1.2 | Anemoia

1|one

Seon SungKyu was a lonely, aging man who owned a marinated crab restaurant and a house with a large courtyard, both on very nice pieces of real estate. His wife had died of fever very long ago, when his daughter was a middle schooler, and he had assumed the roles of both a mother and father since then. 

He was older than his daughter. Much older. He already looked like a grandfather when she turned twenty. His teeth were crooked and his hair was white. The old man wore yellowing shirts and torn hem pants, because he thought his daughter could buy more fashionable clothes if he saved money. His restaurant was doing good, but they were in a small town, after all. 

There wasn't much to be done. Wasn't much to see. His daughter wanted to go to Seoul. She started speaking in a Seoul accent, and she had different friends which she never brought over to her house. It didn't take the old man much time to figure out the abrupt change in her behavior. 

She would lash out at him, not come home late at night, while he waited for her on the front porch, she would insult his cooking, call him a brainless oaf, and ask him what worthwhile he had done his entire life. He couldn't answer any of those accusations. Sometimes, he would sit alone and look at the sea, cry a little, think where had he gone wrong. 

There wasn't much time to even think in the end. His daughter left the house one day, saying that she was sick and tired of him and his shitty country life. Seon SungKyu never heard from her again. 

Half a decade later, his quiet village was in an uproar on a quaint Sunday morning. A child had washed ashore, and had no guardian. He wore expensive fleece jackets and had a diamond ring fastened across his neck, but he looked like he had been starved for days. 

That boy was no less than an omen. 

"Why did his guardian choose our village of all places?" The rice cake shop ahjumma said bitterly, "left this wretched child with us." 

The villagers wanted the ghastly boy to have drowned overnight, and the local police station made no efforts to locate his parents. Seon SungKyu was different from them. He wanted the boy to stop being difficult and just speak his name, his birthday, and where he was from. 

"He looks like he's from Seoul, can't you look him up?" He rubbed his palms together before the local police constable, and bought them tiffin boxes from his own restaurant. 

"Ah, this old geezer," the constable slammed his hat on the table, "why don't you go find his parents yourself?" 

"I can't," he said, "that is why I am asking you. Don't you pity him? What if he was your son?" 

The constable sighed, and took the tiffin boxes. "See ahjussi, just by the looks of him, one can tell that he was meant to be dead. He's wearing three jackets, no child out on an excursion wears three. Whoever put him there wished him to die." 

SungKyu's feeble heart raged. 

"Boys like those are mostly illegitimate children of big people. Their step mothers or stepfathers kill them, so that they can't demand shares for property later on." 

There were bruises on the boy's body. Black, blue, yellow, purple, red, in places where it should never have been. He lay in the hospital, where the only person who took him with kindness was the new resident transferred from Seoul. 

"Well it's not hard to say that he had been, er... abused," the resident told SungKyu one day, as he had taken on the responsibility as the boy's guardian. "I could legally report it, but the constable ahjussi told me that if higher ups get wind of this boy, they'd kill him without remorse." 

The resident then leaned in to whisper, "It's probably cause he's some Congressman's son. Don't tell anyone, they'd use this child to extort money."