The night the power went out, no one in the neighborhood noticed at first except Ji-ho, because he’d been watching a livestream of a man tattooing his own forehead in real time. When the screen blinked off, he just sat there for a second, blinking too, the dark folding in around him like it had been waiting for its cue.

Outside, the wind hadn’t started yet, but the air already had that feeling—pregnant with static, too warm for April, like someone had left the oven open in the next room of the universe. It was the kind of heat that makes memory stick to surfaces. That pulls certain names closer, whether or not they belong to you.

Later, someone would say they saw Eun-ha standing barefoot in the middle of the street, holding a desk lamp with the cord still trailing behind her like an umbilical. No one could prove it. No one took a picture.

At Kang-seok’s house, the emergency floodlight snapped on and pointed straight at Hyun-soo’s old place, even though no one lived there anymore. It was just an empty house with the blinds drawn and a porch light that hadn’t worked since the fall. The light stayed on for seven hours.

Seon-mi said it was broken. “Floodlights don’t choose,” she said, smoking a cigarette with one hand and swiping through pictures of herself with the other. But her voice cracked a little when she said it. Just a little.

Around 3 a.m., someone knocked on every door on the street—three slow knocks, spaced out like a heartbeat trying to decide if it wanted to keep going. Kang-seok opened his door and found nothing but wet footprints on the concrete, each one facing a different direction.

Ji-ho said it was Hyun-soo. “He came back for the goat,” he whispered, not laughing, not blinking, staring at the floodlight like it might blink back. “He’s gonna drag it through town like a banner. Like proof.”

But we all knew the goat was gone. Had been for months. No one ever said what happened to it. It just disappeared after the mailbox incident. No one really looked.

By morning, the light had burned out. The street smelled faintly of burned plastic and school disinfectant. The footprints were gone. So was someone’s cat.

That day, Eun-ha didn’t speak. Just sat at her desk drawing pictures of eyes on the back of a math worksheet—wide, flat eyes, no pupils.

That night, Ji-ho slept with his phone under his pillow and the lamp still on.

That night, the light didn’t come back.

···

Ji-ho’s mother had stopped speaking the week after his cousin drowned in the irrigation canal, though she swore it wasn’t connected. “Sometimes people just run out of language,” she told him once, not unkindly, while folding a stack of towels so tight the edges looked like they’d been ironed. She still moved through the house like nothing had changed—cooked, swept, hummed—but never directly addressed him again.

That was last summer.

By November, the house had started making new noises. Pipes with rhythm. The floor in the laundry room letting out little sighs. But it was the kitchen that changed the most. Specifically: the space beneath the sink.

He didn’t go down there at first. There was no reason to. They didn’t keep anything useful down there, just plastic bags and maybe an old can of Comet with the top rusted shut. But one night, while microwaving rice, Ji-ho heard it.

A wet sound.

Not a drip. Not quite a moan.

A sound like someone talking through food.

He opened the cabinet door with the edge of his slipper, like that would protect him, like the thing inside would respect footwear. Nothing there. Just dark. But then the smell came—something too warm and meaty to belong in a kitchen.

It didn’t happen every night. That would’ve made it simple. But every few days, when the house got quiet enough and the weather sat just wrong against the siding, he’d hear it again: the slow, smacking murmur of whatever lived just below the pipes, saying something he couldn’t quite make out.

He stopped eating rice. Then stopped eating dinner. His mother didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t say. She just kept folding things that didn’t need folding.

Once, when the noise was loudest, Ji-ho crouched beside the cabinet and whispered, “What do you want?”

The answer wasn’t in words, but in feeling. A dense heat behind his forehead. A pressure in the teeth. A picture in his mind of a mouth that opened sideways and never stopped.

He didn’t sleep that night. Or the next.

At school, he started blinking slower. Teachers asked if he was okay. He nodded without hearing the question.

He started writing things down in his notebook that didn’t come from him—fractured phrases, repeated numbers, a drawing of a hand made of steam. He stopped recognizing his own handwriting.

By the end of winter, Ji-ho had built a wall of plastic bowls around the cabinet door. Not to keep it closed. To warn it. The mouth hadn’t spoken in days, but he knew it wasn’t gone. It was waiting for the right version of him to come back.

He still heard his mother humming sometimes. In the other room. Folding something. Not looking.

Sometimes, he’d hum along. Just loud enough to cover the sound of chewing.

Somewhere in the drain, beneath the mouth and behind the heat, something was counting. Not sins. Just repetitions.

He stopped asking what it wanted. He started asking what part of him had already given it permission.

···

The room had a window, which they all said was lucky. The woman with the clipboard said it like it meant something. So did the nurse with the eyes that never quite pointed the same direction. Even his grandfather, who only came on Fridays and smelled like mouthwash and boiled peanuts, said it—“Lucky to have a view”—like you could measure a boy’s luck in square feet of glass.

Hyun-soo stared through it anyway.

What he saw wasn’t sky, or trees, or anything that promised shape. Just the parking lot, always wet, even when it hadn’t rained, with oil patterns in the pavement that looked like maps of other places. Places where no one whispered in slippers or bled in slow-motion or took plastic bags home from the cafeteria like they were proof you’d eaten.

There was a chair by the bed that never moved but always ended up facing him. No one admitted to turning it. Hyun-soo stopped asking.

The man with the purple hands came every third morning. He carried a silver cart with wheels that sounded like teeth when they moved. He smiled too hard and always used his name—like Hyun-soo might forget it, like he might be someone else if they didn’t remind him often enough.

Sometimes they spoke to him like a child. Other times like an heirloom.

His veins had started hiding. It became a game. A mean one. The woman with the drawstring wrists called it “chasing”—like the veins were rabbits and her hands were too tired to run.

He didn’t cry. Not because he didn’t want to. Just because it felt like something the body used to do, like how baby teeth used to be part of the plan.

Once, a boy in the next room screamed for eleven minutes. Hyun-soo counted. Not loud screaming—just the kind that sat in the throat, held by whatever stopped a person from dying too fast.

After that, they gave him headphones that didn’t play anything. Just silence in two ears. And they called it music.

One night, the window fogged so hard he couldn’t see the lot, and for a second he thought maybe the whole world had given up on being seen. Maybe everything outside had gone soft and white and quiet.

That was the same night the woman who cleaned the floors whispered to him when she thought he was asleep. She told him a story about a boy who turned into a beetle—not the Kafka kind, but the Korean kind, the kind that could bury itself underground for seven years and come back with wings.

She said it twice, just in case.

Hyun-soo didn’t reply. He didn’t move.

But he watched the chair slowly turn back toward him again, inch by inch, like it was preparing to listen.

And I don’t know how he knew I was there. I hadn’t said anything yet.

Not out loud.

Not in a long time.

Sometimes I think I forgot how. Or maybe I said too much, once, and the body shut the door behind it.

Because there are places the voice goes after it stops meaning anything.

Somewhere below thinking, or above remembering, where what’s left just drifts—unfinished, unclaimed.

That’s where I am.

I didn’t want him to feel it.

But I was there the way rot is there, even when the floor still holds.