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Spores fall like snow.
They drift in endless veils of pale dust, catching on ribbed scaffolds and battered billboards, threading through cracked windows and abandoned streets. They cling, to the hem of a coat, to the fold of a hood, like an affectionate creature that will not be shaken off.
The city is an empty husk, all stone and glass and echo. The streets are blanketed by a layer of powdered white, the streetlamps crowned by pale mushrooms. A fountain in the square stands forlorn—the water long gone, its basin furred with soft colonies.
Junhan roams through the square. A scarf winds around his head and over his mouth, knotted securely beneath his hood. The spores gather upon him, kissing his shoulders, his sleeves, the creases of his gloves, dusting him in the same speckled white as the world around him. He has learned the city’s turns, the fickle whims of the wind. He knows where the air settles, knows the courtyards where it spins itself in dizzy pirouettes. He knows where the spores gather to purr in sunlight, and he knows where they flare hungrily in the shadows.
He does not seek, does not hurry. He has no destination, and requires none.
The western square cradles an old station, a carcass of steel and shattered glass. A clock hangs, stilled at the hour of noon.
Junhan steps through the doorless entrance. Glass crunches underfoot, like bones snapping. Inside, the air is a drifting sea of gold-lit dust, spores scattering beams of light off broken panes. The light falls upon the far end of the hall, where a mural colors the wall. The saints’ faces, once rendered in pigment, are now half-devoured by fungus, their robes softened by pale fuzz. There is a bench by the wall, upon which a figure slumps beneath a coat. Faint threads of white climb from its collar like frost on a window.
Junhan does not dwell upon it. He affords the dead their dignity, and he affords the living their silence. He turns his gaze toward the ticket counter, where tickets were once pressed into expectant hands. Now, the counter is furred, and the little bell has become a pale bellcap ringing only when the wind finds it—a remembrance of the invisible choreography that once belonged to someone’s life.
Junhan likes that the world retains the shape of absence.
“You’re not a ghost, are you?”
Junhan turns. The slumped shape on the bench stirs, unfolding into a person. The coat slips, revealing a mop of long, tousled hair gleaming golden in the slanted light. He sits upright, spores glinting from his lashes. His eyes are feverishly bright, pupils eclipsing caramel-brown. A laugh tears loose, sending a puff of spores whirling. “Don’t frown,” he giggles. “It’s only air. See?—” He waves a hand, fingers tracing bright loops in the dust. “It seeps in, soft and silver—” his palm presses to his sternum—“it fills me until I’m burning."
Junhan tilts his head. “Careful,” he murmurs.
The stranger leans forward. He grins, gummy and reckless but not unkind. “You’re pretty,” he declares, as though it’s the simplest truth. “I’m Jooyeon.”
“Junhan.” He responds, because there is no harm in names.
Jooyeon points at the mural. “They’re laughing, you know. You can’t hear it because you keep your cotton in, but they’re laughing.”
Junhan’s gaze lingers on the wall. “Only the wind.”
Jooyeon chuckles, delighted. “That too.” He stands, steadying himself with a hand on the bench. He inclines toward Junhan, curious. “Walk with me? If you’re not bound to your shadows, that is.”
“Shadows?”
“They cling. They’re greedy like that.”
The corner of Junhan’s mouth lifts. “I don’t mind company.”
Jooyeon’s grin widens. “I’ll count that as yes.”
The wind stirs the broken panes. The spores flare, then subside, as though the station sighs. Junhan studies Jooyeon for a moment—spore-drunk, dancing on the edge of delirium. “Don’t breathe too deep,” he offers.
Jooyeon's brow arches in response, though his grin does not fade in the slightest. His hand lifts toward the light, reaching as though trying to catch the swirling dust. He beckons Junhan with a playful tilt of his head.
Junhan huffs. “I'll pass.”
Jooyeon leans closer anyway, a glint of mirth in his eyes. “Tell me what you see without it.”
“You first.”
Jooyeon closes his eyes with a faint smile. “I'll try. It would be easier if you breathed with me, otherwise it’s like describing hunger to someone who’s never eaten.” He takes a deep breath. “The mural—look. The saints carry their heads like lanterns. Their eyes watch me from their palms. The spores tumble like wedding rice—though I know it’s only snow. I smell oranges too, too many to eat. Someone’s singing, but it’s all vowels, no words.”
Junhan listens, not to the image, but to the cadence of Jooyeon’s voice, the way it dips and rises as he speaks. He watches the leap of his throat when he laughs, feels the faint warmth of his skin radiating in the space. He feels, as a distant sensation, a pull towards this stranger the same way a moth is pulled towards light. He wonders, dryly, if he is the glass abandoned on the table when everyone else drifts off to dance. He thinks of the word inevitable, and sets it gently on the floor.
Elsewhere, in the same room—a child licks frost off a window and tastes sugar. Elsewhere—a woman paints her nails the exact gray of the winter sky. Elsewhere—the spores fall on a sleeping man and fill his dreams with libraries; he wakes with dust on his lips and thinks he has read a thousand books.
They walk. Jooyeon leads and Junhan follows.
The concourse opens into a long corridor where ticket stubs flutter like pale leaves. In a closet sits a custodian long claimed, his uniform knitted through with delicate filaments that twine around his ribs and out of his mouth like a grotesque bouquet.
Jooyeon pauses, his brightness dimming into something almost solemn. “Gruesome, isn’t it?” he murmurs. “Everything keeps… changing.” His tongue trips, searching. Eventually, he gives up and flashes that gummy grin. “The world is constantly shifting and turning, yet we only notice when it has already begun to become something unrecognizable.”
“The world is large,” Junhan replies. “More often than not, any changes are beyond what the mind can comprehend.”
Jooyeon hums. “Like trying to count the snowflakes in a storm.” He shakes his head, a small, breathless laugh escaping him. “I’d never stop counting.”
They tread through the winding corridor, watching the spore-snow puff around their shoes.
Jooyeon studies Junhan’s face with a tentative curiosity. “Do you ever think about it?” He asks softly. “Just breathing, until the world tilts?”
Junhan shrugs. “Sometimes. But I like knowing where the edge is.” There is a measurable threshold where his vision begins to blur. He has flirted with it, and stepped back. He prefers clarity over blurred lines.
Jooyeon laughs, delighted. “I like you.”
Junhan glances at him, amused despite himself. “You’re very sure of that.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
The corridor spills into a side hall, where rows of glass display cases stand, fogged from within. Inside one case hangs a dress, wedding-white, its fabric stiff with fungus crawling in a curious imitation of lace. In another, a collection of clocks hang handless, their faces blurred into fuzzy ovals. Even in silence, the station is crowded—with settling dust, with faint laughter stored in rafters, with the cough of time unspooled.
“Do you yearn for anything?”
Junhan pauses, contemplating. Eventually, he shakes his head. “No. I just keep walking.” He glances at Jooyeon. “You?”
Jooyeon hesitates. “...To be a window to the world,” he says at last. “Even if it makes a fool of me. It feels worse keeping everything at bay.”
Junhan’s eyes rest on him, thoughtful. “What if keeping it at bay is the only way to stop it from swallowing you whole?"
“Perhaps,” Jooyeon hums. “But in the end, a hand is just a shape in the dark. Who knows what it's reaching for?” His voice lingers, curling softly in Junhan’s ear. A small, uninvited image touches him then—Jooyeon’s mouth, warm against the cloth covering his own.
He sets it gently aside on the shelf beside the clocks, leaving it to fuzz over in the dust.
“Come here,” Jooyeon says, as though answering the thought itself. He reaches to tug carefully at the knot of Junhan’s scarf.
“No.”
Jooyeon stills, but he doesn’t retreat. His smile softens. “Just for a moment,” he promises. “My air for yours.”
Junhan doesn’t move—but when Jooyeon lifts the edge of his coat, drawing it over them like a canopy, Junhan steps beneath it. They stand together in the shadowed tent. For a moment, everything is very intimate and very ridiculous. Slowly Junhan lowers his scarf, drawing a tentative breath.
He feels nothing at first, save for the awareness of another person’s ribs lifting and falling inches away from his own. Then, quietly, the edges of his vision blur. The world takes on a hushed brightness, as though seen through glass filled with water and light.
“Do you hear it?” Jooyeon whispers, radiant. “The saints—they sing.”
Junhan hears no hymn, but he does hear the echoes of a city. Shoes striking stone, scaffolds ringing with laughter, the bated breath before a kiss. Memories expand, spilling outward, gilding the air around him. He feels sun-warmed metal against his skin, tastes the faint sweetness of honey kissing his tongue. Light trembles along fractured glass, scattering a kaleidoscope across his vision.
Junhan takes another careful breath—just enough to share Jooyeon’s world for another moment. Then, he steps back. The coat falls, taking the warmth and sweetness with it. The world snaps into shape once more, though it bears the faint taste of ecstasy.
Jooyeon is flushed, his eyes bright. “How was it?”
Junhan lifts his scarf from where it has slipped and reties it. “Strange. But not entirely unwelcome, I suppose.”
They leave the station together. They walk with the easy almost-touch of strangers on crowded sidewalks—except there is no crowd, and they are not strangers—not anymore. At least, Junhan doesn’t think they are.
The spores keep what they are given. If you laugh in a doorway, the doorway laughs when it is empty. If you kiss someone in a coat’s shadow, the coat remembers warmth, and later when the wind claws at it, it refuses to relinquish it.
Jooyeon kicks at a glittering drift. His hair is haloed in white, like a crown a child would make from dandelions. “I don’t wish to change you,” He blurts. “I only want…” He pauses, searching for the right word.
“...Company?”
Jooyeon blinks. It is a small word for a large hunger. He glances up, suddenly anxious. “Is that a burden?”
“No,” Junhan says, and the certainty in his voice surprises even himself.
Jooyeon beams.
The boulevard drifts with spores like a dream of winter. A body lies on a bus stop bench, its coat arranged carefully over its chest. Thin strands rise from its mouth into the air, like a tale not yet finished. They turn into a narrow street where balconies drip with pale frills, where a bicycle is welded to the sidewalk by white rinds that used to be tires.
“You’re sure about not wanting more?”
Junhan nods. “Want is a burden in its own ways. I already have more than I care to carry.”
Jooyeon tilts his head. “I could do the wanting for you.”
“You can if you’d like,” Junhan replies. “I’ll watch.”
Jooyeon laughs, delighted by the permission.
Somewhere—a boy writes a letter he will never send. Somewhere—two strangers share a cigarette beneath an awning. Somewhere—a man teaches his daughter how to braid, and the child watches with wonder in her eyes.
At the edge of the city stands a theatre veiled by lacy white growth. Inside, the seats are an upholstered meadow of pale fuzz. Jooyeon bounds up onto the stage. “Tonight, I am the playwright and the play, the saint and the sinner.” He turns to Junhan with a flourish. “And you, solemn one, are my muse.” Junhan smiles, stepping into the aisle. He sits in the front row, his chin upon his hand, and watches as Jooyeon performs into the empty hall.
Jooyeon spins visions into the spore-thick air. He speaks of parades and choirs, of saints and worship, of prayers and laughter. Junhan listens. He collects each image, carefully placing it down so that it can be remembered. He feels, unexpectedly, the aftertaste of their shared breath settle inside him like a small animal finding a hollow to nest. He thinks of the word companionship, and is surprised to discover he does not spurn it.
It is not too bad of a thing for two people to agree to keep walking in the same direction for a while.
When Jooyeon has finished, they leave through the backstage door.
In the alley, the spores fall in a bright column of ruin. Jooyeon steps into it, face uplifted. Junhan watches the pale specks color his lashes white. They stand together, two figures outlined by dust. Junhan tugs lightly on Jooyeon’s sleeve. Jooyeon opens his eyes, falling into step.
The spores continue falling. Jooyeon describes to him another vision—a man painting flowers on his lover—and Junhan listens quietly.
There is madness if you go too far, and decay when you stay too long. There is freedom in both saying yes and saying no.
They keep walking.