Somehow, a Day I Didn't Want to Get Up
I ran with everything I had, lungs on the verge of bursting.
Fighting down the nausea that kept rising, I tore through the dark corridor that seemed to spin and whirl around me. Barely reaching the open black door ahead, I tumbled through it, kicking the door shut as I fell.
I tried to stand again, but all I managed was to sink down with my back against the door. I lifted my eyes to take in the room, yet my vision had already blurred too badly to see anything clearly. Sitting there a moment longer, I attempted to move—only for the worsening sickness to overwhelm me. I retched.
With ragged breaths, something spilled from my mouth and splattered onto the floor. When I dropped my head toward it, the hazy shape that swam into view was a strange, dark-red gelatinous mass.
My insides itched like mad. I kept breathing only by forcing out thin, wheezing gasps. There was no part of my body that didn’t hurt. My left shoulder, especially, was shredded as if it had been run through a saw, and the pinky finger of my left hand was simply gone. Everything in front of me stayed too blurred to make out.
“…Falling for that… am I… a complete idiot…”
I kept the self-mocking monologue going, still slumped against the wall. If I stopped talking even to myself, I felt certain I’d lose consciousness on the spot. With the desperation of a drowning man snatching at straws, I stretched out a hand and flailed. The stump of my severed left pinky scraped across a book on the shelf. The pain that bloomed from the wound seemed, for a fleeting second, to clear my head.
Using that pain to wring out whatever strength remained, I wriggled my fingers—yet all I managed was to clutch the book that had been sitting there. I no longer had the energy to move.
“…Should’ve just… transferred…”
The final muttered words mixed with the sound of air leaking from my wheezing lungs as I toppled sideways. The book rolled from my grip and hit the floor. At the same moment, from far down the corridor, I could faintly hear the ominous, dull thud of hooves striking the ground.
A few hours earlier.
Somehow, it was a day I didn’t want to get up.
That was the first thought that crossed my mind the moment I woke on Saturday morning, eyes still closed. As if on cue, a notification chimed. I picked up my phone and checked the message.
The cold, blunt letters stared up at me. A text from the club I belonged to.
Damn it.
I hurled the phone to the far end of the bed. Turning my head deliberately away from it, I caught sight of the window—and the heavy, leaden clouds packing the sky.
“….”
I wanted to go out even less.
The message had come from the president of the Occult Club—the one I’d joined only because Hwashik High School required every student to belong to a club and actually participate. Freshman year you could get away without joining anything. From sophomore year on, membership was mandatory. Most kids started early, back in first year. I hadn’t known that, so I scrambled around looking for a club only after becoming a sophomore.
Plenty of options existed, yet none appealed, and the ones that had been running since freshman year already felt like tight-knit social circles—hard to break into. Since I at least had a mild interest in mysteries, the occult, ghost stories, and the like, I signed up for the Occult Club, which sat half-hidden at the bottom of the very last page of the club list. There was also a thin calculation that an occult club would attract introverts rather than extroverts.
The moment I actually joined, I discovered it was just another brand-new social club for freshmen. I’d overheard during one of the few meetings I attended that they’d deliberately chosen the name “Occult Club” so ordinary people would naturally stay away—something odd and off-putting enough to keep casual joiners out. In other words, every single member was already friends with everyone else. So I kept skipping meetings whenever attendance wasn’t absolutely required. Showing up to a social club’s activities was, by itself, exhausting for someone as introverted as me.
Skip after skip after skip, and the end of that road was the text I’d just received.
I hesitated a moment, muttered another curse under my breath, then rolled across the bed, snatched the phone back up, and brought it to my face. The letters on the screen seemed to rearrange themselves into something else entirely.
…Now I really didn’t want to go.
Of course I wanted to quit a club like this. The only reason I stayed was that leaving would just mean I had to join another one. I’d already been grinding through this one under protest; now I was supposed to jump into a different club mid-schedule? Might as well tell me to die, damn it.
So yes—today’s meeting was one I had to attend. I knew that. Rationally the answer was crystal clear, yet for some reason I still hated the idea of going out with an intensity that made no sense. Was it because of the rain?
I half-pushed myself up, then flopped straight back onto the mattress.
Maybe I should just transfer schools.
A ridiculous fantasy, but I entertained it for a second.
Hmm…
Reason for transfer: I hate club meetings.
“….”
Even I could tell that wasn’t going to fly.
…Fine. I’ll go. I have to go.
Even while I shoved one leg after the other into my pants, even while I dawdled slipping the bag over my shoulder, even while I jammed the folding umbrella into the side pocket—an almost grotesque reluctance to leave the house kept flooding through me. As if stepping outside would kill me.
I moved so slowly that the preparations somehow felt finished in the blink of an eye. In the end I had no choice but to open the front door. It gave an ominous creak as I stepped out; I glanced back once. The small, lonely, cluttered room filled my view. I blew a weary sigh into the doorway and shut it behind me.
Looking back on everything now that it’s all over—I really should have just transferred schools.
I left the apartment and walked and walked beneath a sky that looked ready to pour, through streets just as gloomy, until the subway station the club had chosen as our meeting spot came into view. When I arrived, the club president and another member were already there, staring at me with complete indifference. The president, who’d been leaning against a pillar, spotted me and opened his mouth with the same unwelcoming, half-hearted expression as always.
“…Ah… you came?”
…You’re the one who told me to come.
“Yeah. Looks like not many people are here yet.”
“…Well, it’s still before the meeting time.”
We’d started a conversation, yet neither of us felt like continuing it. At that moment a bus pulled up in the distance and disgorged a crowd of people.
“Ugh—!”
“Ugh.”
“Ack!”
“What the hell—”
Four students burst out with assorted weird exclamations, gulped air for a second as if they’d been suffocating, then headed our way.
“Huff, huff—I thought I was gonna turn into a sardine in a can! Wasn’t that bus packed just now? Right? Huh? Oh, hyung, you came too! I knew you’d show up eventually! Come to the next activities more often!”
The one chattering nonstop with a face flushed red from whatever effort he’d put into surviving the bus was the only club member who was actually friendly toward me. Handsome in an open, easygoing way, kind, decent grades, decent personality—Yeom Sang-hyeon, the only person in this entire club who talked to me without awkwardness. A genuinely good guy.
And at the same time… an absolute social butterfly. I could barely handle his energy. Just standing near him felt like every last drop of my life force was being drained. Better to give him a half-hearted answer and leave it at that.
“Yeah. Sure.”
Apparently that was enough; he grinned and immediately bounced over to the president and the other early arrival, launching into conversation—how the weather had been swinging wildly so everyone should watch out for colds, what new dramas were airing and which ones were fun. Watching him laugh and talk only confirmed it: pure extrovert voltage. Just looking at him sapped my strength.
The three who’d gotten off the bus with him had already followed Sang-hyeon into that group and joined the chatter. Honestly, by now I preferred it this way. I wished they’d just forget I existed and go run the whole meeting without me.
Go on. Forget about me. Just leave smiling, the lot of you.
I muttered the silent wish like a spell, but the instant they started to move, Sang-hyeon turned back.
“Hyung, let’s go!”
“…Yeah. Okay.”
“….”
I swallowed the sigh that wanted to escape into the open air, and together we walked along the path that cut between the dense gray buildings—without the slightest idea of what today’s club activity would bring.