Chapter Text
I.
Taehyung is eight years old, and he’s packing all of his worldly possessions into a plush puppy-shaped backpack.
His father is driving him out of the city today, into the cool green fields and rolling hills that make Gyeongsangbuk-do look like a painting in one of the downtown museums.
His father is driving him out of the city today, and Taehyung is pretty sure that he’s never coming back.
-
After they’ve been on the road for a while, Taehyung sees his father glance back at him in the rearview mirror. He hugs his puppy backpack to his chest and stares blankly out the window, willing the lump in his throat to subside before his father tries to make him talk.
“You’ll be staying with your halmeoni for a few months,” Taehyung’s father says over the droning static of the car radio. “Your mother and I just need some time to work towards a bigger house, one with a yard for you to play in.”
He glances back at Taehyung, who is still clutching his puppy backpack as if it were a life preserver.
“Maybe we could get you a real dog when you come back. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” his father says.
Taehyung bites the inside of his cheek. He knows they’re not getting a new house, or a yard, or a dog.
It’s just empty words, and it’s so obvious that it’s insulting.
Taehyung nods anyway. His gaze slides to the right, out the window again.
He draws his knees up to his chest and leans his cheek on his puppy backpack.
“I’ll miss you and Eomma,” Taehyung says, because he will, in spite of it all, and because he wants to hear his father say it back.
Instead, his father just says, “Don’t be silly, you’ll be fine.”
Taehyung closes his eyes and lets the rumble of the road distract him from his dull, persistent heartache.
-
Taehyung has met his grandmother a few times before. She lives alone in a small country house and sells vegetables to nearby families. No one is quite sure how she has managed to maintain the farm so efficiently after her husband’s passing, but, somehow, she does.
The village children call her a witch, but Taehyung has seen enough anime to know that she couldn’t possibly be one; she doesn’t store her power in gemstones or deliver baked goods by broomstick or transform into an alter-ego that can save the world from evil.
She does make potions, though, if extra-spicy maeuntang and slow-cooked yukgaejang count as potions.
And she does have special powers, like being able to rub Taehyung’s back just right so that he can sleep without nightmares for once.
She has a familiar, too, a balloon-like creature that floats above her left shoulder and hums pansori tunes, but Taehyung’s pretty sure that everyone’s grandmother has one of those.
-
“Thank you for watching our little one, Eomma,” Taehyung’s father says once the car is parked and the bags are in the house and Taehyung’s world has changed forever.
“I’m always happy to have Taehyung stay here,” she says with a smile, like it’s the easiest thing in the world to love a little boy who needs her.
If it’s so easy, why do his parents make it seem so hard?
-
The day is warm and sunny, and the night is cold and windy, and Taehyung settles into the house with ease. His grandmother is warm and welcoming; their dinner is spicy and filling; his bed is made up with his favorite blanket and a stuffed animal shaped like a dragon. The heat of the daytime sun lulls Taehyung into a haze of drowsiness, and the whistling of the nighttime wind drags him under the surface of sleep.
He dreams of hearts and hugs and warm glasses of milk, but he doesn’t remember it in the morning.
-
Every day is more or less the same on the farm.
He plays out in the yard for a while, chasing the erratic paths of fireflies and petting the velvety tops of mushrooms. He rolls down the tallest hill and gets grass stains on his jeans; he pulls his clothes off and jumps in the deepest, bluest lake. He eats and bathes and combs his hair, singing to himself as he goes.
Finally, one afternoon, once his lungs are full of country air and his belly is full of fish cakes, he asks his grandmother why.
She pokes at the fire under the large cooking pot in the center of her little hut. The broth snaps and crackles and spits; the flames lick up the side of the pot like the disembodied claws of the devil.
“Your appa and eomma love you very much,” she says, eventually. “But little boys like you ought to be out in the wild where they can run around, don’t you think?”
“I can run around in Daegu. There’s a playground down the street from our apartment.”
“Well, that’s hardly the same thing as what we have out here, sweet boy.”
Taehyung shrugs.
“It makes me feel like they don’t want me,” Taehyung says, maybe a little too bluntly, because his grandmother stops stirring the stew for a moment before starting up again with renewed vigor.
“I want you,” his grandmother says, which is not the same thing as saying they want you or we all want you, and Taehyung hears the difference loud and clear. “I am so happy to have somebody to share all this food with, because cooking for little old me is just so dull. Not to mention that it’s been so long since I’ve had somebody to talk to. Between you and I, you’re the most interesting conversationalist I’ve ever met. Our chats at the dinner table will be a far cry from your eomma and appa talking about work and traffic and bills all the time, I’m sure.”
Taehyung smiles in spite of himself. He nods.
His grandmother taps the spoon against the edge of her cooking pot, breathing deeply to catch the heat of the rich red spices swirling in the air. “Do you know how much I’ve missed you since you started school? This old house has felt so lonely without you.”
Taehyung peers into the pot to get a look for himself. “I like it here,” he says softly, making eye contact with his distorted, wavy reflection in the bubbling broth. “I felt lonely before, too.”
-
Taehyung, for all intents and purposes, has always been alone.
His parents have never had space for him in their lives, or have never made space, one of the two. They had him too young, before they were married, and Taehyung knows that’s shameful because he’s heard his aunties whisper about it in the kitchen while he was supposed to be watching television in the front room.
He doesn’t have siblings, either, because his parents still aren’t really ready for a family, even though Taehyung is eight years old and has been ready for one for a while now.
Taehyung has always been a big kid, tall and strong. He was a big baby, too; it made his mother sick when she was carrying him, or something like that. He’s not sure if that’s exactly right because he can’t ask those kinds of questions, but what he does know is that his mother’s family resents him for it still. They squint at his gangly arms and knobbly knees and say, “he’s growing so much, he must be eating you out of house and home,” instead of something like, “he’s growing so much, he must be doing very well at sports,” and when Taehyung sits down at the table with them later, he feels too sick with guilt to eat much at all.
He thinks that they must wish he had never been born, or at least that he was someone else’s problem. His aunties tell him he looks just like his father, but they don’t seem to like his father much, so Taehyung’s not sure if it’s a compliment so much as a way to distance themselves from him, to push the responsibility of taking care of him onto his father’s side of the family.
It works, he supposes, because it’s his father’s mother that was on the phone the other day, agreeing to let Taehyung stay in her little farmhouse “until things turn around.”
Now that he’s gone, Taehyung wonders if he will even feel like turning back around.
-
But there’s something else, too, something else that makes Taehyung wonder if it’s all his fault that his parents are giving him up.
Taehyung has seen a lot of animes about witches, and in the same way he’s sure that his grandmother isn’t one, he’s sure that he is.
There are lots of little reasons, lots of transgressions that his schoolteachers write home about, lots of idiosyncrasies that the other kids tease him for, that no one would really put together unless they knew about magic.
But the most damning evidence doesn’t come from within.
Taehyung knows that, in almost every story, the witches are outcasts, just like him.
-
On the seventh day at his grandmother’s house, Taehyung finally feels brave enough to ask why again.
“Halmeoni,” he says as they hang wildflowers up to dry above the kitchen basin. “Why did Appa really give me to you?”
His grandmother pairs a bundle of lavender with sprigs of aster and hands them to Taehyung for binding. “You have a kind of power that they can’t help you understand,” she says, after a while. “But I can.”
Taehyung hands the twine-bound flowers to his grandmother’s familiar, who has been humming bits from the Chunhyangga since sunrise. The familiar hangs them up where Taehyung can’t reach, pausing their sorrowful singing to blow on the flowers until they are perfectly, uniformly dry.
When Taehyung looks at his grandmother, she is already looking back.
“Am I a witch?” he asks, hoping she won’t laugh like his mother did, or scold him like his father did, or ignore him for the rest of the year like his classmates did when he brought it up.
“I think you might be,” she says, as though his question is important, as though he’s important enough to know the truth.
“Everyone says you’re a witch,” Taehyung says, standing on his tiptoes to watch the clipped flower stems collect in the basin under his grandmother’s knotted, practiced hands. “But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”
His grandmother does laugh at that. “Why would they be wrong? I have this friend,” she says, indicating her familiar, “and I always make you wonderful potions so you can grow big and strong, and I heal your bruises and aches whenever you roll over stones on that hill out there, don’t I?”
“But everyone’s grandmother has a friend,” Taehyung says. “Eomma’s mother has that little dog, Nari, and she’s always helping out around the house, bringing in the newspaper, things like that.”
His grandmother suppresses a wide smile then, resting her elbow on her forearm, tapping her chin with manicured nails. “But this friend was made with my magic,” she says. “Don’t you want a friend like that someday, Taehyung?”
Taehyung blinks.
Suddenly, instead of a cooking pot nestled in the center of the room, he sees a cauldron.
Instead of menthol balm massages, he recalls the spark and heat of healing magic under his skin.
“Oh,” he says, “oh,” and his grandmother catches him deftly when he faints.