Work Text:
Jung Heewon’s nights start like this.
She wakes. Sits on her bed. Waits. Counts to ten. Eats something. Anything that hasn’t gone bad. It tastes like nothing. Takes out the trash, and her mother’s voicemails, then her brother’s complaints. Showers.
Takes her sweet time getting to the last subway train. Squeezing in the last car just in time. Even at midnight, it’s even more cramped than usual. Such are holidays. Glares at any man looking too closely, too intently on some unsuspecting woman’s blouse, or the tight pantsuits of an overworked office lady.
The city lights pass her by with a flurry, and she wonders idly whether any of her old friends are amongst them somewhere. These thoughts come to a screeching halt as the train does. A hushed silence falls among the crowd as they all wonder which fool decided that today is their last before cutting those thoughts short, feeling all sorts of shame and a feigned disbelief that they’re capable of them.
Jung Heewon doesn’t wonder. She stopped wondering a long time ago. She turns up the volume of the music blaring through her cheap earphones. Ignores the tugging sense of unease, wrests it away from her heart.
The conductor announces through the intercom: Just a false alarm.
Nobody wonders how much of it is true. The train moves forward.
It takes a brisk ten minute walk from the station to her workplace.
The stars hanging overhead all become mere twinkles in the night, overshadowed by the crowd of city lights.
Jung Heewon says nothing as her manager scolds her for her tardiness.
Says nothing when she has to clean up after whoever had the previous shift. Doesn’t grimace when she wipes the grime off the counter. Pretends she cares about her co-worker’s idle chatter.
The night progresses, and the cacophony worsens.
The clinking of glassware, the suffocating haze of muffled, idle chatter, the stinging scent of cigars interweaving with the sickeningly sweet cologne through the humidity.
It’s nauseating. It’s nothing new.
Her phone screen lights up. A text from her brother. A notice from the school. She turns on airplane mode. Wipes furiously at the countertop. Some old fart spilled his drink there, after being jostled about by his merry band of women, either his secretaries or work juniors, maybe both.
Nothing’s really ever the same anymore, the anchor of the late news show commentates overhead matter-of-factly through the speakers of their old TV, as if the statistics he’d provided are any more insightful than the first hand accounts anyone’s experienced in this day and age.
It’s always been like this. Jung Heewon bites back for once, though in her head as she wipes the counter, ready to prepare another shitty cocktail for yet another shitty old man for the night. It’s always been the same.
“Make that a double, why don’t you, sweetheart?” Said old man winks. And she hates him. She hates him. She wants to stab him in the gut. She hates every old man that walks in here. Just as much as she hates the one who walked out and never came back to her mother.
She pours him a double. Smiles while she’s at it.
Can’t have a pay cut threat hanging over her head again, when her brother and her mother are enough.
The hours pass, the shitty jazz slows half a step, and then the gaggle of secretaries, each tied to the arm of their respective executive or official, peters out along with the dulcet tones leaking out of their shitty sound system.
All the while Jung Heewon polishes a glass.
And another.
And another.
The last of her customers dwindle and thin, only some remain; sad pathetic little creatures who’d long forgotten what places they'd call home.
Jung Heewon doesn’t mind this bunch. They come in an assortment of stories.
An office lady nursing her third gin of the evening, playing with the rim of the glass as she looks on with blank eyes.
A hunk of a man who looks like he belongs in the military, and nowhere else.
A soggy looking woman, who looks to be her age, and pays with a black card, but is dressed like a struggling university student.
But eventually even they peter out, until the clinks of the glass are no more, and all that’s left is the hum of their refrigerator out back, and then the lights powering off automatically just in time for closing.
Their manager installed it recently, said it’s because the closing shift workers can’t be trusted with the lights, because they keep wasting electricity when there should be no more work to be done a maximum of thirty minutes before closing.
He has never worked a closing shift a day in his life.
Jung Heewon is still polishing the last couple of glasses in near complete darkness. She still has to wipe down the counter, and the booths and the tables.
The night is ever quiet, ever still. But then, just beyond the tall glass window—
A ball of light shoots up, then another, and another. Vivid light flowers burst in the sky, swallowing the stars whole. And even in the high rise building where Heewon works, she thinks she can hear the shouted greetings all at once, as the lights below also flicker, as if to reflect their sisters in the night sky.
And eventually, something deep inside Heewon snaps.
As though possessed by a militant sort of resistance, she pushes entire trays of glasses off the counter, relishing in their high pitched screams as they shatter on the floor. This will cost her more than a month’s worth of paycheck.
But she doesn’t stop there, soon the bar stools come flying, then the tables, then anything she can throw and fling off its place.
It’s exhilarating. The rush, the heat. She feels lucid. She feels free.
The clattering and the breaking and the smashed pieces in the walls, out the windows and scattered about the floor.
She breaks and she breaks and she breaks everything until her fingers bleed from the pieces.
Before she knows it, a small explosion has erupted within that very room.
She pants and breathes hard as the fireworks washes her face with light, as she looks over the mangled remains of the bar.
She walks through the broken glass and closes the door behind her shut, blood staining the handle red.
Jung Heewon’s night ends like this.
She hands in her one day notice the very next day.