A Game of Roulette

A Game of Roulette

I’m still fuming. I want to beat someone up or be beaten up. I wouldn’t hesitate to taunt a world-class boxer. Hello, Mr. Stone Hands, let’s see what you’ve got.

Dark clouds are gathering, and the sky is darkening to the color of Russian blue, like my Leche’s eyes.

My home, no, the house that my father, the evil stepmom, and their baby—was his name Yeondu?—live in is on the uphill road that leads into the forest from the Temple Beomuh subway station. To get there from the station you have to walk past the city cemetery and go farther into the forest until you see a small cluster of houses. Taxi drivers are reluctant to drive anyone there because there is nearly no chance of finding a customer on their way out.

When my dad was running a factory workshop at home and my grandmother was dying from lung cancer, I was taken back by my father. I held his hand to his car, got in, and arrived at his place—our home was the largest house in the entire town. It was always loud with machines and workers, but father was rarely stressed out about money. The men at the workshop teased and bullied me, but it wasn’t unbearable. I heard the slippers we produced in the workshop sold very well. My father couldn’t produce enough to meet the demand, so he and his friend decided to build another workshop, a huge factory. They got cutting-edge machinery and recruited more workers. Our family moved into a Western-style two-story house in Sajikd District. We had a live-in maid and driver. My father drank and partied, and Stepmom didn’t have to do any chores. But neither of them gave me any money or bought me the things I needed, like underwear, so I shared underwear with the maid. My crotch was so itchy when I shared underwear with her, and she told me, “I caught the crabs from your dad, anyway.”

In less than three years my father’s business went bankrupt, and we had to move to the apartment complex when I started the second year of middle school.