One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun

Author:Hwang Jungeun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
Published: 2016-09-25T07:54:59+00:00

—

How about we sing, Eungyo?

You sing to me.

Which song?

Footprints.

Remind me how that one goes?

Footprints in the white snow. Footprints, side by side with paw prints. Who, who left at the break of day?

I can’t sing that song.

How come?

I’m choking up.

This one makes you choke up, too?

It says that someone left at the break of day, with only a dog as a companion, and nothing but footprints remain.

You don’t have to sing it, then.

I don’t, right?

Although you kind of did already.

I’ll sing something else.

Tell me a story instead.

What kind of a story?

A story about the boy Mujae.

How far did we get?

The boy’s father died. What happened after that?

The boy went on living.

Okay.

The boy’s name was Mujae, said Mujae, and he was quiet for a while, and then he said, How about we leave it there?

Why?

A story like that is too bizarre for a night like this.

What’s so bizarre about it?

The boy’s father dies, leaving his debts behind, and the boy grows up, struggling to pay off those debts.

Is that what happens?

The boy goes into debt to pay that debt, and gets into other debts to pay the interest on the debt, and everything he earns gets sucked up by the debt, so he has to go into more and more debt just to pay for rent and food.

…

You tell me a story, Eungyo. One that isn’t too bizarre.

A story about Omusa, then.

Omusa?

Don’t you know Omusa, Mujae?

No, I don’t.

Omusa is a shop where an old man sells light bulbs. Not the ordinary light bulbs people use in their homes, but the tiny bulbs used in things like torches and microwaves, the kind that cost ten, fifty, a hundred won a piece. When you buy a pack of bulbs at Omusa you always come away with one extra. When you buy a pack of twenty, you get it home and find that it contains twenty-one, when you buy forty, you find forty-one, when you buy fifty, you find fifty-one, when you buy a hundred, you find a hundred and one.

Could it be that the owner makes a mistake when he counts them?

That’s what I thought, but when I kept finding that extra bulb, no matter what size of pack I’d bought, and always just one, I thought that it couldn’t be a coincidence. I asked the old man about it the next time I went to Omusa, and he looked up from the bulbs he was counting but didn’t say anything. I was nervous, thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but when I looked more closely I saw that his lips were twitching, as though he was working himself up to speak. After a while, he said that he always packs an extra bulb in case one breaks in transit, or one is defective, since he doesn’t want his customers to have to come all the way back to his shop. When I heard that I felt, I don’t know, touched, because, well, you know ‘buy one get one free’? Do you ever get those offers, Mujae, at the big discount stores?

Sometimes.

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