The World I Belong To
“Haa…”
Back home, Mun Doyun let out a sigh thick with guilt.
Not that sighing would pull the guilt out of his chest.
The image of that girl’s ankle—the one he’d seen when he went into the apartment with the paramedics—kept flickering behind his eyes. More precisely, the ankle that ended in a blunt stump where a foot should have been.
And if he thought about the handprints smudged across the unlit living-room wallpaper—marks that had forced themselves into his sight whether he wanted to look or not—he could more or less picture how she had been living. She must have braced herself against the walls with her hands and hopped around on her one good foot. The noise from upstairs that he and Sumin had complained about had come from that. The occasional thuds, too—those had surely been the sound of her misstepping and falling.
Thinking how badly he wanted a cigarette he’d already quit, Doyun sank onto the sofa and just kept sighing.
Without knowing any of that, he and Sumin had cursed out the upstairs neighbors, hadn’t they?
Judging by the state of the living room, she looked like she’d been living alone for quite a while. She had clearly been living up there with her parents—so where had that couple gone? And why had the apartment turned so bleak?
Paying her hospital bill had come from that same guilt. Doyun didn’t think of himself as a particularly good man. But he also wasn’t bad enough to just ignore his own conscience and move on.
The doctor had said she hadn’t injured anything; once she came to, she could be discharged. So he’d figured the medical fee was a cheap indulgence—pay it and walk away with a clean slate. Maybe it was because the amount hadn’t even been that much. Even after covering the bill in her place, Doyun still couldn’t settle.
He and Sumin had raised a daughter of their own, and that made it worse.
He was staring blankly at a TV he wasn’t really seeing when Sumin came home.
“Oh—honey. You’re back? Did the kid upstairs wake up?”
Doyun’s voice came out low and heavy. Sumin dropped down beside him with a weary sigh of her own.
“Yeah. She just came to, so I took her home and came straight back. By the way—remember that woman from a while back who killed her husband and went to prison? The one who turned herself in saying her kid was getting beaten so badly she thought he was going to die, so she killed the father? Turns out that was the upstairs unit.”
“That happened?”
“You’re the one who told me about it while watching the news last time. You don’t remember? Anyway, she’s been living alone in that place with no parents. The trash bags are nothing but cup-ramen containers, and the sink and everything else look completely bare.”
It wasn’t something Doyun had paid attention to, but all of it had apparently registered with Sumin. He’d vaguely overheard someone bragging that the kid upstairs—son or daughter, whichever—had gotten into a prestigious university. For Doyun, who could barely keep his head above water with work, details like that hadn’t stuck.
At any rate, if his wife was right, it meant the girl upstairs had been scraping by on her own ever since her father died and her mother went to prison.
“Wasn’t the kid upstairs a college student? But she’s so short…”
“You’re short too. Why are you giving her a hard time about her height?”
“Come on, we’re from completely different generations…”
“Fine, whatever—just go to sleep already. You have work tomorrow. You came home early and you’re still up for what?”
Listening to his wife’s grumbling, Doyun let out one last sigh and headed for the bedroom. College student or not, short or not—the news Sumin had brought only weighed heavier on his heart. He was a father himself. The thought that a child had been abused and was now left alone like that was enough to put tears in the eyes of a man who had lived most of his life without crying.
But if his wife caught him tearing up, she’d only tease him for it. Even with his chest so heavy, the embarrassment won out. Doyun lay down first and turned onto his side, facing away from the door—so that even when Sumin lay down beside him, she wouldn’t be able to see his face.
“Haa. That was rough.”
The moment I got home, I sighed. With my leg like this, going out and coming back was no small thing. At least the downstairs neighbor aunt had helped support me, so I’d made it back in one piece—but even on the receiving end, being propped up like that was incredibly awkward and skin-crawling. Well, the skin-crawling part was my own personal issue.
Anyway, I wasn’t family. To her, I was just the nuisance who kept falling on the floor whenever I felt like it and causing noise complaints. And yet the second we were face-to-face, she was that kind—it was weird. Though if I thought about it, maybe it wasn’t that strange. People will cheerfully talk about how someone’s parents are dead and swimming in the afterlife when they don’t have to look them in the eye.
Wasn’t it the same in the game I played—League of Champions? The second things went sideways, the chat filled up with people who started with insults. And it wasn’t just games. Look at the nightmare customers who call support centers—plenty of people who start cursing the moment they know you can’t see their face. That’s just how humans are, I guess. Which is also why the same person can turn out so kind once you’re actually looking at each other.
On the flip side, I still remembered the sound of them slamming the ceiling in retaliation the second I fell. So the favors people kept doing me didn’t make any sense. Why pay my hospital bill for me? Why walk me all the way home?
But once I got back and looked around, the answer was simple. They’d been this nice, so now I was supposed to move around the house a little more quietly. Something like that, right? And it seemed like the message had landed. Now that I owed them, I couldn’t just hop around without thinking. Never mind how much falling hurt—I didn’t want to keep causing trouble for people who’d even covered my medical fees.
So I just crawled to my room. Moving on one leg was hard and dangerous, but if I gave up on walking altogether, well—even a leg with everything below the ankle carved off still had a knee left. Crawling was no problem at all. I’d just get around like this from now on. I was done with being in pain.
Moving low toward my room like that, I noticed the traces of people who’d been in and out of the living room, and it irritated me. I didn’t remember being carried out to the hospital, but apparently the crash from me collapsing in the bathroom had brought the downstairs neighbors and the ones next door and everyone else running. Other people being in my house was unpleasant enough, but what bothered me more were the footprints themselves.
If the floor had just been a uniform layer of dust, fine—but with footprints scattered here and there, something about it felt wrong. Even that woman who dropped by whenever she felt like it seemed to respect that in her own way and never left traces. Everyone else had just walked straight into the dust pit without a clue.
It was pretty ironic. Normally you’d be disgusted if someone walked into a clean house in their shoes and left dirty footprints. I was disgusted because that dust pit had gotten cleaner. I could already picture it—the next time that woman came over, she’d take one look at how uncomfortable I was and talk me into cleaning the living room while we were at it.
“Come to think of it… where did that woman go…?”
Earlier I’d been too out of it to ask the aunt. Why had she been the one sitting by my hospital bed instead? It struck me as odd for a second, but then I decided it wasn’t important enough to bother thinking about and let it go. There’d been a racket from the bathroom, an ambulance had shown up, so of course the other units had come poking around too. That woman might come over to lecture me about this and that, but going all the way to the hospital with me would’ve been a lot to ask. The computer was still on—according to the clock, it was already half past midnight. For most working people, that was time to start getting ready for bed. Of course, for people who played League of Champions—myself included—this was peak waking hours.
So the aunt had probably sent that woman home first and come to the hospital in her place. There was no telling when someone who’d passed out after falling in the bathroom would wake up. I only came to because I was usually awake at this hour; otherwise the blackout might have just rolled straight into sleep. For a working adult, that kind of situation would be seriously awkward. The aunt had come with that in mind.
“Whatever. Let’s just play.”
Anyway, water under the bridge. I struggled up and sat back down in my chair. Thanks to all the chaos, the penalty for not accepting a match had fully expired. People really should just stick to what they know. I had to go and take a bath, and look where it got me—passing out in the most pathetic way and ending up at the hospital. If I’d just kept grinding games, none of this would’ve happened.
…Of course, to maintain basic human dignity you still had to bathe and clean every so often. But I was going to die once the money ran out anyway. Might as well live sloppy.
Maybe because plenty of people shared my sleep schedule—the game I queued into with that mindset found a match in under a minute. I accepted, dropped into the ban-pick lobby, and the chat started rolling immediately.
Ah. This familiar festival of trolls.
Yeah. This was the world I belonged to.
A dry little laugh caught in my throat as I got ready to close the client. Drop at exactly zero seconds, then wait for the next queue.