“I want to see Ji-woo.” His oh-so-familiar voice, low and tense—she could tell he was struggling to sound composed—was like a blunt knife stabbing her in the chest. “Couldn’t you let me see him, just one time?”

So that was what he’d called to say. Not to say he was sorry. Not to beg for her forgiveness. Only to talk about the child. He didn’t even ask whether Yeong-hye was all right.

She’d always known how sensitive he was. A man whose self-esteem was so easily wounded, who quickly became frustrated if the situation didn’t go his way. She knew that if she refused him this one more time, it would probably be a very long time before he contacted her again.

Even though she was aware of this, no, because she was aware of it, she hung up without answering.

A public telephone booth in the middle of the night. Worn-out sneakers, shabby clothes. A despairing face, no longer young. She shook her head, trying to erase those images from her mind. Whenever she thought of him now, those thoughts were quietly overlaid with the way he’d looked when he tried to throw himself over the railing of Yeong-hye’s veranda, trying to fly like a bird. All those scenes of flight he’d included in his videos; and yet, when he needed it most, such flight had proved beyond him.

“I don’t know you,” she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. “So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.”

When the phone rang again she pulled out the cord. The next morning she connected it up again but, as she’d predicted, he didn’t call again.

—

Time passes.

Now Yeong-hye’s eyes are closed. Is she sleeping? Can she smell the fruit her sister put to her lips just now?

In-hye looks at Yeong-hye’s prominent cheekbones, her hollow eyes, her sunken cheeks. She feels her sister’s ragged breath. She gets up and walks over to the window, where the dark gray of the sky is gradually lightening, the landscape growing brighter at the edges. The light touches upon Mount Ch’ukseong’s forest, rekindling its summer colors. The place where Yeong-hye was discovered that night must be somewhere over on that slope.

“I heard something,” Yeong-hye had said, lying hooked up to the drip. “I went there because I heard something calling me…I don’t hear it anymore now…I was just standing there waiting.”

When In-hye asked, “What were you waiting for?,” a fever came into Yeong-hye’s eyes. Her right hand was the one with the needle in it; she reached out with her left and grabbed In-hye’s hand. In-hye was shocked by how strong her grip was.

“It melted in the rain…it all melted…I’d been just about to go down into the earth. There was nothing else for it if I wanted to turn myself upside down again, you see.”