The Great Storyteller

“Hey, have you read this yet?”

Juho looked up from his desk. He had been just about to take a nap. As usual, he had been writing late into the night. Unaware of his state, Seo Kwang was extremely excited. He had Seo Joong’s new book in his hands.

“This is exceptional! It was worth waiting five years for.”

Juho took the book from his hands. The title was ‘One Room.’

“I’ve read it,” he answered. He had read it as soon it came out, but unlike what he said, Seo Joong had gave him a copy as a gift.

In the book, there was a corporate worker who was slowly losing his grip on his emotions. The time flew by, and he grew more and more dull. Yet, he didn’t bother to resist it. In the end, he became an old man who wasn’t moved by anything. Even after losing his family and parents, he shed no tears.

“Time was just passing by, and I couldn’t have been more afraid,” Seo Joong had said in passing.

When he read the book, he almost felt the same fear Seo Joong had felt in his five-year hiatus. It gave him several goosebumps.

“How was it?” Seo Kwang asked.

“It was incredible,” Juho answered after a brief thought. He didn’t want to lose. “Yawn.”

As soon as he got home, he took long nap. While stretching, he went to the kitchen to find something to eat and found that the table had already been set. There was a note from his mother next to the bowl of rice. ‘I’m going out for little while. I’ll be back soon.’

‘Did she think that I’d be anxious when I woke up?’ With a smile, he took the note and placed it into his desk’s drawer, along with the notebook he had used to write his past failures. After a short glance, he closed the drawer.

After the quick meal, he washed the dishes.

When he went back to his room, he saw piles of paper as usual. ‘I better clean this before mom gets home,” he thought as he picked up the paper. On the pages, he saw that he had written the direction and destination of his story.

“Regret,” he read out loud from the page. The word didn’t have a very good connotation. An unfiltered emotion brought along a cloud of dust, and the waters in his mind began to reek. He loved how fitting the word was.

From his chair, he put his hands on the keyboard. He tried to remember how he felt in that moment. A story couldn’t happen in the blink of an eye. A person had several emotions, and they rose up to the surface while taking different shapes. A writer was also a person. He couldn’t maintain the same emotion every time he wrote. For that reason, he had to remember what he had felt when he first started writing that story.

‘The baby was falling, and the mother rushed to the rescue. The stroller suddenly changed its course towards the right. There was a wall at the end of its course. The stroller slammed against the wall, and the baby took the impact, but the baby wasn’t crying. Silence. A sound echoed throughout the quiet alleyway. “I’m so sick of this!” There was a sound of baby’s wailing. Their voices filled the alleyway together.’

‘Silence and wailing.’

The two contrasting words competed for Juho’s attention before his eyes.

‘A mother who had lost her grip of the stroller. A mother who was sick of her baby. Two babies crying. Silence. What if the mother had let go of the stroller intentionally? What if she had pushed the baby down?’

The boundary between silence and wailing disappeared, and the two became one.

The sound of two women lingered around Juho’s ears. There was a noise. He heard a scream. She had begun screaming the second she’d lost grip of her stroller. It sounded a lot like her annoyed grumbling that had broken the silence in the alleyway.

‘What is she made of? Mother, parent, child, motherly love, murderous intent, impulse, maybe regret.’

He wanted her to regret.

‘A mother who had let go of her baby. People who had ignored her shouts. The baby who didn’t survive.’

He had organized the developments that were going to take place throughout the story and he wrote every morning as soon as the sun rose. Now, he needed to dig deeper. Then…

‘Meow!’ He heard a cry. It sounded like a kitten that was both sad and somewhat annoyed, and he looked back. His eyes met with a black cat, the same one he had seen at Seo Joong’s house. It was looking at his direction with sadness in its eyes.

That cat had been watching its baby as it struggled to go over the windowsill. It was lying down comfortably, and Juho tried talking to it, “Why aren’t you helping?”

“That kid is strong,” the cat answered as his tail moved about.

“That’s not what I’m seeing. Look at its legs, they’re shaking. Maybe it’s too slippery.”

“Human,” the cat quietly called for him. Its squinted eyes sparkled brightly. “This is our business. Stop interfering.”

“Then do something about the wailing.”

Its pupils dilated in the middle of its yellow eyes, and it said, “Aren’t you the one who called for us?”

‘Meow,’ the kitten cried again.

The cat was right. He had called his memory of them for ideas.

“Is it a he or she?”

“A boy.”

“What about the baby inside you?”

At Juho’s words, the cat’s stomach puffed out. Its light, pink nipples became visible.

“A girl.”

“So, you already know, even if the baby hasn’t come out yet.”

“Of course. It’s my baby,” the cat answered as she licked between her legs. Her fur was greasy. She was quite dirty.

“Should I bring you something to eat?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“The baby needs nutrition.”

She scoffed.

“My baby’s strong.”

“Then, how about bath water?”

“Are you trying to take me in?” she asked with hostility. On the other hand, she sounded seductive.

“I don’t know if I can take both of you in,” he answered as he put out his hand to stroke her.

‘Meow,’ the baby cried once again. Its mother raised her claws.

“Then, get lost,” she snapped as she scratched Juho’s hand.

There were scratched in his hand, and blood slowly bubbled up to the surface. A drop of it spilled through the crack in his skin.

‘Meow.’

The cat no longer spoke like a person, and Juho opened his eyes. There was nothing on the windowsill.

He thought of the upcoming developments for his characters.

“A son,” and started typing away. ‘Stomach twice the size of her breasts, two people, four lives.’ The sound of typing that had filled the room came to a sudden stop.

That wasn’t enough.

‘This isn’t enough. It’s too flat. I need it to be richer,’ he thought. He wanted to add more color to his story. He wanted to have something or a character that stuck out ever so slightly.

Juho looked through the piles of paper in the corner of his room. ‘Not this, or this, or that.’ Pieces of paper fell from his hands, and he opened another box nearby. It was also filled with paper.

“No, no, it was here somewh… found it!”

He had picked up two sheets of paper.

“A clown and an audience.”

A clown imitated other people around him… people around him, puppies, trees, cars, things within like smiles, tears, conversations, murder, urges, sex. He imitated just about anything.

Then there was an audience of one beside him. He was the person who would evaluate the clown and he mostly spoke positive words. In response, the clown imitated him.

‘I should include these two.’

He had already written a story for the two characters, and Juho had stayed up several nights to finish it. He took the two pages to the desk. It was almost like finding the missing pieces to a puzzle. They fit perfectly.

A clown and an audience. A mother and her son.

Juho imagined what the son would look like. The baby turned around as he babbled, and more time had passed. Four years old, seven years old, twelve years old, it was still not enough. She had said that her baby was strong. Twenty, thirty-two, forty-five. He thought about the trembling kitten, and he knew he had gone too far.

“Eighteen years old.” That was it. Juho moved his hands busily and smiled through the light shining from the computer screen.

*

Baron had been looking at a blog. It was written by the person who had claimed that Yun Woo was an innocent girl. He went by the nickname HongSam and had written several book introductions and reviews. Baron had bought quite a few books after reading HongSam’s reviews.

“I can’t find it.”

For some reason, HongSam hadn’t been writing very often. Without any explanation, the announcement had said that he wouldn’t be able to upload anything for a while.

‘Did he go on a trip? He said he was an adult, so maybe he’s trying to make a living.’

Still, as an avid reader of his blog, Baron was disappointed by his absence.

The comment sections were also curious about his whereabouts. Among many reasons for the blog’s popularity, the biggest reason was that his affection toward books was very apparent in the way he wrote his reviews. Every single review had been written after he had read through a book. He read a ridiculous amount of books, and people naturally believed what he wrote.

Now, he had disappeared without an explanation. Baron too had left a comment. ‘Is there something going on in your life?’

“Son, come out and eat.”

“OK,” he answered as he turned off the computer and walked out to the kitchen.

*

“So what do you want to eat?”

“What do you want, Baron?” Juho asked.

They were on their way back from exercising together. Baron had been exercising consistently for quite a long time. The skills he had shown at the sprint race were the result of his consistent effort up to that point.

He usually walked around the park in the evening while Juho’s activities were mostly in the morning, so there had been no chance for them to run into each other.

As he ran errands at the market for his mother, Juho decided to take Baron along for snacks. There was an intoxicating smell, and they stopped in front of an old lady who was cooking pancakes on a grill.

“Two seafood pancakes with green onions, please.”

The lady took turns looking at Juho and Baron, and then answered with a smile. The batter started to sizzle as soon as it came into contact with the grill. Its golden brown color made it look all the more scrumptious. Food tasted a lot better after exercising.

As he quietly watched the pancakes cooking, Juho suddenly remembered something and said with his eyes on the grill, “Have you been to HongSam’s blog recently?”

“Yeah, there hasn’t been any updates.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Don’t know. HongSam himself isn’t saying anything, so there’s no way for me to know.”

“True.”

Baron had answered without taking his eyes off of the grill. He too was an avid reader of HongSam’s blog, who had also been left confused. ‘Why hasn’t he been writing anything?’

“Maybe he’s just tired of it,” Baron said brusquely.

There was a deep sense of disappointment in his tone. Because of the nature of his blog, HongSam had to read through an entire book before writing a review. If he was tired of having to read through an entire book for every review, it would have made sense that he was growing tired of it. Still, there were doubts as to what might have happened.

“Maybe, but wouldn’t he have said that he was quitting altogether?”

“I guess so. Maybe he’s been in an accident?”

If he had been in an accident, he might not have gotten around giving his readers an update.

“Let’s see, it’s been about a month since his last post, so if he really was in an accident, his injury was severe enough to keep in the hospital for at least four weeks.”

“Hm. Not something I want to think about.”

“Right.”

Baron thought briefly. If there had to be another reason…

“He did say he was an adult, so it has to be that he’s trying to make a living.”