Please Save Me
I cut through the water at a sprint. The swimsuit fit so perfectly that the water barely dragged on me at all.
"Ah!"
Jiyu caught me anyway. She grabbed my ankle and said,
"Hana, you've gotta play with us! What do you mean, swimming off first?"
"Blub, blub, blub..."
With Jiyu latched onto my foot, I sank. All the momentum I'd built up vanished in an instant.
"Ah!"
Jiyu seemed to realize what she'd done and let go. I broke the surface and said,
"You can't just grab someone's foot out of nowhere, Jiyu!"
"Hehe!"
Jiyu smiled, a little sheepish, and Yumi came walking over. Everyone was playing hard. I looked at the two of them and said,
"Then let's see who can stay under the longest!"
"Yeah!"
A breath-holding contest never got old, no matter when you played it. Yumi nodded too, and I tacked on one more condition.
"Last place buys drinks from the vending machine today!"
"Okay!"
A bet always burned hotter once something was on the line. Jiyu, Yumi, and I stared one another down, and I said,
"When I count to three, we all go under together!"
"One. Two. Three!"
At my signal, the three of us dove. I'd taken a huge breath before going under, so I was confident. Last place, at least, would not be me. But Jiyu and Yumi had already locked eyes and cooked up a scheme.
They came toward me smiling. A bad feeling crawled over me, and I backed away—only to hit the wall almost at once. Jiyu and Yumi closed in around me. All I could do was stare, shivering like a girl cornered by a creep, and because I was holding my breath, my heart pounded even faster.
They slipped their hands into my armpits, and I understood, a second too late, exactly what they meant to do. The two of them had formed an alliance to shove me into last place!
Tickle, tickle.
The moment they started tickling me, I couldn't help but burst out laughing. But we were underwater. The laugh exploded out of me, and the oxygen I'd hoarded rushed away all at once. After a laugh like that, the gasp that follows is pure instinct. There is no fighting it.
My lungs demanded air, trying to inhale and refill what I'd lost, but I was underwater. There was no oxygen to give them. Watching the bubbles boil up around me, I could only think one thing: I'd been had. I'd already laughed, though, and what little breath I had left was climbing all the way to my chin.
I couldn't hold out any longer. I chose buying drinks over dying. My body shot toward the surface the way a fish sometimes bursts up out of the water.
"Pwah!"
I packed oxygen into the lungs that had been begging for it. Gasping, I looked around. Jiyu and Yumi had seen me surface and come up too. I glared at them and said,
"Tickling is against the rules!"
"Nobody said that. And you were the first one out of the water!"
"Wha..."
Yumi laid it out so neatly that I had nothing to say. I accepted the loss. I did not whine like a little kid.
"I'm gonna go swim!"
I left Jiyu and Yumi behind and started swimming. I was absolutely not sulking off to play by myself. As I swam, though, something felt unsatisfying. The water was too shallow. Swimming only tasted right when it came up to your neck, and here it sat a little below my stomach. I could practically swim with my hands on the bottom.
I slipped out of the pool. I'd spotted another one earlier, and not far from here was the pool the upper grades used. Swimming there would actually be fun. How deep could an older kids' pool really be?
Glancing around, I reached it. None of the upper grades seemed to have swim class today; the place was empty. I grinned and dove long and far, like a competitive swimmer.
But I'd forgotten something. I was short. And the pool was, quietly, quite deep.
"Blub! Blub!"
I went under. My feet couldn't touch the bottom. I thrashed, flailing to get back to the surface, but panic had locked my body up. It wouldn't move the way I wanted.
I had no choice but to scream.
The villagers' crime did not end with a single outing.
One of them, who still had a scrap of decency left, did speak up.
"At this point I think we've filled the village development fund... Are we stopping after the next run?"
But Village Chief Kim Chunbae, who had already tasted money, barked at the man.
"Now listen here! Don't those company bastards make your blood boil?"
"What?"
Kim Chunbae explained, spittle flying.
"They've started putting up walls on land we've used for decades."
Just as he said, Byeolbit Foods had begun raising a barrier to protect the Tangle. Closing a perimeter that enormous without a single gap would take time, of course.
Nothing was impossible with human hands, though. A barrier far longer than the one Byeolbit Foods meant to build already stood in Korea. Think of the barbed wire along the 38th parallel, and the wall Byeolbit Foods was planning didn't amount to a scratch beside it. Set next to the fencing on the armistice line, it was practically child's play.
Even so, it was a massive undertaking that would take more than a year.
Kim Chunbae knew that, which was why he had to milk it for everything it was worth. Once a year passed, they would no longer be able to pilfer Tangle. After the wall went up, mere ordinary villagers would have no way in.
"Nobody in our village ever put up a wall on their own land and told people to stay out."
"That's right, that's right!"
"My little brother came to the village and asked what on earth the wall was for! Since when did our village's heart grow this cold? Sharing and living in harmony—that's our village."
"Those Seoul people are downright shameless. They barge into our perfectly fine village, and all they do is throw up that enormous wall. One of these days they might even bulldoze the whole place."
From Byeolbit Foods' perspective there was no reason to do any such thing, but in the villagers' heads they were already picturing themselves as the oppressed.
Watching the mood ripen, Village Chief Kim Chunbae said,
"Ahem... So until that shameless company admits it was wrong, we'll keep up a rightful 'protest.'"
"The chief speaks true! This is a protest. Don't dance to those corporate crooks' tune—let's do what we have to do!"
"Hear, hear!"
The village was tiny. Thirty people didn't even live there, all told, and perhaps that was why their unity was remarkable. There was an old saying that you survive by sticking together. Kim Chunbae, who ran a village this small and knew his people's temper, smiled a oily smile and thought,
We're already going once every two weeks...
At first they had taken only about fifteen at a time, but the number kept climbing. Lately someone had even come back with thirty.
Sell Tangle the proper way and you could make a fortune, but they couldn't. Byeolbit Foods would catch them at once. So they sold on the quiet to buyers dealing under the table, and received barely half the price.
Even so, it was serious money. Nearly a hundred million won—some seventy-five thousand dollars—every two weeks. Nominally it went into the village development fund, but Kim Chunbae had no intention of showing the villagers the details.
No. From the start, he was planning to run. Three months of this and he would have enough to loaf for the rest of his life. Byeolbit Foods would never notice the Tangle was gone, so the plan was perfect.
He would claim he was ill, leave the village, and walk off with the development fund piled in his own account. There was no plan more perfect than that.
He meant to leave behind only enough to keep up appearances. They were accomplices in the same crime anyway. Nobody was going to report him.
"All right, all right. We've got an early start tomorrow, so get some sleep."
The farming season was already over, and the villagers had nothing else to do. That was why they headed out before dawn to pick Tangle. Night was too dark to be safe, and Byeolbit Foods didn't start work until after nine in the morning, so they aimed for around six and did their pilfering then.
After a little sleep, the villagers rose at dawn and set out for Byeolbit Farm, strolling along with cheerful faces as if they were out for a walk.
Far off, a single drone was filming them. It made almost no sound at all.