Crisply Starting Over
“I’ll come by this weekend. Don’t bother making side dishes.”
“Why not? I should prepare something when you visit.”
“No, really… I’ll just pick up some chicken on the way.”
“Chicken again? Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
His mother clicked her tongue even as she laughed. Chi-yeol forced the corners of his mouth upward in return. Only after he ended the call did he rub the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand. He wasn’t about to cry. It was just that something inside him had grown hot.
Lunchtime came, but he didn’t go to eat. Instead he climbed to the rooftop, bought a vending-machine coffee, and stood beside the wind-swept railing. The coffee in the paper cup was cheap, yet unbearably hot—hot enough to scald his tongue. He deliberately held that heat in his mouth for a long time. It felt as though he needed to cover one pain with another.
By the end of today…
The phrase kept circling in his ears. By the end of today, change the direction of your life. The company was still ruthlessly efficient. Chi-yeol opened the calculator app on his phone and roughly added up his remaining balance, possible loan amount, monthly rent, credit-card bills, and insurance premiums. Numbers were always honest, and therefore cruel. The shortfall appeared immediately; the time he could hold out was shorter than he had hoped.
Then a thought that had been rolling around in the corner of his mind for years rose clearly to the surface.
A chicken shop.
His friends had joked about it over drinks. “Dude, you’d be great at running a chicken place someday.” Every time he heard it, Chi-yeol had laughed—half in earnest. After all, he was the kind of person who checked the state of the frying before even looking at the menu, noticed changes in seasoning flavor whenever a brand switched suppliers, and privately marveled at packaging techniques that kept the crunch alive. Once, the owner of the neighborhood chicken shop had slipped an extra drumstick into his order and said, “Sir, you really know your chicken.” At the time they had all laughed it off.
Liking something didn’t make it a career. Liking chicken didn’t make life itself turn crispy. The world wasn’t that accommodating.
Yet the moment the fence called “company” shoved him in the back, the idea no longer sounded like a joke. For the first time, an impulse stirred: the chance to do something with his own name on it instead of sitting in a seat assigned by others.
Of course he was afraid. Anyone could open a chicken shop. Running a business wasn’t done by feel, and even without watching the news he knew how dangerous self-employment was these days. Still, strangely, his heart pounded harder when he thought about it than it had when he received the documents in the conference room. He couldn’t tell whether it was pounding from fear or from anticipation.
Around three in the afternoon, he finally signed the resignation letter. As the tip of the pen completed the last stroke of his name, his hand trembled slightly. The team leader wore an unnecessarily apologetic expression and patted his shoulder.
“Manager Kang, you’ll do well wherever you go. I mean that.”
It might have been sincere. But such words were usually reserved for those who were leaving. Those who stayed simply got their pay stubs tossed at them. Chi-yeol answered, “Thank you.” The habits of twelve years of corporate life still functioned perfectly even at that moment. It was impressive, really—being able to remain polite while being cut loose.
As quitting time approached, a few colleagues drifted over. One offered to buy him coffee, another suggested they keep in touch, and yet another offered various words of comfort. Some were genuine; others were probably just trying to ease their own awkwardness. Chi-yeol accepted them all with a smile, knowing the difference. He didn’t want to make the atmosphere any heavier. He had no desire to be remembered as the guy who caused trouble until his very last day.
Before leaving the office, he opened his desk drawer and took out the old items one by one: a worn-out USB drive, a bundle of business cards from vendors, a promotional ballpoint pen, a bottle of vitamins he’d received long ago, expired throat lozenges, and two chicken gift certificates he had won in a company raffle. He stared at the certificates for a long time, then let out a small snort of laughter.
Chicken, right to the end. The world really had no sense of decency.
When he stepped out of the company building, dusk had already fallen. The early-evening air was colder than the daytime. Chi-yeol adjusted the strap of his bag and walked for a while before finally entering a convenience store. He picked up two cans of beer and a bag of peanuts, but as he was about to pay, a chicken-shop sign at the end of the alley beyond the glass door caught his eye. Beneath the bright red-and-yellow lights, the words Fried Half, Seasoned Half glowed especially vividly.
He hesitated for a moment, then set the beer down in front of the register and walked back outside. Tonight, it had to be chicken rather than beer. For some strange reason, it felt necessary.
The chicken shop was fairly crowded with people who had just gotten off work. The smell of oil, the sound of frying, and the sweet-salty aroma of seasoning leaked out every time the door opened. Chi-yeol placed a takeout order and sat on a chair in the corner to wait. From behind the counter came the sound of chicken being dropped into hot oil—shhhk. That sound felt unusually comforting today.
The fact that something only became edible after throwing itself into heat somehow seemed like life itself.
“Sir, half seasoned and half fried, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like extra radish?”
“Ah, yes. Just one more, please.”
He answered with unnecessary politeness. The habit of speaking as if asking permission even for small favors was hard to break.
The owner folded the takeout box with quick hands. As Chi-yeol watched those movements in a daze, thoughts chained together. That person is earning money with his own hands in his own shop at this very hour. At least no one will sit him down in a conference room and tell him ‘by the end of today.’
Of course, business had its own kind of hell. But that hell probably didn’t involve signing your name under someone else’s judgment.
When he got home, he set the takeout box on the table. The studio was quiet; the sound of the refrigerator seemed unusually loud. He took off his coat, hung it on the chair, washed his hands, and opened the box. Steam rose in a rush. The golden-brown chicken pieces were packed tightly together. He picked up the largest drumstick and took a bite.
It was crispy. Precisely crispy, followed by savory juices. He had wanted to eat without thinking, but that proved impossible. After experiencing something too big, a person becomes strangely sensitive to small sensations. Today’s chicken was exceptionally hot, exceptionally fragrant, exceptionally vivid. The more he chewed, the stranger he felt—something like sorrow, something like amusement, something like anger.
In the end he set the drumstick down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Damn…”
The curse never fully emerged. It crumbled awkwardly inside his mouth. He laughed alone. Even in a moment like this, I can’t even swear properly. So typical of Kang Chi-yeol.
At the end of that laugh came a long sigh.
Several chicken-shop flyers lay scattered on one side of the table—old delivery menus he had never thrown away. He spread them out one by one. Brand names, set compositions, menu photos, prices, country-of-origin labels, phone numbers. His eyes moved across them out of habit.
This seasoning name is decent. This place has a weak side-menu selection. This photo is terrible.
His hand suddenly stopped in the middle of those thoughts.
Am I really going to do this?
It was no longer a joke that had floated up casually. This time the idea felt heavier, more concrete. Calculations spun automatically in his head: how much severance pay he would receive, how much consolation money, how far he could borrow. Neighborhood commercial districts. Delivery ratios. Initial interior costs. The difference between franchise and independent branding.
It wasn’t that he lacked fear. Precisely because the fear was so great, he felt the urge to pin it down with numbers. Chi-yeol turned on his laptop. The slow boot screen felt even slower than usual that day. He opened a browser and placed the cursor in the search bar. He hesitated for a moment.
Typing a search term wouldn’t really change his life, yet for some reason his fingertips felt heavy. Once he entered the words, it seemed there would be no turning back—as if they were a sentence that could never be undone.
He typed slowly.
When the search results for chicken shop startup loan poured down the screen, his breath caught. Advertisements, consultations, franchise recommendations, success stories of small-capital startups, articles about closure rates, government support guides—every kind of information flooded in at once.
He stared at the screen for a long time, then picked up a piece of the chicken that had grown cold beside him. It was no longer as crispy as when he first opened the box. Beneath the dampened skin that had lost its crunch with time, the flavor still remained. Strangely, that was all right too. Even if the crispness had faded a little, it was still edible.
Maybe people are the same. Maybe being broken once doesn’t mean it’s over. Even if the shape is a little ruined, the temperature has cooled, and it looks less impressive to others—can it still produce its own taste?
Outside the window came the sound of a late-night bus passing by. In the narrow room, the glow of the laptop screen lit Chi-yeol’s face white. He wiped the oil from his fingertips with a wet tissue, then murmured in a very quiet voice.
“Rather than being fried under someone else…”
The end of the sentence hung empty for a moment. In that empty space, various emotions flickered past—sorrow, fear, stubbornness, resignation, and a very faint hope. He swallowed once as if taking all of it down, then finished the rest.
“I’ll fry it with my own hands.”
No one had heard it. It wasn’t some grand declaration. It was merely a laid-off salaryman sitting alone in a shabby studio, eating chicken and speaking to himself. Yet at that moment, strangely, his chest felt a little less tight.
The thought Even if I fail, I want to fail under my own name became, for the first time, a clear sentence. Instead of a life arranged by others, he wanted to try living a life where he turned on the fire, heated the oil, and set the timer himself.
Kang Chi-yeol slowly finished the cold chicken and scrolled through the laptop screen, examining materials until dawn. Startup costs, market analysis, small-capital success stories, failure cases. There were plenty of frightening articles and plenty of sweetly tempting ones. Wandering among them, he finally opened a memo pad and wrote a title.
Things I Can Do
And beneath it, in very small letters, he wrote the first line.
For now, I’ll look into it.
The room was still quiet, but inside him something small and hot had just begun to fry.