The Scar
For fifteen full seconds, I held my surgical scar up to the camera.
The director clutching his headset microphone froze solid in that exact pose, and the cameraman hesitated a beat before zooming in on the scar. The staff writer just stared, slack-jawed—which, measured against Candidate Pyeon Seongyeop's contorted mug, was practically composed.
"Do you believe me now?"
The debate wound to a close amid the pandemonium.
"Viewers... everyone? What did you... what did you make of that? It has been a meaningful hour, devoted to examining who is truly fit to lead Maesan City into the future. To all our viewers who stayed with us until this late hour—thank you."
Closing remarks included, the whole thing ran seventy-five minutes.
But of that, the extract-worthy portion totaled barely a minute.
Candidate Pyeon Seongyeop, smirking ear to ear as he brandished photos of me playing foot volleyball and running marathons. Me, tearing my shirt off in a blaze of fury (or the convincing performance of one). And the moderator's pupils quaking in their sockets. That was it. That was the whole of it.
But a single minute was more than enough kindling.
And I wasn't the only one who thought so—the campaign staff waiting for me outside the green room were wearing distinctly bright faces.
"Let's head back."
I was on my way out, satisfied that the objective had been met, when Pyeon Seongyeop of the Democratic Party came stomping over and seized my arm, his face twisted with rage.
"Hey! Candidate Min!"
Naturally, Candidate Pyeon was livid. A face mottled red and purple, eyes webbed with burst vessels. I was the one who'd been forced to bare a painful chapter of family history, so why did this man look like he was the wronged party?
No doubt he felt he'd been played, but what exactly he planned to do about it at this point was anyone's guess.
"You were fishing for me from the very start, weren't you, huh? When the army came up last time—you were acting restless, weren't you? Fine. Fine! You just gutted me nice and— clean! Young people learn the dirty game of politics all too well. If you're this filthy already, what will you be like in ten years?"
"Candidate Pyeon, please calm yourself."
"Calm? Keh-hah-hah-huh!"
Keh-hah-hah-huh?
It was such an idiotic sound that I found it strange, and I took a second, closer look at Pyeon Seongyeop's face.
Pyeon Seongyeop was sixty years old. Astonishingly, that made him one of the younger men in this mayoral field. But sixty was sixty all the same.
And obese, on top of it.
Maybe 170 centimeters if he stretched, and no less than 85 kilograms. Now that I looked properly, his neck was strikingly short for his frame.
"Bare your belly on TV and squeeze out all the sympathy juice you wa— want. Our Maesan citizens won't be taken in by it."
"Candidate Pyeon, are you quite all right? The way you're speaking is... a little strange."
"If anything, this blows my way, Candidate Min. A young fellow has no business knowing tha— that!"
His diction was slurring, and his color had gone genuinely bad.
I was still registering that something was off when I saw it: a fine tremor seize one corner of Pyeon Seongyeop's mouth.
"Your belly! Uhh."
He even swayed on his feet mid-finger-point, just for a moment.
"Candidate Pyeon Seongyeop? Are you truly all right?"
"Of— course."
Yet Pyeon Seongyeop himself seemed to have no idea what state his body was in. He simply glared at me with bulging eyes, one hand propped against the wall.
This man was, by any measure, not in normal condition.
"Candidate Pyeon Seongyeop."
"I did my army service in Hwacheon—"
"The army again? That's quite enough of that."
"No, listen. In the early voting, a candidate like you, Min, I'll— um. We'll see when we get there."
"Yes, sir. But first, let's get you to a hospital."
"What hospital."
Pyeon Seongyeop, naturally, waved off even his own aides' attempts to support him, blustering that he was fine. Fortunately, he did steady himself before long. He didn't look right, exactly—but he was upright.
Was he actually going to keel over like this...? Even so, I could hardly haul the man to a hospital myself.
"Candidate Pyeon? Your health matters more than the election."
I dipped my head in a polite bow, urged the hospital on him one last time, and left, ignoring whatever he spat at my back.
From where I stood, the Maesan mayoral debate had been a success. I didn't need to spend a single minute verifying whether the bait was rolling the way I'd cast it.
Then I checked my phone.
The missed calls had stacked up over the course of the debate. Nearly half of them were from my family.
So they'd watched it live. Good for them.
That was more calls than I'd shared with my family in the past three years combined.
The messages had piled up too, and their contents were entirely predictable.
It was the first time in my life I'd received such passionate attention from my family.
I had no intention whatsoever of replying.
But left as it was, the noise threatened to bleed into the campaign. I did carry a separate work phone, but out in the field, the line between public and private refused to stay razor-clean. Politics was the worst offender—though plenty of people delude themselves into believing they keep the two strictly apart.
Fortunately, this problem had a simple solution: Family Group—block sender, mute notifications. A few taps of the screen, and my entire family was silenced.
Perhaps something I should have done long ago.
Tonight I would rest easy. From tomorrow, it was back to the campaign.
"That boy isn't even human!"
Min Taegi, section chief of the Citizen Cooperation Division at Maesan City Hall, could contain his fury no longer and hurled his phone. Thwack! Crack! Crunch! The screen spiderwebbed, but this was no time to mourn a phone.
"That brat—the debate ended ages ago. Why won't he pick up?"
"Dain's dad. What do we do now?"
Min Seojun's stunt on the live debate broadcast had left the atmosphere at home in absolute ruins. Min Dain stared gravely into her smartphone. His wife, Kim Jeongran, dabbed at her tears with a tissue. Min Dajeong, mercifully, was away in Gunsan for a tournament, but when they reached her by phone, she was every bit as shaken.
Ordinarily, they were nothing more than a warm, harmonious family.
"One brat, Seojun, and look at this mess. Honestly."
Min Seojun had lost his mind, and now the whole household was reeling. As head of the family, Min Taegi wanted nothing more than to put out the fire. But... how?
Min Seojun had pulled a spectacular stunt on live television and was now refusing to answer his phone.
"Dad. Stop standing there like a statue and go find the boy's campaign office, at least."
"I don't know where it is either."
"You don't know? And you're telling me this now—"
"D-Dain?"
"...Sorry."
At this rate, the family would be at one another's throats. Min Taegi barely managed to smother his pounding heart and set his face. For now... yes. Perhaps this wasn't the sort of thing to panic over after all.
"Be that as it may, televised debates don't pull ratings. Honestly, how many people are going to sit through a debate on channel 68?"
"It's already trending, Dad."
"What?"
"See for yourself..."
Min Dain's somewhat testy correction. Min Taegi's stomach lurched, but his daughter wasn't wrong. This was, in truth, exactly the kind of story people would sink their teeth into. Stripping on a televised debate? And airing the family's history on top of it?
In a single evening, the Min family had become one of those trashy-TV clans that wouldn't lift a finger for the son who'd given away an organ for them.
Of course, Min Taegi saw it differently. It wasn't that the family had cast him out—Min Seojun had been the one drifting off on his own, circling further and further from the fold. That side of the story weighed just as heavily. But the public was never going to care about nuance.
"By tomorrow it'll be all over the news. The viral-clip kind."
"Good grief."
"It catches fire in the online communities, the reporters sink their teeth in... that's the standard lifecycle of a political scandal."
It was a chilling thought. One badly timed outburst, and a person could be preserved in amber forever. An active response was clearly required.
"Dain's dad—what about our Dajeong?"
"Phew."
"This is the most critical stretch of her entire career! Does Seojun even realize that?"
Min Dajeong. The precious youngest daughter, raised by the couple with every bit as much care as their eldest, Min Dain. A professional golfer, sitting respectably high this year on the Dream Tour, the KLPGA's second tier. On the Dream Tour, even the top prize-money earner operated at a loss—but Dajeong was a promising prospect, with a future ahead of her.
Min Taegi and Kim Jeongran, for their part, had tended to their youngest whenever they could spare the time.
"And then that brother of hers had to go and ring the death knell."
"He's out of his mind. As if he'd ever help her!"
That Seojun carried hurt feelings toward his parents... by now, even the couple understood that much. But did that justify inflicting something this cruel on a sister still so young? Hadn't he just turned her, overnight, into a player saddled with parental-risk baggage?
Golf was a sport where reputation and mental game were everything. If he had one shred of pity for his little sister, grinding it out at a ranking where her tour card hung by a thread, he could never have done this. Family was supposed to help each other at the crucial moments, weren't they? Blocking his own sister's path just to grab some attention was beyond unforgivable.
"And it will not be forgiven."
"That's right, Dain's dad."
Min Taegi and Kim Jeongran exchanged a look of grim resolve. Even Min Dain, who'd been a touch sullen last time, took their side wholeheartedly this once.
"Mom. Stay strong. You too, Dad."
"Thank you, Dain. Honestly, these past few days... watching Seojun greet us all by himself at the bus stop on his way to work, I did feel a little sorry for him? I even thought, maybe I should say something—tell him to hang in there. But seeing him now, I was far too complacent. Far too naive."
"It's okay. None of this is your fault, Mom."
"Thank you for saying so, sweetheart."
Min Dain, comforting her own mother. Kim Jeongran, sighing through a strained smile. And Min Taegi, watching the mother and daughter with tender pity.
But there was no room for sentiment.
Because articles like that were already beginning to surface. YouTube was a worry for the family as well—whether by the algorithm's design or pure spite, a Short of that brat Seojun stripping off his shirt to display his surgical scar was sitting right on the main page. The view count was already closing in on a hundred thousand.
Proof that the spectacle Min Seojun had staged at the debate was spreading fast.
"What a joke. Did I ever threaten him into donating?"
"We would never have done such a thing, Dain's dad. The way I remember it, Seojun brought up the army first—he's the one who reassured us?"
"Political ambition is what ruined that boy. There's no other explanation."
Min Taegi and his wife stared at each other, faces tight with stifled frustration. Because in their memories, they had never once committed a wrong so grave as to earn this much resentment.
Frankly, the couple felt wronged.