Bak Hyunjin

Hyunjin’s father was a businessman who was forever dissatisfied with the company he worked at, always grumbling that he could run it better. His mother had inherited a small 분식집 from her parents, and worked there full-time. They were middle class at best, nothing special at all, but in many ways Hyunjin’s elementary school years were his happiest. His family was financially stable and his parents were both too preoccupied to give him more than perfunctory reminders to study hard and do his hagwon homework on time, so he spent most of his free time playing FPS games after school with friends at the nearest PC방. Sure, Hyunjin’s parents fought, but no more than he brawled with his classmates, and whose parents didn't fight?

When Hyunjin was eleven, his father quit his job and announced that he was going to start a company with a few friends. His mother objected, but he went ahead with it anyway. Hyunjin rarely saw him for the next few years, and when he did come home he would fight so violently and loudly with his mother that he learned to dread his father’s return. The last fight came just before his fourteenth birthday — Hyunjin had curled up in his room with blankets over his head to block out the sounds, and he had eventually fallen asleep. When he woke up, his mother and all of her belongings were gone. He asked his father where she was, and he told him she was dead. Hyunjin knew he was lying, that she must have just run away for a while, but time passed and she never returned.

His father’s business finally went bankrupt in Hyunjin’s last year of high school. He started coming home to broken bottles everywhere and his father insensate on the couch, if he wasn’t drinking and throwing things and threatening to kill Hyunjin like he’d killed his mother. With each drunken outburst Hyunjin's long-simmering rage grew, his waking days filled with equal parts detailed fantasies of killing his father as all-encompassing despair. In the end the latter won out: with his 수능 results he would only be able to get into a local college, and with it went the hope of escaping his father. Hyunjin had taken up a job as a ship mechanic at the docks that winter, learned how to bypass a motor, and on a calm moonless night he jumpstarted an unguarded fishing boat and simply drove away. He stopped it when he reached deep waters, to ensure his body would never be found, and threw himself overboard. Maybe I'll get to see you again.

Hyunjin woke gasping, choking on phantom waves. He was lying on dry land deep within the heart of a neighborhood he knew, sunlight warming his cheek, and the moment he stood he knew, somehow, that he was free. He laughed in disbelief, and sank to his knees with his next exhale as thousands of minds poured into his senses. He could feel the dead pulling at him, all the ghosts he hadn't believed existed struggling to be heard in a cacophony of shouts that blurred into nonsense. He sank his fingers into his hair, and handfuls of bright flowers came fluttering to the ground. It was dark when he regained himself, clouds dragging across the muggy summer sky like long-fingered hands. The thought that he had to move filtered slowly into Hyunjin's mind, and he dragged himself up with an effort. He had no money, but no one at the desk seemed to notice as he took the elevator to a random floor, stumbled into a open room, and collapsed dead away on the made bed.