I Met That Child
She ran. She ran. She ran. For the first time in a long while she drank the wind with her whole heart and kicked the earth away beneath her.
Yesterday's today and today's today were not the same. Today, she had met that child. When the woman spoke of him she hadn't truly understood, but now, somehow, she thought she did. She felt as if she had grown clever.
But he wasn't what I imagined.
She had thought he would be a little cuter, a little lovelier. The woman was always saying how small he was, how cute, and so the child she would someday meet had become, in her mind, someone downy-soft and warm and adorable.
But the child was enormous. His face... well. It wasn't as if she couldn't call it cute.
Ah!
Maybe that was what the woman's husband had meant by the nostalgia filter. Whenever she called him a cute child, her husband would laugh and ask what could possibly be cute about that great hulking boy. A middle schooler bigger than a grown man, he said, could hardly be small and cute.
She hadn't known what a middle schooler was, but she never asked. She hated to break in on the two of them. It was enough just to listen.
When she first met them, their faces had been smooth. As time passed, wrinkles gathered on both, and people began to call them Grandma and Grandpa. In her memory now, though, they were very young. She didn't know why, but they wore the faces of the days when she had first met them. The wrinkled faces from the hour of their death rose only if she forced herself to remember. The prettier image, it seemed, was the one that stayed.
Is this the nostalgia filter?
A strange feeling came over her. The "cute child" the woman had spoken of was a nostalgia filter, and the young faces of the two of them that she herself recalled were a nostalgia filter too. To be able to think and feel exactly as they had thought and felt—that made her terribly glad.
"Hehe."
Their graves lay behind the house where the girl had lived until not long ago. Until the man called the Guild Master came to fetch her, she had gone on living in that house, and beside those graves.
She ran the whole way in one breath and flung down, with a careless scatter, the grass she had just pulled from the field. Properly, one was supposed to offer flowers. Chrysanthemums, she had heard they were called. Or perhaps you didn't scatter them at all, and only laid them down. In any case, you gave flowers to a grave. This season flowers were hard to find, so she had brought the prettiest grass she could see.
She knelt before the grave and folded herself low. This, she had been taught, was a bow. The woman's husband had shown her how. After the bow, he had said, it would be good to pour liquor as well. Liquor was something he liked. But liquor was expensive, and the girl could not buy it with the money she had, so she had filled the leather waterskin the two of them left behind with water from the lake. When both offerings had been poured out, her heart felt full.
Those were the last words the woman left. Her husband had only smiled, quiet.
"I met him. I met that child."
She said it to the small grave. As always, no answer came. A little water gathered in her eyes. The girl touched the corner of one eye with a finger, looked at the wetness, and laughed.
"I'm crying."
The two of them had died together. So many wrinkles had come to the woman, and her eyes had grown less and less able to see. They said she had fallen ill. That she was dying. So the woman's husband asked the girl to draw a zentangle.
After those words, the son the two had taken as their own cried for a long time, and that adopted son's daughter cried for a long time after him. The girl did not cry. Back then she hadn't really known what crying was. She couldn't understand why the adopted son and his daughter poured water from their eyes like that.
As she had been asked, she drew beautiful patterns over both their bodies. Circles, squares, triangles, flowers and stars. She filled them with the loveliest things she could imagine. The patterns the woman had called zentangles took away every pain they had, and let their breath stop as if they had only fallen asleep. They died with those beautiful patterns held across every inch of their skin.
Only long afterward did she understand why the adopted son and his daughter had cried. Once a person goes into a grave, they can no longer speak. That is what death is. She had heard it explained, but she only truly knew it long after the two of them had been buried together.
When she understood that she would never see them again, the girl grew sad as well. Sad as she was, the tears would not come. She had learned what crying was, and still no tears—she thought it a little unfair, but there was nothing to be done. Now, though, she could cry too. She didn't know why she was crying when she wasn't sad, but the tears came anyway.
"Ah!"
Too late, she realized her mistake. She had been in such a hurry to reach the grave and say she had met that child that she forgot to tell him her name. When humans meet, saying one's name is the rule.
The woman and her husband had given the girl the name Yeonhwa, so that she would not be lonely even after they died and vanished from the world. They told her Yeonhwa was the woman's own name.
The words rang in her head. After the woman and her husband went into the grave, the girl had begun to imagine more and more. She thought the things they had said, and thought them again, so she would not forget.
The girl, Yeonhwa, nodded.
"Yes. I like that."
What she had to do from now on was stay always at his side and protect him. And land one good blow on Santa. Of course, now that she had met that child, she didn't have to hit him—but they had waited far too long. The woman had believed she would meet that child while she was still alive, and it had been much too late. If it had been her, she would certainly have struck him once.
Yeonhwa was quiet a moment. Then she smiled brightly toward the grave.
"I won't be able to come often from now on. But I'll come sometimes. When the flowers bloom, I'll bring flowers. When I have money, I'll bring liquor."
What the woman in the grave had wished of Santa was a being who would always stay beside her beloved son and watch over him.
Her wish had come true.
From now on, Yeonhwa herself would be the one to watch over him.
The happiness the screaming carrots had given Lizzie was gone, and her heart was packed with cloud. The silver turning to gold ought to have made this a truly happy day.
Juhwan walked the central square with one arm around his wife's shoulders. He matched his pace to hers, and the steps were unusually slow. Word of the screaming carrots must have spread; now and then someone came on purpose just to look at their faces and go. Even Dorothy, who hadn't understood at first, caught on once people stared and muttered carrot, carrot.
She tugged the mouth of her front pocket downward, pushed Oz's face out into the air, and tipped her nose high. The nose kept climbing. By now the person in front of her could probably see straight up her nostrils. At that, Lizzie smiled, just a little.
"There. You smiled."
She didn't answer. When Juhwan tightened the arm around her shoulders, Lizzie leaned her head against him.
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?"
She sank again. Her thin little body seemed to draw in even smaller.
"Lizzie, I know what you're afraid of. But you don't have to worry. Earlier, you heard me say I'm Santa's Contractor, didn't you? It's true. I made a wish, and that's how I came to this country."
She was silent.
"Do you know what I wished for?"
Still she said nothing. Her body had gone a little stiff. Perhaps she was thinking of strong mana, or a fire mage's power, or money—something like that. Looking at what Juhwan had now, it would have been easy to think so.
"What I wanted was a wife and a child. You and Dorothy."
"Oh..."
Lizzie lifted her head from him and looked up.
"You and Dorothy are my wish."
"...Really?"
"Yes."
They were in the middle of the square. People were passing, and others had come on purpose to stare, and Lizzie stopped walking and began to cry in a steady pour. The tears came so fast that in an instant she could hardly see. Passersby looked. They murmured, and looked again.
Juhwan, at a loss, caught her shoulder with one hand, let go, and caught it again. He wanted to wipe her tears, but her whole face was tears, and if he used his own hand he was afraid he would turn all of it to grime. Dorothy fumbled frantically in the front pocket, dug around beneath Oz's bottom, and came up with a small handkerchief.
"Dad, here!"
Lizzie had made it for her. In one corner sat a tiny embroidered rabbit, stitched not with costly floss but with ordinary sewing thread. Dorothy loved it so much that this handkerchief, of all things, she would lend to no one. She hardly used it herself. She only kept it, like a treasure. That she would pull it out at once meant that, to Dorothy, this was an emergency. It was one to Juhwan, too.
He took the little cloth in his large hand and carefully, carefully wiped Lizzie's face. She cried and laughed at once. If he had known she would be this relieved, he should have told her long ago. He felt a little sorry.
They had meant to do a bit of shopping, but they simply went back to the inn. Lizzie had cried herself into exhaustion, and there was no strength left for wandering.
That evening he ordered the inn's special menu: thick meat seasoned with salt and herbs, a stew crowded with bits of this and that, and bread with a coarse, hearty flavor. Special, in the end, meant nothing much. The portions were merely close to double, and a cheap wine had been added. Even so, it tasted as good as what they had eaten in the city of Moderni. Dorothy and Lizzie both ate far more than they usually did, heaping their plates.
Oz received one person's share of the thick meat. His small mouth worked at it a little at a time, and yet the meat vanished in an instant.
"Amazing, Oz! Totally finished!"
Dorothy was delighted. Lizzie looked troubled, already worrying, it seemed, over the cost of meals to come. The two of them were so cute that he laughed, and both of them got a little angry. Watching that, he thought how alike they were even though no blood joined them. If more time passed, would the three of them, Juhwan among them, come to resemble one another? The feeling was strange.
After Dorothy fell asleep, the time belonged to husband and wife. Beneath the low lamp, Lizzie's shy, flustered look was lovely. They had joined skin again and again, and still she seemed embarrassed.
Was this, too, one of Santa's gifts? The day after they met had been dearer than the first meeting; the time after he realized he loved her, dearer than the moment itself; today, dearer than yesterday. Like sand slipping grain by grain through an hourglass to pile into a wide beach, the feeling only deepened. The tenderness rose in a swell, and the words came out before he knew it.
"I love you."
At the whisper, Lizzie's whole body flushed so red he could see it even under the dim lamp.
Lizzie's hands, worked since childhood, were a little rough. Her body was as soft as a newborn's. When he nibbled lightly and tasted her, she cried out in a sweet voice. Tonight, of all nights, that voice seemed especially sweet.
He heard that Red Sword had ordered karambits at the weapon shop on the day they sold the screaming carrots. Because Juhwan had gone with them on that first visit, they had received a small discount. Nothing was finished yet, and they would have to wait a good five days; all three of them were impatient.
Juhwan took a few more requests. The numbers didn't match, so he decided to work apart from Red Sword, who seemed set on continuing to gather herbs. Since he meant to travel by wagon from here on, he spent several days helping with carriage repairs. This world had nothing like the service on Earth, where you called somewhere and they came to tow the car. Proper repairs could be left to a shop, but if trouble struck suddenly on the road, the emergency work had to be done by hand. To live here, he would have no choice but to become a tinkerer who laid hands on anything and everything.
He built carrying frames, hunted his own food, divided meat from hide, mended wagons. Day by day, the things he could do kept growing.
At this rate, I've grown pretty well used to this world.
Somehow he felt he had become a decent husband, and he was a little proud of it.
While Juhwan helped with the wagons, Lizzie took Dorothy to mend secondhand clothes. A request had come into the guild, he heard, from a merchant who had bought up a great lot of lower nobles' clothing. The pay was said to be fairly good. It was sewing work, so the request went not to adventurers but to the women of the village. The guild seemed to keep a few false adventurer names for times like this. An adventurer under the guild's name accepted the job, then hired the women to do it—which meant, in the end, that the guild itself was employing the village women.
A good number of the women in the adventurer village latched onto the request. Side work was rare, and their spirits ran high. Sewing was no small labor. He wondered whether Lizzie really needed to take it on, but her enthusiasm was just as fierce. The work was divided among several groups. A few women gathered to sew and to talk, and they seemed to enjoy it.
While the adults sewed, Dorothy ran errands—fetching needles and thread and little scraps of cloth, or rubbing the women's shoulders. Her wages were two dolls the size of a palm, and a bit of leftover fabric. Oz had done nothing at all, and yet somehow came away with a pretty little cape. A small rabbit wearing a cape was cute. When he and Lizzie looked at Oz and said so several times, Dorothy sulked.
"Dorothy would be cute in a cape too."
Oz, for his part, seemed awkward in it. Once the cape was on him he wouldn't move, sitting frozen for a long while as if he had turned to ice. In the end Lizzie took it off. After that, if anyone brought the cape near him, he fled like a shot.
The wagon repairs and the mending of old clothes were both work done inside the adventurer village. The day ended before sunset, and afterward they met Red Sword to ask, and to be told, the things an adventurer ought to know. Each time, Red Sword taught them a few scraps that happened to come to mind. Among those scraps were matters concerning the brothel wagons. Hearing that sort of talk from women left him too awkward to meet anyone's eyes, so he stared at the ceiling.
And three times a week, they took lessons in letters from the guild's Reader.
He didn't know the full story, but the Reader seemed to be a daughter of a noble house. Her conduct and her manner of speech both showed that she had been educated, in her own way, since childhood. Lizzie watched everything she did with close attention, and when she was alone she secretly copied it. In an empty room she mimed picking something up with her fingers, imitated the lilt of an introduction—Hello, I am Lizzie—and tried the pose of a small, slight bow. She looked exactly like a child playing house.
Perhaps the Reader's manners had seemed beautiful to her. To Juhwan, Lizzie simply smiling brightly was far more elegant, and far more beautiful. When he said so, slipping it in as if it were nothing, she realized she had been caught and grew terribly embarrassed.
"Lizzie, the way I see it, you don't have to copy any of that. You really are more beautiful. Cute, and lovely."
"...Juhwan, you really..."
She shot him a sidelong look and laughed under her breath. He had meant it, but she seemed to take it for empty flattery.
And for some reason, the girl who had told them about Rudolphs seemed to have begun living in this village. He didn't know where she stayed, but now and then he caught sight of her.