Sleep Comes Easy
One day, Haru uploaded a song Hana had sung to NewTube. The response was nothing short of explosive. Nearly everyone who heard it hit the like button.
Everyone who heard Hana's nursery rhymes found something kind to say about them. Most agreed they were wonderful to fall asleep to, the way a lullaby is. Haru uploaded other versions as well, not just the nursery-rhyme ones, and the reach was wide enough to push the videos onto the fastest-rising chart.
"This is blowing up way too hard, isn't it?"
Haru said it while watching the research institute's channel, which had somehow already climbed past a hundred thousand subscribers. Only a few days ago the count hadn't been anything special. Seeing the numbers surge like this, she could feel Hana's popularity taking hold in earnest. Maybe because Hana was small and cute, the comments stayed warm. Now and then someone cracked an off-color joke, and Haru went in herself and deleted it.
"Even I didn't think we'd get this big."
Bora, too, had never dreamed NewTube would take off so suddenly. Hana's singing, though, carried an effect no one had seen coming. That she might possess an ability like this was something neither Bora nor Haru could have imagined.
Seo Jiwoo was a working man with brutal insomnia. He had never slept well at night to begin with, and the company he worked for ran rotating shifts. A schedule that kept rearranging his hours of rest was, for him, nothing short of ruinous.
It had gotten so bad that he went to a clinic, picked up a prescription, and spent long nights agonizing over whether he ought to quit for real. The pills did something, but he wasn't the sort they worked on particularly well, and he was at an awkward age to walk away from the job.
In his twenties he could have resigned on the spot and still had room to look for another place. Thirty was a murkier age for getting hired anywhere else. Shift work never stacked into the kind of career history anyone respected, and from where Seo Jiwoo stood, moving to another company looked like far too dangerous a gamble.
Of course a man like that watched NewTube before bed. Sleep refused to come, so he killed the hours however he could, and the app's Shorts were perfectly suited to the murder.
"Can't sleep again tonight..."
He was due at work in five hours, and rest still didn't look likely. He was wondering whether he'd have to pull another all-nighter and drag himself in anyway when a video came up: a little child with green hair, singing.
She sang nursery rhymes, then other songs, and something about it snagged his eyes. He closed Shorts, went to the proper channel, and listened to the child they called Hana. The songs themselves were ordinary. The voice was not. No singer alive could have sounded the way that child did.
It wasn't that she sang especially well. The voice was simply too strange, and the longer he listened, the more his chest unclenched. It felt odd to put the feeling into words, but it was like hearing music from the middle of a forest. A clear voice struck his ears and rang there, lovely to listen to. An orchestra of the woods.
What is that voice...
Seo Jiwoo stared at the screen as if spellbound, then closed his eyes to savor Hana's singing. Before the third video had even finished, he sank into a deep sleep. He could hardly remember the last time rest had come so peacefully.
The next morning he woke genuinely refreshed and checked the time. Something about it felt like he was late. Nine times out of ten, when you woke clear-headed instead of exhausted, whatever waited afterward was bad news. But the hour was exactly right for heading in to work.
All across the country, plenty of people did what Seo Jiwoo had done. They watched one of Hana's videos, slept like the dead, and woke up new.
Before long, Hana's songs were growing famous among people with insomnia as the national lullaby.
I took solitary little outings through that enormous building. Going outside still wasn't permitted, but indoors I could do whatever I liked. Up early for the first time in a while, I stood quietly at the front entrance.
Watching people come and go was its own kind of fun. And there was something I always did.
"Hello!"
I offered a greeting to everyone who came in, and a few of them patted my head on their way past. Most returned it properly. A handful seemed embarrassed and answered me, but clumsily.
I was the one saying hello, and that was the reaction I got? It was the sort of thing that deserved a proper scolding, but I, in my mercy, decided to let it go. I kept greeting everyone who entered, and then I saw a familiar face.
"Haru, hi!"
Haru was coming in to work with a tired look on her face. The moment she saw me, her expression demanded to know what I was doing there, and she started toward me. When she reached me she slipped her hands in under my arms, hoisted me clean off the ground, and carried me off somewhere.
"Hana, why are you down here?"
"I was bored staying in my room..."
"Come on up. You've got studying to do today too, remember?"
"I don't wanna!!!"
I thrashed and tried to escape, but the strength of Haru's hold was absolute. She cradled me against her and stroked my head, and I felt my will to resist go slack. Haru's arms were always warm, always comfortable. I slipped into sleep in that short span, and when I opened my eyes again I realized I was back in my room.
I looked at the books stacked on the desk with the face of someone whose country had just fallen. Haru had left them with a smile, homework for later. Problem sets, first thing on a perfectly good morning... She had informed me the level was appropriate for someone about to start elementary school, and then she was gone.
In other words, I was shut in a room I couldn't leave until every last problem was finished. It wasn't technically forced. But if I went off to play without doing them, Haru would look at me with that gloomy expression, and my conscience would sting, so I always finished the homework before I played.
It's only elementary-level stuff. I'll blast through it and go play!
I opened the book on that private vow. But this was not something I should have taken so lightly. The math was easy enough. Korean was the real problem. Inside this shabby little body the right answers were sitting right there in my head, and still my hand would not write them.
After an hour-long war of attrition, I finally finished the workbook Haru had left behind. Wrung out for no good reason, I dove straight onto the bed. I was resting like that when Bora came into my room.
"Hana? You asleep?"
I didn't answer, my face buried in the pillow. I had just solved problems that would have stumped a Nobel laureate, and my head was burning. Heat like that could only be cured with sleep.
Bora, though, saw through the fact that I wasn't actually asleep, sharp as a ghost. My acting, it seemed, did not work on her.
"Why are you pretending? I got your favorite thing all ready."
At those words I could have sworn my ears pricked straight up. I peeled my face off the pillow, scurried over on my short legs—tap-tap-tap—and latched onto Bora's thigh. It was a very huggable thickness.
"Come on, let's go, Hana~"
What I loved most was spending time somewhere the sunlight fell just right, drinking water as the hours passed. While I was at it, a massage therapist who lived in the building would come up and work on me. That cool relief, and the slow feeling of my belly filling—nothing else compared.
I was only four foot five, but if I kept growing under sunlight like this, surely I'd get taller. Five foot seven would be enough, I thought. Tall for a woman, though nothing special beside my past life. Even so, a man had his pride. I had to clear five-seven. Female models stood taller than that, didn't they?
And so I gave my body over to the therapist's kneading hands and passed a thoroughly pleasant afternoon.