Romancing on Jeju by Hyun-joo Park

Author:Hyun-joo Park [Park, Hyun-joo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2024-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

On the ride back down the mountain road, the black clouds had crowded together again in the sky and were swarming without a sound. It was silent inside the car too. Neither Kyungwoon nor Romi said much. It was comfortable with Kyungwoon whether they were talking or not, but that wasn’t the only reason Romi wasn’t speaking. Like the insatiable itch of a sneeze tickling her nose, certain thoughts would poke their heads into her mind and then hide away again.

Romi felt the gears in her head slowly turning in time with the wipers that moved only now and then to clear the raindrops falling on the windshield.

“What was it that you said earlier?” she asked. “About the bees?”

“Hmm?”

“You said something earlier. About the black ribbon, the bees.”

“Ah, you mean that custom? Telling the bees when something important happens?”

This had been constantly weighing on Romi’s mind since earlier. It nagged at her like a wisdom tooth that badly needed pulling.

“What did you say more specifically? Tell me again.”

“Hmm, what did I say?” Kyungwoon mused, scratching the side of his head in confusion. “Well, when they planned to hold a wedding, the bride and groom had to pay the bees a visit, and when there was a funeral, people covered the hives in black cloth. There’s a poem titled ‘Telling the Bees’ by a nineteenth-century American poet that describes the practice well. For the young speaker of the poem . . .”

She had to inform someone of something. But what was it? She’d thought there was something she definitely had to announce, but as Kyungwoon continued to talk, Romi felt whatever it was sinking deeper into her memory rather than rising to the surface. She shook her head, blinking her eyes. It wouldn’t be polite to fall asleep beside the person driving, but the one place in the world that made a person the sleepiest was the passenger’s seat. At some point, Kyungwoon’s voice had become like a lullaby.

“The young speaker of the poem only finds out in the end that the young woman he loves has died . . .”

Romi’s head slowly began to lean to the side. Kyungwoon, so absorbed in the story he was telling, startled when Romi’s blond head fell near him with a thump, and he used one hand to prop her upright again. Carefully righting her head so that it lay back against the seat, he murmured, “You must be tired after waking up so early today.”

He sounded perplexed, but there was laughter hidden in his voice too. With that laugh, Romi fell deeply into a dream that may have been a real memory or merely something she’d imagined.

She had quickly crossed a stream. There were flowers she encountered as she walked through a green meadow: red poppies, yellow daisies, white lilies of the valley. She gathered them into a bouquet and walked along a stone fence. The sound of bees buzzing around her made her heart quicken, and she broke into a run. Where

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