school looked like the remains of a battlefield. His friend, In Young, had his head in her arms, and he felt a warm cloth wiping across his cheek. His right eye was stuck closed, but his left eye squinted to see the same friends that had held him back before, now standing over him in desolation. His head jerked to the left where his father had been when he fell, but now there was only a pool of dried blood. “Father! Where’s my father?” his voice was coarse at first but quickly becoming stronger.

Shin Hae’s good eye shot from friend to friend, but each one of them looked away. In Young, whose arms still held his head, refused to meet his eyes. Finally, his best friend from childhood, In Hyul, with lowered head, responded in a silent, somber voice, “he’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean? Where did they take him?”

“They didn’t take him anywhere. We did… It was too late. There was nothing else we could do, so we took him with the rest. There’s a truck coming to pick them up…”

“Truck!? Too late? What do you mean? Is he…?”

“His head had been beaten so badly, we barely knew it was him. If you hadn’t been right here beside him, we probably would have never noticed him.”

“Where is he? I want to see…I want to see him.” Shin Hae struggled to get to his feet, finding more strength in his bones than he had expected. His friends tried to calm him, but he refused, so they simply pointed off to the right where a large crowd of people had gathered. He walked toward the crowd, not knowing what he was seeing. As he approached, the growing wail of mourning women so engulfed his ears that he thought he was entering the gates of hell: as he came nearer, the sight before his eyes confirmed his delusion. There was a growing pile of unidentified bodies being gathered by men with downcast faces. Occasionally, a woman would burst into the pile and wrap herself around one of the bodies, dragging it out of the pile and into the open. Many such women kneeled and lay prostrate beside wretchedly deformed bodies of the men they loved, some of the women ignoring deep wounds of their own in their grief.

The sight shocked Shin Hae into a dream-like state, as one observing a fiendish nightmare from a distance. His eyes, his right now wrenched free from the dried blood that had held it closed, scanned the scene. He was saddened by the grief around him but still consoled by the ever-constant feeling of “this could never happen to me,” until…one unmistakable voice rose in mourning above all the rest; all other sounds, all other sensations, were drowned into this one wail of grief. It was Da Hee, his younger sister. He stood with his eyes closed, unmoving, for what seemed like an eternity, soothed by the constant wail of his sister’s voice. All action around him faded into transparency, but in what in reality was only a few seconds, he was standing above his father’s mutilated corpse. Da Hee turned and quickly rushed into Shin Hae’s arms, but he did not respond. He only stood limp, staring at his father - his image of security and sanity in a harsh world.

A while later, a garbage truck arrived, and the same men with downcast faces that had gathered the bodies now loaded them as respectfully as they could onto the truck, often with a woman who had lost all sense clinging to the man’s hand until it was no longer possible. When they came for Shin Hae’s father, Da Hee wrapped his bloody head in her arms for one final embrace and then turned away. They stood silently and watched as the rest of the bodies were loaded, and then they joined a procession following the truck as it slowly made its way across town. The procession grew in number until nearly the entire town was following the garbage truck, as though its exhaust carried the tune of the pied piper. In their faces there was the image of defeat, despair; most of them lost so much in the confusion of the crowd that their eyes were empty: zombies following the footsteps of those ahead of them. If their own government would violently destroy the strength of their society, their strong and their wise, then what hope could there be for freedom? Shin Hae, who was near the front of the procession, always in sight of the truck, could not forget what he had seen; his mind could not wander into the peaceful solitude of emptiness. His gaze remained fixed on one foot, protruding out among the mass of bodies carefully stacked on the truck - a shoe he had longed to one day fill but knew he could not, not yet. Without his father, he was alone now: alone to care for himself, his sister, and all the cares of the world surrounding him. He longed to join the bodies on the truck, to not be left behind to face the world alone, but he simply continued walking, gazing steadily forward, occasionally blinking sand from his eyes.

Once the bodies were buried, there was nothing left to do but to turn around and go home. His friends surrounded him, consoling him as much as they could, but his sorrow was beyond words. He spoke nothing. When they returned, he opened a bottle of soju his father kept in a cupboard and began to drink it straight from the bottle. He pushed everyone away and simply began to walk. They tried to stop him, to console him, to get him to say something, but it was all useless. Their strength to oppose him was weak, and his resolution was strong. Despair engulfed them all like a mountain cloud, and they did not even see as he wandered off into the night, bottle in hand - the image of his father’s shoe always before him.

Editorial Policy Statement

Pusanweb is an open forum. The views and observations of contributing writers are their own, and in no
way represent the policies or opinions of Pusanweb management or editorial staff.