In the Korean peninsula, they had a name for the pale skinned, pale eyed foreigners, if Jimin was to translate it into their language, he would say, "white pigs." But now, with a tall man who stood at an astonishing height of 6 feet staring him down with his steely grey eyes, he didn't have the guts to utter, "흰 돼지". He had seen what happened to men who spat at the white skinned.
They never ended well.
But they didn't stop trying.
Jimin remembers Mrs. Shen, a nearly ageless woman with only 5 strands of grey hair, say that the men who called the Pale names, took revenge, however small it might be, for taking away their homes, their children and their lives which they now spent working for the Elites.
Jimin believed them. He gulped her words down as if it was the words spoken by the Head Preacher on their Sunday mass.
She was much better at spinning lies, his mother said, so he preferred her sweet tales over the monotone of the Priest.
The man stared him down, and then asked in their harsh, unforgiving tongue, "How old is this brat?"
Mrs.Shen hesitated for a second, before replying with a reluctant, "12."
The man let out a laugh, in Jimin's ears it felt like the grating of a metalworker's saw against steel. The man with grey eyes looked at him again, then he asked, "Do you know what you are here for?" Jimin gulped, his fear was slowly creeping into his bones, it was a cold gnawing against the rubber rain-cover he wore. He nodded his head. In the motion they used to say no.
"You didn't tell him?"
Mrs. Shen hesitated again, soundlessly she nodded her answer too.
The man knelt down, his face right in Jimin's face. The horror of feeling those cruel eyes inspect him was far worse from the loud warning that blared from the sirens at the stroke of midnight. "Little boy, you are going to be sold." Jimin felt cold, in a way that predicted something bad was about to happen. In the way Death crept into their beds and slit their throats.
Jimin croaked out, "No." clenching on Mrs. Shen's dress as he used it like a curtain to hide himself.
The man clenched his jaw, and Jimin knew that his predatory eyes flashed in a tone of warning.
"Hey! What is happening here?" His father's voice travelled from the back door. His white shirt covered in dark engine oil barely kept itself around his strong arms. "Who is this man, Mrs. Shen?" Mr. Park's fury came through an aggressive harrumph that showered the other man's face, intoxicating him with the strong smell of cigarettes, making him turn his head away with a cough.
Mrs. Shen was petrified, as if the angry winds in their demonic dance had frozen her. Jimin let go of the material of her skirt and aimed for a safer place — behind his father. The father that wouldn't hesitate to become his son's shield in front of a waterfall of bullets. A true soldier doesn't need a shield, but Jimin didn't have the time to become a soldier before his shield was gone.
The trembling stars of the night sky walked through the cracked window with waving curtains. Their light contoured the blue chin of Mr. Park, who helplessly laid in a pool of pain and suffering — his own blood was leaking all over the floor and as the time went by, he couldn't find the energy to even lift any of his fingers.
The tiredness pressed his eyelids together, forcing him into an endless rest, but he knew better than anyone that if he was to close his eyes, he wouldn't open them ever again.
The thing he was thankful for, at least, now as he lived his last moments, was that his last breath was to be a sigh of relief. That was until, not so much to his liking, his son's eyes met his, and they frightenedly traveled to the blood outlining him, in which his transformer figurine drowned.
"Dad?" He whispered, too low for the tall man to hear. His voice faded into the darkness in the air, so he just watched through his almost closed eyelids how the fully clothed figure approached his father, walking through his blood.
The older man couldn't mutter anything as a drop of blood mixed with saliva flowed down the corner of his mouth with his desperate gamble to escape from the man's clutches.
It looked like his last moments wouldn't be peaceful either, judging based on how the mysterious man embraced a baseball bat with his blood stained fingers.
And as the weapon came crashing down, he had no regrets, he pressed his eyes close and pretended that his son was not there anymore, that everything was fine. As it touched his forehead, he felt nothing but the frightened stare of the young boy.
It was over.
His dad died with a smile on his lips. He smiled when the weapon touched his skin, when it tore through the flesh and muscles and even when the sickening crack of bones echoed in Jimin's ears.
The palpable scent of blood in the air; the scent of death in the air frightened him. He couldn't move from his crouch in the corner of the room, he couldn't close his eyes, he could only watch as the scene replayed itself over and over again behind his eyes.
The blood on his pale cream color shirt and the gore on the walls, he could believe. What he couldn't believe was that his dad was dead.
"Dad?" he asked again, after the tall man had left, after his footsteps had vanished into the gloom of the night. After the sun peeked from beneath the bruised clouds of monsoon and when he could barely remember the man's features, the only thing ingrained in his memory was the red bird
The glowing tattoo of the red bird he had seen his father paint onto the skin of that man.
"He is dead." He declared with cold resignation.
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