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Kim Dokja is four, and he is walking on the street, his mother’s hand in his. He has on his new rain boots, yellow reflecting onto puddles like bubbles of sunshine, the waters serene—soon to be disturbed by the stomp of his heel as he giggles and races across the sidewalk, his mother’s hand forgotten.
“Dokja-yah,” his mother calls out. “Be careful, all right?”
“Yes!” But he is four and he knows nothing except that the rain has stopped and that the world is a rainbow blur of colours as he splashes water everywhere. He’s free here. He’s unbound. And he runs, runs, runs—
“Ow!” He staggers back, rubbing his forehead.
“You were warned to be careful.”
He cranes his neck, and it’s a man in a black coat, tall and dark. A wicked scar runs along his face, distorted by his frown. “You were warned to be careful,” the man says again, his voice low.
“S-Sorry,” he stutters, backing away.
The man looks down at him, contemplative. There’s a furrow to his brows, an emotion that Kim Dokja doesn’t know how to describe—only that he himself is feeling terribly sorry. So sorry that his vision is fogging up, his mouth sour with unshed apologies. Guilt freezes him in place, subjects him to judgement.
“Watch your mother well,” the man settles on. “If you look away from your mother for too long, you will lose sight of her.”
Kim Dokja wordlessly nods. The tall stranger takes a step forward, foot landing next in the puddle next to Kim Dokja’s yellow boots. There is no force, no splash. He passes like a whip of autumn wind, almost non-existent.
And just as Kim Dokja is about to move, the man continues, quieter now. ”And watch yourself, Kim Dokja.” His voice is hollow, distant. “If you look away for too long, you will lose sight of yourself, too.”
Kim Dokja looks at himself in the puddle. Someone foreign stares back, clad in a white coat that is not his. Not a hint of yellow to be seen. I’m sorry , his reflection says. I’m sorry I read you into existence.
But even as his mouth moves, there is no sound. Just the autumn rain clouds, sweeping over the sky. The storm comes without a warning, and his mother calls for him, but he cannot hear. He stares at the puddle beneath him: plinks of raindrops on glass water, bounced off the surface like a fist against a wall.
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Kim Dokja is seven, and he is sitting on the balcony, eating a slice of pizza while looking at the fireworks. The radio is playing in the background, drowning out the sounds of his father’s bellowing. A burst of red against black sky, setting the entire horizon alight. Kim Dokja follows the edge of the fire, silent as it hisses out of existence.
Then, as quick as a bird flitting past at dusk, a black blob falls from the top of his vision. A girl touches down onto the balcony where he sits. The landing is soundless, like she’s a shadow. Like she’s been dropped from a dragon’s claws. Her hair is brown, her eyes bright.
“Hey there,” she says timidly. “Could I have a slice of that pizza?”
Kim Dokja stares at her, his eyes wide. Eventually, when the girl starts fiddling with her fingers, he nods. The girl smiles, and she grabs the last pizza slice on the plate on the table, before taking a seat on the stool beside him. She takes a dainty bite, chewing slowly. Swallows, before asking, “Do you like fireworks, then?”
The radio crackles, gunshot pops of the fireworks woven between harsh static. Kim Dokja looks at the sky again, at the stars twinkling along with the yellow sparks. The bellowing from behind the balcony has finally stopped, and the world does not shake. “It’s pretty,” he says.
“It is,” she agrees. “I like watching the fireworks when we’re all together.”
“Yes,” he says softly. He likes it too.
They finish the rest of their pizza without speaking, content to watch the fireworks in silent company. The girl hums as she wipes her oil-stained fingers with a tissue. As she hands him one, she asks, “Do you like pizza?”
He shrugs. He eats, but it's not for himself.
“I like pizza,” she says to him, scooting her stool closer. She regards him then, a strange understanding in her eyes. “But I like ahjussi more. If I was with ahjussi, if I was with everyone, I’d be able to eat anything.”
She puts her hand in his, small and fragile. A child’s. He squeezes it, his hand large and rough and scarred. But she doesn’t flinch, squeezes back instead. “Yoosung-ah,” he says quietly. “It’s the same for me.”
Shin Yoosung leans in and hugs him, her hands wrapped around shoulders much bigger than hers. She presses a kiss to his temple, as though he were a bronze statue, unmoving, unseeing.
“Keep reading,” she whispers. Her cheeks are glistening in the dark, wet. Her eyes are swollen, puffy and red. He’s shaking. Behind her, the lone sparks of fireworks just set off are rising. But at the height of their ascension, there is no explosion. “Whatever you do, ahjussi, don’t stop.”
It is spring. The night is warm with the scent of wet gunpowder. He reaches out to embrace only air, and the fizzle of the fireworks sound like a girl crying into her hands, trying to stifle the sound.
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Kim Dokja is ten years old, and he is hiding in the closet. Outside, her mother is speaking to the police officers. He’d taken one look at them and fled, curling himself in the safety of the bedroom closet. His hands are pressed to his ears, trying to block out the world’s sound.
The closet door creaks open. He squeezes his eyes tighter, but the light comes through anyway. And even though he’s slapped his hand over his ears, her voice comes through anyway, low and sunken. “Why are you crying?”
His eyes peek open, and it’s not his mother. It’s a teenage girl. Her hair is black, tied in a ponytail, and her face is sharp. But for some reason, he doesn’t feel afraid. She kneels down. Places her hands on his wrists, and pries his hands off his ears.
The world falls quiet. Only blank silence.
The girl looks at him, her lips pressed flat. “Why are you crying? It makes you look uglier than usual, ahjussi.”
“I did something bad,” he whispers.
She snorts. “Oh, that commotion outside?”
Kim Dokja tenses. The entire universe trembles. A blink, and his hands are wet, blurred red.
“You’ll be okay,” she says.
He shakes his head. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t.
“You wanna know something?” she whispers back, her eyes glinting like a finely-honed sword.
“W-What?”
“I did something worse,” she confides.
“...You couldn’t help it, Jihye,” he says. His voice is rougher, older, edges of memories he shouldn’t have. “It was to survive.”
“Oh, ahjussi,” she says, shaking her head as if he’s the one who couldn’t understand. “Wasn’t it the same for you?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
Lee Jihye closes her eyes. There’s a storm, crackling around them. The salty scent of sea breeze and tears. “Not your fault. It was my hands.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats numbly.
“Instead of saying sorry,” Lee Jihye says, grasping onto his shoulders so tight he can feel her tremble too, “open your eyes, ahjussi.”
The window in the bedroom flashes, sudden lightning, blinding white clap. Kim Dokja is a boy who has just killed his father, a boy who will soon lose his mother, and he stands in his bedroom. The closet door is open. The air smells like the sea. But when he fumbles in the dark, trying to grasp onto the source of the scent, there is nothing. He is Dokja, Kim Dokja, and he is alone.
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Kim Dokja is eleven, and he is sitting on a bench outside the courthouse, watching the world pass him by with his knees pulled to his chin. He has nothing except whispers and pitying glances, the bone-seeping cold of an uncaring winter day.
The bench creaks with the sound of settling weight, two shadows flanking his lone one on the ground.
“Should I be surprised to see you alone?”
Kim Dokja looks up, but it’s not the bullies from school. It’s a pretty lady with piercing eyes, sitting to the right of him. She stares at him, a frown on her face.
“What are you doing, just sitting like that?” He looks the opposite way, and it’s a tall, muscular man speaking now, a wistful tint to his smile.
“Waiting,” Kim Dokja says.
The lady smiles bitterly. “Me too,” she says. She gestures to the man, then to herself. “Both of us. We’re both waiting. Almost a year and a half now, Kim Dokja.”
“For what?” he asks. It seems impossibly long to him, like the stretching of his shadow into a stranger. Like the stretching of a second into infinity, like staring into razor-thin soap bubble memories almost about to pop, yet melding into another anyway. Like a child turning into a man into a child.
“Not what,” the man corrects gently. “Who.”
“...Do you want to wait with me?”
Lee Hyunsung nods. “We will,” he says. “It’s our duty.”
“More than that,” Jung Heewon says. “Because we want to.”
And then Jung Heewon’s expression turns sharp. She glares at him, as though he’d thrown himself off a cliff. “But I’ll let you know, this wasn’t what I signed up for,” she says, “when I pledged to be your sword. You better compensate me fairly for the overtime.”
“Is it worth waiting, then?” Kim Dokja asks, his throat sore, and the world holds its breath. “Maybe it’s not.”
“Worth, huh? It’s just like you, to think that way. But the thing is: if I could have given up on you,” Jung Heewon says, “I would have. As it is, I spend every waking moment refusing to think about the fact that I’d have to wait. Thrown myself into training, broken off a relationship, moved out of a house. Don’t you think I’ve tried?”
Lee Hyunsung winces. “Heewon…”
“You’re right. Maybe it’s not worth it,” she continues. She closes her eyes, her voice low with sorrow. “And yet… Why is it that I can’t?”
Her admission turns to white fog in the cold, melding into the drifting snow. And Lee Hyunsung follows her, flowing into her words as though it’s the most natural course of action. “Some things,” Lee Hyunsung says, “are beyond simple logic. Like a used cartridge kept in secret, Dokja-ssi.”
For a moment, there’s nothing else to say. The shadow shrinks. The soap bubble splits. Kim Dokja shivers, then looks to the sky: not a cloud in sight, but it’s snowing. Each snowflake glints, drifting starlights that sting his cheeks when they melt. And when he looks down, there is only one: shaded void, empty longing.
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Kim Dokja is twelve, and he is staring at ants. The summer sun is burning over his back, he has nothing to do after school except hide away in the corner of the sandpit, avoiding bullies by watching ants. Pretending that he is one of them, surrounded by family members, blending into the seamless paths of in and out.
Suddenly, a shadow drops over him.
“Are you searching for bugs too?”
Kim Dokja startles, almost falling on his face as he leaps away from the stranger’s voice. It’s a boy in a snapback cap, brown hair and black eyes, face almost too pale in daylight.
“...Not searching,” Kim Dokja says, finding his voice. He doesn’t stammer, and he’s almost proud of himself for this fact. It only wavers a little, like sudden ripples in a still lake. He points to the ant colony, how worker ants are so numerous they colour the anthill black. “Looking.”
“Huh,” the boy says. “Do you like bugs too?”
Kim Dokja blinks. He’s not sure. He looks, but it’s not for himself.
The boy shrugs, not minding his silence. He sits down next to him, and trails a finger over the anthill, letting the bugs crawl over his finger as though it were a perch for a pet bird. “Ants are really cool,” he says absentmindedly.
“Are they?”
“Mhm. Did you know…” The boy talks. He talks as though he’s never told anyone anything, talks as though Kim Dokja is the only person that would ever be around to hear what he says. And when the boy runs out of facts about ants, he talks about cockroaches. The big kind, the ones that hiss and writhe over rotten logs, hidden under old leaves that shiver whenever the sunlight leaking through the canopies would hit them just right. “Shin Yoosung says they’re icky,” he complains, “but she’s a girl, so of course she would.”
“Oh.”
“You said you were going to catch them with me,” the boy says as he pokes at the grass, face dark, voice sullen. “You still haven’t woken up yet, so I have to wait. But it’s a little hard, waiting so long. Everyone says it’s only been two years, but I’ve already grown two inches. That’s like, forever , isn’t it?”
“...Gilyoung-ah,” he says thickly, laying a hand over the boy’s head. His hair is warm from the sunlight, and Kim Dokja’s hand is an adult’s, worn and large compared to that of a boy. And Lee Gilyoung is just that, isn’t he? A boy, just shy of fifteen, the age where he oscillates between invincibility and vulnerability. Almost at the age where he’ll start to look out into the crowd, wondering where he belongs in the sea of stars.
Kim Doka swallows, and pats Gilyoung’s head. His fingers are shaking. Gilyoung peers up at him from under his hand, and his eyes are sad. Sadder than a fourteen year old’s eyes have the right to be, abyssal pools of grief.
“Hyung,” he says. “Come home already.”
The world tilts. His vision refracts. Sunlight dripping down his back, cicadas chirping above, Kim Dokja lowers his hand to the ground. Touches his little palm against warm sand, shifting loose grains parting to make way. He pushes himself up and stumbles toward the grass. Presses his ear to the earth, but nothing answers.
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Kim Dokja is thirteen, and he is burning a book. The flames lick away at the bolded title, Underground Killer slowly dissolving to ashes.
He’d found a copy in his bag one day, presumably a cruel prank. He certainly wouldn’t have spent what little money he had on something worth little more than matchfire. So he did exactly that. The peak of summer, sweltering hot, but he didn’t even blink when he’d struck the match.
He thought he’d feel freed, but he doesn’t. The only thing he sees in the fire is that woman’s face on the television, flashing cameras lighting her face as she says calmly, I killed my husband.
“You didn’t even read it,” someone says. Kim Dokja remains silent, jaw locked in place. A hand lands on his shoulder, the touch light.
“It’s a worthless tale,” he says harshly.
“How do you know it’s worthless,” she says, “if you didn’t read it?”
He glances to his right. Besides him, there’s a woman, brown hair, gentle eyes.
“It’s all lies,” he tells her.
“But not all lies are bad,” she says. “You’ve told your fair share, haven’t you?”
“I…”
She’s smiling, as though she already knows the answer.
“She comes every day, you know,” Yoo Sangah says. “Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a minute. But she always comes.” Her eyes are ignited with reflections of a fire—and him, standing helplessly in front of her, twenty-eight but feeling like he’s a kid again.
“Yoo Sangah,” he fumbles. “What should one say to earn forgiveness? I’m sorry?”
“That’s not it. You know that.”
“Then what? What should I say, what can I say? I’m not good with words like you, Sangah-ssi.”
She smiles, soft. “There’s nothing to earn,” she says, “and there is nothing to forgive. We’re all waiting, Dokja-ssi.”
The ground shudders. The air simmers. His gaze slides back to the bonfire, and the touch at his shoulder disappears. Flames dancing in front of him, sweat sliding down his neck, Kim Dokja looks at his hands, and they are the overlap of thirteen and twenty eight, delicate and worn and his. Palm lines written, but no way to read.
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Kim Dokja is fifteen, and he is opening a window.
“Hey,” a woman snaps. “Don’t be stupid.”
He ignores her. He’s gotten good at ignoring everything. The sky is vast and cloudless, deep infinite blue. He could almost taste it, the spring breeze. But the second his foot touches the bottom ledge of the window, someone drags him back by the collar and tosses him onto the floor.
“Just because he’s stupid doesn’t mean you can be so rough with him,” the woman mutters.
“He is a fool,” a man says. “Words are wasted on him.”
Kim Dokja gasps for breath. Twists his neck around, two people staring down at him, a man and a woman, black coat and white coat. He is fifteen, about to die, he is twenty-eight, about to live, he is thirty-three, about to cry, and he can’t help but think: I know you. I know who you are.
Han Sooyoung offers him a hand. He takes it. She pulls him up, a surprising amount of strength in her hand. She latches onto his fingers, refuses to let go. Yoo Joonghyuk crosses his arms, pins him down with his stare.
“After the story ends, what’s left?” Yoo Joonghyuk says bluntly.
“The epilogue,” Kim Dokja answers.
“And beyond even that?” Han Sooyoung says. “What’s past the margins?”
“An ending the reader can’t read,” Kim Dokja says softly.
“Is that what you really think?” Yoo Joonghyuk scoffs.
“Who do you think the story is written for?” Han Sooyoung asks. “Who brings it to life?
A story, lived by the character, recorded by the writer, viewed by the reader.
What did it all mean then, the last three years?
Who were they all for?
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I don’t know, you want to say. There is an ocean in your mouth, a galaxy in your eyes. Every word you speak is a universe unto itself, a world finished before it’s begun. I don’t know who this story is for.
But you do, don’t you? You do.
There’s no epilogue written, but you can imagine it. Your mind reaches for it, space-time continuum bent and warped and beaten to your liking. And you want it, that epilogue. That beyond, what lies in empty margin. To smell the antiseptic hospital room. To feel the ache of your muscles. To hear creaking door, echoing footsteps, to see blinding sunlight, spilling through the open window, pages and pages swirling around you, scattered by the wind, and you breathe. Look to the window. Then look to your hands.
…Hey, you. Shouldn’t you wake up now?