A flower floating on the lake
Chapter 23. The Wind's Circumstances
백운하
2021.10.31Views 20
Like a delicate flower that blooms like that
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Chapter 23. The Wind's Circumstances
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“Okay, that’s it!”
“Huh? Oh, where is that!”
“Tell me more.”
“That’s all I know. You guys finish this story.”
The heroine, wearing a blue cloak, drifted like the wind. She became a flying whale to the children of the neighborhood. She wandered from place to place, telling them stories she heard along the way. But the story that came out of her mouth the most was, without fail, the story of her heartbreaking first love. The children knew it was her story even without saying a word. Whenever she spoke of her first love, she had an expression that seemed to soar, yet at the same time, she looked like a whale about to fall.
“It’s a star! A star has come.”
“Shh, brother, if we get caught, you’ll get beaten.”
Yeoju and Jimin were called stars. Since the children they sought were usually from back alleys, the shining Yeoju and Jimin were like stars to them. Yeoju remembered her lost childhood, and Jimin lost the painful times he had experienced. The two became whales, wanting to spread hope through their stories. In a way, it was a natural progression.
Jimin was born in the back alleys of a red-light district. No child born in a red-light district could be raised by a normal mother. Pimps would force these barely weaned children into prostitution. Jimin was one of them, but when the once-pretty Jimin turned ten, the pimp decided to use her for other means of making money. At ten, Jimin ran away. And now, he was returning to the same back alley he'd fled from. In the back alleys where I'd grown up, where pain had filled me, there were still children suffering.
“...Give me money. Money... Mom is sick..”
“Honey, are you hungry?”
Jimin put some bread in a tin can that clinked. He patted the child's head as he ate hurriedly, apparently hungry, and pointed to a dark back alley. It was a darkness that seemed as if anything could be swallowed.
“Call your friends. I’ll give you something to eat, okay?”
"yes!"
The child ran into the darkness, oblivious to the rags he was barely wearing. As the female protagonist held back tears at the sight of the bottom finally being revealed, the door to the room next to Jimin opened.
“...Who are you? Who are you to the children..”
“...”
A middle-aged woman leaning against the door stared intently at Jimin, whose face was half covered by a mask. Jimin, too, couldn't take his eyes off the woman. He clearly remembered what the pimp had muttered as a child, watching Jimin grow prettier. "The child is becoming more and more like her mother. Even the mole under her mouth is the same." As young Jimin listened to those words, he would picture his mother's face. That face was hope.
"...mom?"
Finally, the floodgates of longing burst open.