Chapter Text
The bus deposited Yoongi and trundled away, grey fumes sputtering out of its exhaust pipe. He stood next to the rusted metal pole that was the bus stand and took in the road before him. When the road was being constructed back in the 70s, two decades before he was born, a town meeting had been held to discuss a name for the road. The name that the residents eventually decided upon reflected their lack of creativity and their narrow minds. Main Street was the only real road in this town, paved with asphalt and therefore unlike the other thoroughfares that could only be considered dirt paths at best.
When he was a child, Yoongi had wondered why more roads hadn’t been built. Rain had often turned those dirt paths into uneven ground of slippery mud that soiled his shoes and forced him to be extra careful where he stepped next if he didn’t want to land face-flat on the puddles of gritty rainwater. Then he grew older and he understood that building roads meant raising money and people in this town preferred to pinch every penny than to contribute for the greater good. Then he grew even older, and he realised that their reluctance made sense because no amount of asphalt road would make a difference to this godforsaken town.
To get to the funeral home, he had to walk a distance up Main Street and make a left turn. But he adjusted the backpack hanging off his shoulder and headed in the opposite direction instead.
On one side of the road was a field of tall grass and wildflowers that perfumed the air with their heady scent; on the other side was a row of shops that were either closed for the day or permanently boarded up. The latter was more likely. People didn’t thrive here, much less businesses.
Yoongi stopped at the sundry store, the only shop that stayed open throughout the years. Housewives in the town dropped by every day for necessities — salt, rice, canned tuna, toilet paper — and for the freshest gossip exchanged over flapping fans or warm tea, depending on the season. Now the outside benches under the overhanging roof were unoccupied, the air empty of chatter. There was only a boy standing in front of the ice cream freezer that hummed abnormally loud in the summer heat. Yoongi walked past him and went into the store.
Stepping into the store felt like going back in time. The interior had not changed since his earliest memory of it. The walls and floor were still the same grey concrete. The cool space was still dimly lit by a couple of bare light bulbs strung on exposed wires. Even the layout of the metal shelves was the same. The only difference was that a flat-screen TV had replaced the previous chunkier one. At least one thing had progressed.
He grabbed a bottle of orange Fanta from the fridge and noticed another difference. The person at the register was not the ahjumma with the mole below her left nostril. It was instead a teenage girl whom he didn’t recognise. She must be one of the ahjumma’s grandchildren forced to help out at the store. She didn’t seem to recognise him either. After all she couldn’t have been older than ten when he left this town five years ago. She grumpily collected his money and went back to her cellphone, probably dismissing him as just the occasional, luckless traveller who happened to stumble upon this town. Her ignorance was an unexpected stroke of good luck in his favour. He had been prepared for the ahjumma to swoop down on him like an eagle that had sighted a fat mouse and squeeze him dry for the latest gossip material.
Outside, he sat down one of the benches and drank his Fanta. The shade and the cold fizz cooled him down. He half-expected someone to walk past, recognise him, offer condolences they didn’t really mean and then proceed to judge him in their mightier-than-thou manner.
How could you be in the mood to drink Fanta so leisurely after what happened to your sister?
Fuck off and get on with your life, he would tell them.
But no one walked by so he didn’t have to swear, even though he would have welcomed the opportunity. That would have taken off some of the steam in his chest that had nothing to with the heat and everything to do with the fact that he was back in this town when he had sworn that he would never return.
Halfway through his drink, with his thirst quenched, he realised that the same boy hadn’t moved from his spot before the ice cream freezer. Yoongi observed him out of the corner of his eyes. He didn’t know much about children — his most recent experience with one was the toddler whose persistent wails had threatened to split his skull on the bus ride here and at that time he had sat as far from the screaming demon as he could — but the boy before him seemed to be about four or five years old. He wore a pastel green T-shirt with pastel pink and purple sleeves. His shorts were a faded mustard.
Was he lost?
Yoongi swatted the thought away. There was a higher possibility of a road being built than a child being lost in this town. The boy’s mother would surely turn up soon and drag him away by the ear.
He took another swig of the Fanta. It had lost a fair bit of its fizziness. Up in the sky, the clouds shifted, and the area of shade under the roof diminished as the sunlight encroached. Being further in, Yoongi remained in the cool shadow, but the boy was now fully in the sun’s glare.
Yoongi expected the heat to drive the boy into movement, either into the shade or back home. That didn’t happen. The boy stood as though he was glued to the spot. A moment later Yoongi put his bottle on the bench, rose to his feet, and went to the ice cream freezer.
The boy didn’t register his presence. He was staring at the time-bleached images of the different types of ice cream emblazoned across the front of the freezer. There was something forlorn and dazed about him.
Yoongi slid the top of the freezer open and grabbed the first cup ice cream his hands came into contact with. He went inside the store, paid for the ice cream, and came back out. He strode to the boy and extended his hand, wordlessly offering the ice cream and the wooden paddle spoon.
The gesture had the boy blinking slowly, the first sort of movement Yoongi had seen from him. The boy tipped his chin a fraction down to stare at the ice cream, then lifted his face to look at Yoongi. Yoongi noticed a couple of things about the boy at that moment. First, the boy was short; he barely reached Yoongi’s mid thigh. Second, the boy had very large eyes. Third, he had pretty large ears too.
The boy didn’t move a muscle. He stared at Yoongi, his matchstick arms hanging by his side. Yoongi glanced at the ice cream in his hand. Chocolate chip mint ice cream. Did children these days not like mint ice cream?
If he was someone who loved children, he would probably break into a wide smile and coddle the boy into taking the ice cream. But he was Min Yoongi, so he only glanced once between the ice cream and the boy, and raised an unamused eyebrow. The boy didn’t move immediately, as though he was trying to wrap his head around what exactly was going on. Yoongi was starting to get impatient when the boy finally moved and took the ice cream from him with slow and uncertain hands.
That’s right, kid, you don’t reject free ice cream.
“You should get in the shade.” Because Yoongi’d be damned if he got blamed for turning a blind eye while the boy overheated under the sun. He returned to the bench, and picked up the Fanta. The condensation had left a dark ring on the pale wood.
The boy plodded into the shade and sat down on the other end of the bench. Yoongi watched covertly as the boy clumsily peeled the lid off the cup. He held the spoon in his fist, dug into the ice cream and delivered a small mound into his mouth. A flicker of delight danced across his face and he took the next bite with greater relish. Maybe children did like mint ice cream after all.
“Do you know that it’s dangerous for you to accept ice cream from strangers?” Yoongi said. “Did your eomma not teach you that?”
The boy’s dangling legs, which had just begun to swing idly, stiffened.
“The ice cream could be drugged. When you’re knocked out, I could toss you into the back of a car and take you to a warehouse where I’ll lock you up for days as I extort your parents for ransom. And when I don’t get the amount I want, I’d sell you to traffickers who’d cut your arms at the elbow and your legs at the knees and make you beg on the streets of an unknown country while they take every cent you earn.”
The boy stared at Yoongi, spoon sticking out of his mouth, his eyes wide and terrified.
Yoongi felt like a jerk all of a sudden, the worst kind that feed nightmares to children and cause them to so wake up bawling in the middle of the night.
“I’m just saying that you should be careful with strangers.” Yoongi said. It was a half-hearted attempt at trying to execute some degree of damage control. Everything he’d said was true. It was a big bad world out there and everyone should be cautious, including children.
“You’re lucky it’s me today. I have no interest in child exploitation.” He looked out ahead. The field of tall grass across the road swayed in a warm breeze, but other than that everything was still.
“Then again that kind of thing doesn’t happen around here. As much as terrible town as this town is, it’s safe.“ He realised the moment he said it that it wasn’t entirely true. “It’s safe as long as you don’t have any dreams of grandeur,” he amended, a corner of his lips ratcheting in a cynical sneer. He turned back to the boy. “So it’s still safe for you.” He nodded at the ice cream in the boy’s hand. “Go on, continue eating your ice cream.”
The boy surprised Yoongi by obeying instead of running off to look for his mother and complain about the strange man at the sundry store. The boy continued to eat his ice cream, though his earlier enthusiasm had deflated and he looked a lot more listless. Yoongi kept his mouth shut after that.
By the time Yoongi emptied his drink, the clouds had gathered before the sun again. The noise coming from the store’s TV had switched from the chaotic chatter of a variety show to the sombre dialogue of a makjang drama. It was time to make a move. Staying any moment longer was equivalent to stalling for time. He wasn’t a coward like that.
He got up and tossed his bottle into the blue trash bucket. The boy scrambled to his feet too. Yoongi paid him no heed. He didn’t think anything was odd until halfway up the Main Street, he realised a set of footsteps trailed after him.
The boy was following him.
When he slowed his pace, the boy slowed his pace too; when he picked up speed, the boy picked up speed too, his tiny feet slapping a hurried rhythm against the asphalt.
Finally Yoongi stopped and squinted over his shoulder at the boy. The boy startled, his shoulders rucking up.
“Do you live this way?” Yoongi asked irritably. The boy looked downward, maybe at his feet or at the half-finished ice cream in his hands. Great, now Yoongi felt like he had just kicked a puppy.
Yoongi hoisted his knapsack up his shoulder and continued on the street.
Whatever, he decided. The boy’d go away on his own when he got bored. And if he didn’t, Yoongi would just scare him away. A cold glance would do the job. He was good at giving glances of that sort.
Yoongi turned left where the asphalt abruptly ended and the sandy path began. Unlike the sundry store, some of the houses along the path boasted more obvious changes in the five years he was gone. The Yangs had swapped their red brick enclosure for a trendier sandstone wall, the Parks seemed to have turned a corner of their barren yard into a garden of sort, and the Lees had gone to the extreme of completely tearing down their old house and building a modern bungalow in its place.
What about the Min’s residence? Had his parents renovated their house, and hopefully also renovated their mindsets along the way?
Yoongi smirked humourlessly, knowing that he was being ridiculous for even entertaining that possibility in the first place.
The funeral home came into view ten minutes after he had made the turn. The roof peeked above the trees, the curved grey tiles overlapping on their edges as they sloped downwards. The funeral home had been repurposed from an old Buddhist temple when religions in the town diversified and the temple could no longer cater to the different spiritual beliefs about the afterlife. Naturally there had been resistance when the change was proposed, but eventually, just like how people had little problem twisting their beliefs to suit their narratives, it was agreed that because Buddha was benevolent and magnanimous, he wouldn’t mind sharing. So even though the building retained its old facade, the funeral rites performed here are multi-religion — Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, or even a mishmash to suit the needs of the family involved.
Yoongi stepped into the compound and halted. Through the building entrance, he saw a few people milling about inside.
What religion would Seungah’s funeral follow? He searched his dusty memory for a time where he’d talked to her about gods and came up blank. Maybe like him, she didn’t have any religion. That wouldn’t surprise him. It was difficult to believe in gods of any sort when you grew up in the Min household.
Someone came out of the building. Yoongi would recognise her anywhere — nervous stride, timid shoulders, silver-streaked hair parted down the middle and twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. His mother startled when she saw him, her hands jumping before her chest.
“Y-yoongi,” she said from the top of the small flight of stairs, “you made it back.”
He felt his jaw tightening, and a stiff nod was all he could give.
Then she looked at a lower spot beyond him. Even before Yoongi turned to look over his shoulder, he already knew that the boy was there. He had somehow forgotten that the boy had been following him. Yoongi stared at the whorl on top of the boy’s bowed head. The boy was still holding the ice cream cup, though the ice cream had melted and some of it had spilled over his hands.
Yoongi turned back to his mother. The sun shifted and their gazes connected.
She tried to smile, but it was more like a grimace, as if things hadn’t gone quite as she’d planned.
“I see you’ve already met Taehyung,” she said.
TBC
::::::::::