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The Rotten Ones

Sarah Szabo

    The rook sailed southward, its black wings spread wide against the blue sky while Lee Sung-Ki watched it go from the earth below. He did not know what kind of bird it was—he knew little of birds at all—but he knew that it could fly, and as it disappeared from his sight into the backdrop of green trees on distant hills, he wished that he could follow. To be away from the stone and steel, to see forbidden cities—that’d be truly something, Sung-Ki thought.
     Not today, though. Today was school, and hunger, as yesterday was, as tomorrow would likely be, and it was not his lot to complain. As he turned and blinked, his eyes dazed from gazing upward into the bright blue of the morning, someone’s fist bumped him, not lightly, on the shoulder.
    “Heads up, kid,” another boy said, wheeling around from behind to the front of him.
    “Oh. Good morning, Woo-Yung,” Sung-Ki said. Ahn Woo-Yung was the other boy’s full name, and Sung-Ki regarded him as he hopped from one foot to the other, restlessly, his lanky limbs dangling at his sides. He was a year older than Sung-Ki, perhaps less, but easily two heads taller. His face, more ugly and red-dotted from day to day, was set, as was typical, in the expression of a lazy grin. Both his shirt and his skin looked dirty, at least three days in to needing a vigorous wash—not that it seemed much to concern him.
    “What’re you doing, staring at up there,” asked Woo-Yung. “See a balloon?”
    “I didn’t see you at school yesterday,” Sung-Ki said, ignoring the question. “Did something happen?”
    “No, everything’s great,” Woo-Yung said, dismissively, as he dug something out of his nose with his thumb. “I found something better to do, though. You should come with me.” Woo-Yung had a worn and torn old baseball with him, which he was tossing high in the air with one hand and catching in the other, casually, while he talked.
    “Come with you?” Sung-Ki looked at his feet, and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Now?”
    Woo-Yung nodded, lobbed up the ball again. “Right now.”
    “What for?”
    “Guess.”
    “To... play baseball?”
    “No, stupid,” Woo-Yung said. “Where would we play baseball at?”
    Sung-Ki wrapped his thumbs around the straps of his knapsack, growing anxious at the thought of skipping school. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, especially for you,” he said. “You can’t miss two days. You’ll get in trouble. I’ll get in trouble.”
    “No, you’ll get in trouble if you don’t come with me,” Woo-Yung retorted, in a teasing tone. “Because what I’ll do, if you don’t come? I’ll tell everyone we know that Lee Sung-Ki was too cowardly, too scared, too much of a teensy shrimp to go on an adventure. And that’ll be who you are. Forever.”
    “Please don’t.”
    “Then come with me.”
    Sung-Ki looked around warily, as though he would only be able to join the older boy if he slinked away with no one seeing him. He had, of course, already made up his mind.
    “Where are we going?” he asked the other one, a devious smile dawning on his face.
    Woo-Yung threw the baseball terrifically high in the air, skipped backwards into the street, and caught it in both hands, just above his eyes. “It’s a bit of a walk,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
    |
    Kim Yu-Ri was shifting her weight from foot to foot as she stood by the unshaded aisle in Chongjin Market, eyeing the burlap sacks across the way. Inside the tops of them, just beneath their folds, she could spy little white grains of rice piled high, amounting to twenty pounds a bag, or maybe more. Her legs were sore, the bones and muscles both, her ankles creaky and her calves tight from the strain of standing up so long, after so little sleep, so soon after yesterday. But she refused to sit down, knowing that her best chances of being noticed by passing shoppers required being seen—her, and her baby both. The child was strapped up in a swaddling cloth held taut around Yu-Ri’s shoulders and cradled in her arms, swaying side to side, asleep. Her name was Lee Su-Dae.
    Yu-Ri knew that she could easily set the baby down; that if she did, she’d likely go on resting, not be fussy, and also be one less burden for her weary body—but she could not chance looking so relaxed. It would ruin the picture.
    “Eggs,” she said aloud, to the walkers, walking by. “Fresh eggs.”
    No one looked up—some were on their way elsewhere, some were drawn instead to the rice grains bagged in burlap. Another group approached, and she repeated her pitch toward them.
    “Eggs? Fresh eggs.”
    Beside her, her two chickens clucked, and bawked, and flapped their wings within their cages impotently. She had a dozen eggs cloth-cushioned on a barrel above them, arranged together in a clean and neat display.
    “Eggs,” she said again, to no one. “Fresh eggs.”
    |
    Far from the streets and garbage-clogged gutters, the two boys walked, more than an hour then into their journey—Woo-Yung’s grand adventure. The older one had remained obstinate all the while, refusing as yet to explain to Sung-Ki where their endpoint was, beyond an assurance that, yes, there was one. Then again, Sung-Ki had not pressed the question too vigorously. Woo-Yung, after all, was older, surely wiser, possessing of a casual self-assurance that opposed all of Sung-Ki’s reservations, and made his worries seem trivial. Maybe it was because he was so tall. Still though, despite the older boy’s confidence, Sung-Ki was inwardly becoming more and more irresolute, the further they walked through trees and brush increasingly tangled, up the uneven rocky mountainside that bordered the city’s south.
    The sun edged up toward its noontime peak, its light hazy through the wooded ceiling of the forest. Sung-Ki wondered what he was missing at school—if his absence had even been noticed. He considered that it was possible that his class had been tasked today with taking their bowls to the industrial riverbanks, to pick corn kernels from the mud—and with that in mind, he found it hard to regret taking a day for himself. Still, the long walk uphill he was taking now was not what he would have chosen for his free day, given the option. The skin beneath his shirt was slick with sweat, and his head swam in the mounting heat. With increasing frequency, as he ambled clumsily over the occasional stone half his height with his hands, his vision was drowned in a fuliginous silver fog as dizziness took over, his bloodflow laboring to keep up with the day’s unusual demands and failing at every other turn. With the straps digging into his shoulders, he wished he had thought sooner to find a place to leave his backpack for later retrieval. He wouldn’t chance it now—the hillside was all unknown, and the trees all looked too similar.
    “It’s not much farther, now,” said Woo-Yung, still heaving his baseball in the air at every pause in his step, not at all obviously tired.
    “I wish you’d told me how far this would be,” Sung-Ki protested. “I would’ve left my bag at home.”
    “No, no, we’ll need it,” said the other, his meaning ambiguous. “Give it here, though, I’ll carry it.”
    The lightened load was welcome, if too late to keep a creeping ache from setting in to Sung-Ki’s back. “How much farther?” he asked.
    “We’re almost there. Trust me. You’ll be glad you came.”
    It was hardly five minutes later that Woo-Yung halted his advance, slinging Sung-Ki’s bag onto the ground and spinning, eyes up, searching for something. Sung-Ki halted just below him, hands on his knees, unhappy. If this was the place, Sung-Ki thought, then he would have to seriously consider reevaluating his friendship with the older boy. There was nothing remarkable here to his eyes; the same brown trees, the same stony ground—not even a decent view of the city below. He felt a bead of perspiration form on the tip of his nose, and followed it with his eyes as it slipped and fell onto the ground between his feet.
    Within the leafy detritus, something orange caught his eye.
    “This is it,” said Woo-Yung. “We’re here.”
    Sung-Ki knelt, not immediately responding, and gingerly brushed away the dirt and dust from the flesh of the rounded fruit, lifting it delicately from the earth between two fingers. It was small, small enough to fit fully in his dwarfish hand, and soft enough that even his wary grip was strong enough to make its skin give just a little, seeping pungent juice. A trio of ants darted across Sung-Ki’s fingers, and he gently shook them off.
    “It’s an apricot,” he said.
    “They’re all apricots,” Woo-Yung replied. And for a moment, Sung-Ki took the comment with confusion, looking first between his feet to see if he’d missed many more on the ground around him. Then he cast his eyes at Woo-Yung, and followed his pointing finger toward the nearby trees, up, up into their branches, into the leaves, high up near their very tops where dozens more were nestled, swaying by their stems in fruiting bloom.
    Sung-Ki’s expression said more at that moment than any words could muster, and Woo-Yung leapt the distance between them with a grin on his face, clapping the young boy on the shoulder. “See? See? I told you you’d love it,” he said.
    Though his mouth watered, Sung-Ki paused before taking a bite of the fruit in his palms, raising it first to Woo-Yung. The older boy leaned over and sank his teeth in, spurting juice upon his face and onto Sung-Ki’s hair. “Oh, god,” said Woo-Yung. “It’s so ripe.”
    “I think it’s rotten,” said Sung-Ki, bringing the fruit to his lips for a bite of his own. Its innards were all goo, hardly the firm shapeliness he figured a fresh one, right off the vine would have.
    “They might all be rotten,” said Woo-Yung, licking his lips and fingers. “Still, open your bag up. I’ll climb the tree and see.”
    Sung-Ki darted up the rocks and grabbed his backpack, dumping out the heavy books inside it to make room for what he hoped would be a bounty large enough to fill up the entire space within. At the same moment, lean and slender Woo-Yung made an effortless leap up to one tree’s lowest branch, and the leaves rustled loudly at his touch. Sung-Ki looked up, and squinted, unsure if he could see any fruits in bloom immediately above him, where Woo-Yung would be able to reach.
     But below the branches—that was different. His eyes open with renewed focus, Sung-Ki scanned the stony ground, its piles of brittle wood and dying leaves. As his gaze adjusted to the patterns of the forest floor, the fruits revealed themselves to him. One, two, two more—he dropped to his knees, and scooped them toward his bag, leaves and dirt and all. One squished entirely at his touch, so he balled it up and ate it there, on his knees, instead.
    “I’ve got one,” said Woo-Yung. “Sung-Ki, I’ve found one, catch it.”
    He looked up just in time to see the falling fruit before it hit him square between the eyes, and unlike the ones down on the ground, this one was firm, fresh, and painful. “Oops,” Woo-Yung said, a chuckle in his voice. Sung-Ki picked it up and took a spiteful bite out of it, intending to save the rest for the older boy—but the fruit tasted so delicious, that he devoured it down to the pit instead.
    “Are there more, down there?” called Woo-Yung, advancing ever higher into the ceiling of the forest. “They must have all fallen... There were so many more on the lower branches, last time I was here.”
    “There are some,” said Sung-Ki. “But they’re all soft, and old.”
    “Get them anyway. I’m going to climb higher... There are dozens, higher up, but I can’t reach them yet.”
    “Shake the branches,” Sung-Ki suggested, digging around for the squishy fruits already fallen. He looked around toward the other trees, wondering what was hidden in their branches, if anything. “Maybe you should climb another one,” he said. “I can’t tell if there are any others, any lower. But maybe.”
    “Give me a second,” said Woo-Yung. And then there was a loud commotion of branches snapping, leaves shaking, and panicked, heavy breath, and Sung-Ki started, fearing the older boy had fallen, or worse yet, was falling down on top of him. But he had only jumped from one branch to another, and as he paused there up above, there was another violent rustling down below, and Sung-Ki finally realized that the sound was not Woo-Yung’s doing, nor the breeze—it was something else.
    Someone else.
    “What do you think you’re doing here, you filthy ratshit thief.”
    Sung-Ki whirled on his heels at the sound of the voice, a man’s gravelly snarl, furious and low. In his panic, his feet caught beneath an unseen root, and he tumbled, twisting, to the forest floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, reflexively.
    The stranger loomed above him, hunched over inside a torn brown coat, with perhaps no other clothes beneath. His hair was dark, long, and tangled like a bird’s nest, his mouth a grimy scowl. He looked like a creature born from mud, as much earth as he was man, with all the caked-on grime—and in his blackened, filthy hand, the knife shone all the brighter. “What do you think you’re doing here,” the stranger growled again.
    Sung-Ki was stammering malformed apologies, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” sinking more and more into the wet leaves when he should have been pushing himself up by now and sprinting far away. He knew it, yet still he could not manage to rise. He heard someone call his name, but did not at first understand why.
    “You have my fruit in that bag there? Hm? Is that what you have there, in that bag, boy? My fruit?”
    Before Sung-Ki could speak or plead or beg again, Woo-Yung hit the ground behind him, and grabbed him beneath the arms, dragging him back into his grasp. “Get up,” he urged. “Get up, get up.”
    “Get away from my tree.”
    “It’s not your tree, creep,” Woo-Yung barked. Sung-Ki, trembling, finally got back onto his feet, and Woo-Yung pressed him backwards, shielding him with his arms. “Get the bag,” he said, beneath his breath.
    The stranger took two steps forward, growing lower and more feral as he approached. The knife twisted in his hand. Its blade was as jagged as its wielder’s yellow teeth, its point reddened with rust, or worse. “Empty it out,” he said.
    “Get the bag, Sung-Ki.”
    Sung-Ki turned, snatched up his backpack, and began to try and zip it shut. But some of its fruits had spilled, when the man surprised him, and when Sung-Ki moved to raise it, he saw five more fruits beneath, newly-revealed... He couldn’t leave them. All he could hope was that the stranger wouldn’t see him move, as he clumsily shoveled them in with the rest. It was a poor decision.
    The stranger did not bother even speaking—instead, he roared, charging over the rocks and leaves toward the both of them, and Woo-Yung shoved Sung-Ki away. The boy kept his footing but he lost more fruits, and by now he had no choice but to go, as fast as he could, lest he be stabbed, killed, eaten by the wild, filthy mountain man. He dared not turn around to see how close his knife was. “Run, run!” Woo-Yung shouted, as though Sung-Ki needed to be told.
    Blindly and mindlessly he tumbled down and away, his body afire with adrenaline that somehow made his small frame and stubby legs feel as graceful and powerful as a mountain lion’s. Minutes sailed by, unperceived, and every rock or branch that would have tripped him otherwise fell to his side, invulnerable in his escape. The only reason that he eventually stopped was because, after a while, he simply no longer felt afraid. The stranger’s pursuit had ended. The two boys had made it, safe.
    “My books,” Sung-Ki gasped, his hands on his knees, with labored breath, once they had stopped running. “My schoolbooks are still there...”
    Woo-Yung placed his hand upon the younger boy’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, consolingly. “It’s not like they’re making us use them anymore.”
    Sung-Ki looked up, gasped, and recoiled. Woo-Yung’s face was covered in blood, a long gash from the stranger’s knife running vertically down his cheek.
    “Woo-Yung, your face...”
    Woo-Yung nodded. “I know, he got me. It doesn’t hurt yet. Don’t worry! I bet it’ll look cool, later. No, get back—I don’t want to get blood on you.” He dabbed a finger at his cheek, an annoyed expression on his face, and looked around for something to wipe his hand and face with. He settled on a leaf.
    They took one more moment of repose, their heartbeats slowing, sweat drops cooling, before they felt able enough to turn and start the long trip downhill home. Soon, the shouts of wrath and fury that had pursued them down the mountain dissipated in their memories into outstretched echoes fading, and the boys resumed their retreat at a walk. They took their time over the following hours, slightly lost, going in careful silence down the gentle slopes, beneath the looming specter of the half-lit moon in the afternoon sky.
    |
    At sundown in the city, Yu-Ri gathered up her colorful cargo, draping each weight delicately in balance over the limbs of her slender frame. Chickens here, a tote bag there, a baby. Su-Dae was asleep again, lacking the energy to do much else, and the chickens were squatting inside their cages, emitting listless clucks. The bustle of the market was dying down around her with the fading light, and she walked away amidst the hum of low murmurs and the quiet sighs of disappointment. She was discovering, paradoxically, that those who stayed at the market longest were often likely the least successful overall.
    No one bothered her as she left. All heads she passed were low, and sullen, and whenever they did chance to glance her over, whenever they saw her baby... While once they would have maybe smiled, now they seemed just achingly sad.
    She cut off the road into an alley, away from the market, heading home. The walk and the weight were already making her vision swim with dizziness, so she resolved to take the shortest path to her apartment, out of the alleys, through unpaved mud, and the old train station.
    At first glance, the dead man looked like he was only sleeping, and as Yu-Ri regarded him from footsteps away, the world went quiet around her. Her chickens ceased to rustle, and the evening breeze went still, leaving nothing for her ears to hear but the squish and squelch of her shoes in the mud as she continued to approach him. He smelled... more or less the same as a living man, at least with all his clothes intact. It was his face that told it most—his tongue, a putrid purple, lolled out between teeth in a too-tight grip, his mouth emitting neither air nor water. A statue made of bones and flesh, newly dead.
    Su-Dae stirred in her swaddling cloth while Yu-Ri crouched beside the dead man, transfixed. Mechanically, the woman placed her hand inside the folds of the man’s jacket, fishing for their contents, but the pockets yielded little more than a redolent grime. Around his neck there looped a worthless chain of metal, painted gold, whatever bauble it had once held long gone, and in his lap, between his legs, there rested three basic stones from the earth worn smooth from frequent sucking—a classic trick to keep hunger at bay. Su-Dae reached her hand out, conscious now and rooting, and traced her fingers around a thread of the man’s corroded, crumbling hair, and Yu-Ri stood, drawing her away. “Just a dead man,” she said, above her daughter’s ear. “No more.”
    When she arrived home at her fifth floor tenement, her legs were seized nearly to failure by a wave of pulsating agony. She dropped the chicken cages as soon as she got the door shut, and sank to the floor of the kitchen, breathless. Su-Dae stirred, but did not protest, putting her fingers to her mouth in silence and suckling off the salt.
    She hasn’t had a thing to eat today, you know.
    With this bleak sentiment echoing in her mind, Yu-Ri gradually stripped herself of her weights, from her shoes to the cloth she held the baby in, and rose wearily to draw water for a meal, with Su-Dae on a chair beside her.
     The door opened soon after she had finally managed to trick the hot plate into working. “Hiya, Mom,” said Sung-Ki, as he entered.
    “Watch for the birds,” she said back to him, listlessly, despite how pleased she was to see him. “How was school?”
    “Oh... Good. This is my friend, Woo-Yung...”
    Adjusting the pot on the hot plate, she turned, flustered to be caught off guard; she hadn’t heard another person enter. The other boy was tall, taller than her, but more shocking than anything else was the long gash on his cheek, clotted but clearly uncleaned, with red blood residue smeared from his jaw to chin along one side of his face. She gasped, stammered. “What? I... Hello. Are you okay?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with a bow of his head. “I’m Ahn Woo-Yung.”
    “Come here,” Yu-Ri said, wetting a towel with cold water from the tap. “That looks terrible. What happened, Sung-Ki?”
    “We, I, he—he was up, in the hills—”
    “Just some creep,” Woo-Yung said.
    Yu-Ri looked from the boy, to her son, and back as she dabbed at the cut, deeper and more severe than it had seemed from afar. She fixed her gaze on Sung-Ki. “You weren’t at school today,” she said, accusingly—and his silence spoke the truth.
    Sung-Ki sunk his head low, and stared at his shoes. His eyes watered. “I’m sorry. It was important...”
    “It’s my doing, ma’am,” Woo-Yung said. “I swear I won’t do it again.”
    “We swear.”
    Yu-Ri shook her head. Her mind had been tried enough today, and there was nothing obvious to say. “Whatever you did, I hope you got the message that it was a bad idea,” she said eventually, holding the bloody towel up high, for both of the boys to see. And then she sighed. The water was boiling now.
    “...Can Woo-Yung stay for dinner,” mumbled Sung-Ki, clearly hesitant.
    And Yu-Ri paused. She looked over the boiling broth, the meager contents of her bowl. Grass, she thought. A chicken egg, and grass.
    She heard herself say, “Of course he can.” And then she gestured to Woo-Yung’s injury and told him, “That’s as good as I can do. I’m sorry, I do not have a bandage.”
    Woo-Yung put his hands up, and insinuated it was fine. “No, thank you, you’ve done enough,” he said. “Thanks very much, for letting me stay this evening.”
    The boys helped her set the table with bowls of broth and drinking water, moved Su-Dae to a comfortable spot, and even put away the chickens. Yu-Ri was the last to sit, and for a time, they ate in silence. There was little to discuss. Yu-Ri wondered where the boys had been today, and Sung-Ki wondered how his mother had done at the market, but neither wanted to raise the subjects unbidden. It was not until mid-meal that Sung-Ki paused, with evident nervousness, and raised his voice to ask Yu-Ri a question. There was something weighing on his mind that had gone undiscussed for days now.
    “Mother, do you know...” He stopped, bit his lip. Yu-Ri waited at the table’s other end, unsure of what to expect. Sung-Ki drew in a deep breath. “Mother, do you think that Ok-Sun’s coming back?”
    Yu-Ri glared. “I’m sorry,” she said to the boy. “Who?”
    “Your sister?” inquired Woo-Yung, loudly, oblivious to Yu-Ri’s tension.
    “His sister is right here,” Yu-Ri said, sternly, quietly, gesturing toward the baby. With her other hand, she pressed a finger to her lips.
    She could feel Sung-Ki’s legs shaking, beneath the table—a long-standing nervous tic. He reached into one of his pockets, and withdrew a folded piece of paper. “She left this, when she left,” he said, his voice notably quieter.
    Even from across the table, she could recognize Ok-Sun’s handwriting, thin and ghostly, as though her daughter were hesitant to commit her words, thoughts and goodbyes to anything physical, even that which could be easily torn, and burned.
    “Ok-Sun said she would come back for us,” Sung-Ki proceeded, whispering. “She says it right here, she says she’ll come back for me. But she didn’t tell me when...”
    Calmly, slowly, Yu-Ri stood to her feet, and reached across the table to her son, while Woo-Yung looked on, perplexed. She patted the backs of Sung-Ki’s hands, smiled, then snatched the letter from his grip and tore it to pieces above her bowl, pocketing every scrap of it to destroy when she was done. “I don’t think we’ll ever see her again,” she said, at normal volume. But as she sat, she leaned in close, and her voice when she spoke then was but a measure above silence. “Sung-Ki, you must never speak of her... She loved you very much... But now she is dead to us. You must think of her as a forgotten one... If anyone hears you speaking of her, we could all be taken away, do you understand? The walls are thin...”
    Tears beaded in the corners of Sung-Ki’s eyes as he gestured that he understood. He stared straight through the table. “I just hope she made it,” he whispered.
    And Yu-Ri said, “So do I.”
    Woo-Yung waited for a moment before he moved to speak, after the palpable tension had been allowed a moment to linger in the air, after the others had resumed to sipping their soup. He cleared his throat. “We got some things today, Sung-Ki and I,” he said. Across the table, Sung-Ki sniffed, and smiled.
    “Oh?” said Yu-Ri, more than mildly nervous. “What’s that, then?”
    “Show her, Sung-Ki.”
    And Sung-Ki grabbed his bag beside the table, drew it up to his lap, and reached his hand in, his face indicating that the remaining apricots within had congealed by now into a swampy, sticky mire. Yu-Ri watched, an eyebrow cocked, waiting, until Sung-Ki finally withdrew one whole fruit, the firmest of them all, warm and sticky like the others, but comparably whole.
    “A peach?” asked Yu-Ri, a youthful smile dawning on her face as she beheld it.
    “No, an apricot,” said Sung-Ki.
    Yu-Ri nodded slowly, and laughed beneath her breath. She rose from the table and moved toward the kitchen, knowing as she went that the mysterious fruit and the older boy’s wound were surely connected, and silently deciding not to say anything about it. What’s done is done, she said to herself. And at least it wasn’t Sung-Ki who got cut. She returned with a knife, and three small plates.
    “No,” said Sung-Ki, pushing his plate away toward her. “We got a bunch, Woo-Yung and I, but this one’s for you and the baby. It’s the only one that made it down the mountain in one piece.”
    “The others were rotten.”
    “They melted.”
    “And we ate them on the way.”
    Yu-Ri looked at the two boys, upright and proud of their present, and quietly cut the slimy apricot into four pieces on her plate. It was soft, and overripe, but beside the cooling bowl of empty broth it looked as sweet as candy and as precious as gold. Su-Dae stirred beside her, cooing wordlessly, and stretched her tiny hand out towards the table.
    Cherish the moment, Yu-Ri thought, as she held a tiny portion of the fruit up to Su-Dae’s smiling mouth. This is your family—your daughter, your son and his newfound friend. And here is an apricot from some far-flung mountain, the first fruit you’ve had in... I’ve forgotten how long. Cherish it, share it, be thankful... It’s not long til tomorrow.
    |
    High atop a nearby mountain, in a copse of fragrant green trees, a plump red-billed starling came to rest on a lofty branch. It sank its beak into the flesh of a ripe and perfect apricot, and the juices flowed out of the punctured flesh over the starling’s plumage, dripping down by meager drops onto the dirt of the earth below.

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