The Owl Cries by Hye-young Pyun

Author:Hye-young Pyun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781956763751
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

With the lights out, the office was as dark and quiet as a dock on a moonless light. Each time the wind blew, a ferocious wail wrapped around the building. The forest had turned into an enormous creature bellowing out its grief. The windows and doors rattled insistently, as if someone were out there, begging to be let in. In-su locked the door.

The forest had become one with the darkness and was encroaching upon the sky, the ground, the air itself. In-su turned his eyes away from the shadowy trees. He’d grown sick of the woods already. No, not sick. Scared. Each time he looked out at the forest from inside the station, he felt the forest was watching him.

Watching him? He knew that was impossible, and yet every time the trees let out an eerie creak with each gust of the wind, or the birds cried out and hurled their bodies into the air, or he heard the voices of creatures he’d never seen or other sounds he couldn’t place, his body went rigid with anxiety. He felt as if the dense air, the huddled trees, the howling birds and the underbrush that shook in the wind, and the animals and insects of every shape and stripe engrossed in their own propagation had trapped him there in that temporary enclosure and were studying his behavior, his habits.

That feeling came from the fact that the forest was always in the majority. The forest was a crowd of countless trees, birds, insects, weeds, small mammals, fungi. When the wind blew, no single tree swayed alone, but rather an army of trees swayed, setting the weeds and fungi to shake, too, and flocks of birds to take flight, until at last the entire forest moved as one. A forest was a plurality and a totality. Meanwhile, he was always only him. When the wind blew, he pulled his jacket around him tighter, and when he heard strange, eerie sounds, he plugged his ears, and when the forest cast shadows, he had no recourse but to endure it with only the overhead fluorescents to hold the darkness at bay.

After his talk with the paralegal, In-su had sat there, feeling disturbed, as the time to clock out and head home came and went. Other than a few days before, when he’d left early because he was under the weather, he had always gone home exactly on time. Professor Jin liked to tell him it was okay to leave early if he wanted to, but he wasn’t one to disrespect his work schedule. He understood, albeit vaguely, that the only real asset he brought to the job was his time.

In-su had never sat alone in the office quite like this, wrapped in such perfect darkness. If it got any darker, he would have a hard time making his way back down on his bicycle, but he couldn’t seem to force himself out of his chair. He was held in place by the phone call he’d received from the paralegal right before he should have left work.

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