Chapter Text
When I was younger,
A small little child,
I hated Sundays.
They were bleak,
bland, unpredictable, and revealing,
I often sat with the feeling of what is going to happen.
“What is going to happen with what?”, you may be wondering.
I still don’t know the answer to that. But I felt too exposed on those days.
In particular, it made me hate natural light. Every corner, every crevice was bleached in the white light. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, I would just sit around and wait until the day ends and Monday rolls around.
At some point, I started sitting in my room with no light on and dark curtains drawn. I relished in the comfort of sitting in the dark abyss. I had no conception of time, and all my emotions could come out of their hiding spaces and be free. My tightly wrapped battle wounds could be cut off and finally breath. I could be me in peace with no scrutinized judgement.
The dark was my little safety blanket.
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Drip…. Drip… Drip
Something didn’t seem right. Something was off, not the usual background sounds he was used to hearing.
Maybe it was a leakage again? The building was after all incredibly old. It wouldn’t surprise him if the apartment complex was a few decades older than him.
Drip… Drip… Drip…
It was weird though. He couldn’t hear anything else but the continuous dripping. It went in a rhythm. Every 5 seconds he would hear new dripping sounds, exactly three times after another.
Drip… Drip… Drip…
It can’t be a leakage. Leakages don’t act like that. Besides, usually, other sounds like old pipes would creak and neighbours doing things could be heard through the walls.
But everything was silent. No signs of human life. Just the simple sound of drops.
Drip… Drip… Drip…
There it was again. It was driving him insane.
Not being able to ignore it anymore, he opened his eyes in haste and expected to see the usual boring cemented roof. Except, it wasn’t that roof. It was a pale-yellow coloured roof and instead of ugly cement, it was made of wood.
Now that he had opened his eyes, he was now aware of the water he was half submerged in
Alarmed, he sat up in one swift motion and felt the water swishing around him in ripples. The water was pale coloured red, and for some reason was an abnormal temperature. Not too warm, but not too cold. Just lukewarm.
It didn’t seem like it was just plain water. Something else was mixed in it. Now that he thought about it, he could smell an awful stench. It made him want to gag. The air reeked this iron-like smell that seemed so familiar, yet he couldn’t pinpoint what it exactly was.
The lights flickered and the light bulb made tinkering noises as if the bulb wasn’t the correct one for the lamp. They were yellow-tinted and made everything in the room heavily saturated.
Suddenly, a burst of deep laughter erupted from the corner of the room, not too far away from him. He whipped his head towards where the sound came from. Immediately, he wanted to run as far away as he could.
His eyes opened wide in fear. His chest rose up and down fast, hyperventilating in a way you would think he lost the ability to breathe probably. There he laid for who knows how long. Was it seconds, minutes or hours? No one knows but after a while, he calmed down and was able to catch his breath.
Bullets of sweat ran down his distraught face, mixing in with the crystal-like tears falling from his shaken eyes. Finally, he was aware of where he was, and that lovely familiar cemented roof was right above him where it should be.
Just as he took a deep breath, a rapid knocking was heard on the wooden front door. The anxiety tsunami in his body roared from the heightened sound of the banging on the door.
“Delivery to Kim Sunoo!”, a deep voice boomed through the door with the continuous knocking.
Sunoo scrambled out of his single-sized bed and clumsily ran over to his front door. Sunoo lived in a tiny, cheap and questionably legal 8 square meter big goshiwon apartment, on the outskirts of Seoul. So, the distance from his bed to the front door wasn’t very far at all.
Now standing in front of the door he inhaled sharply through his nose and with his shaking right hand reached out to the doorknob and carefully opened the door.
Looking straight ahead, he was met with a broad chest clothed in a sky-blue polo shirt. On the right side of the shirt, it had the familiar logo “CJ Logistics” printed on it. Lifting his head, he was met with a conventionally attractive man that looked about the same age as him. Dyed platinum blonde hair that somehow still looks soft, dark beady eyes and full lips with, of course, just the perfect nose.
In his (well-defined and muscular) arms he was holding a package which had “FRAGILE – Please handle with care!” stickers covered all over it. It seemed like some workers hadn’t got the message because it looked like the package had been used as a personal sandbag for boxing.
The delivery worker placed the dented box down on the floor, and from the sound of the placement Sunoo just knew that whatever was inside that box was not “whole” anymore. Just the thought of it made him wince.
“Here”, a clipboard was handed to him, “If you could just sign here then I’ll be out of your hair.”, a lopsided boyish grin was flashed at him. Sunoo noticed two little fangs that he didn’t expect.
Snapping out of it, he grabbed the blue-inked pen and scribbled his chicken scratch scribble on the paper. Under the “deliverer” section of the paper, it was written “Park Sunday” as the deliverer's name. The name struck Sunoo as incredibly strange. Of course, there are foreigners in South Korea but even Sunday was quite a particular name to have just in general.
“Why is it so dark in your room? What are you, a vampire?”
Sunoo snapped his head up with a surprised expression. It was an ironic remark coming from someone with fangs.
Sunday laughed at his own little rhetoric question as if it was the funniest thing ever.
Something felt weird and out of order, Sunoo thought. This man didn’t feel real for some reason.
Having had enough, Sunoo handed over the clipboard in haste. “Thank you for the package, have a good day!”, Sunoo said so fast he could rival Eminem’s rapping skills and shut the door.
The last thing Sunoo saw before the door closed was the man's expression filled with mirth.
…what the hell?