2 | Like a smelly fish out of water

12 hours before she died, and the world was about to eat itself.

"Huh? Wait, what? Is she okay?"

I can barely open my eyes with the pounding headache. It feels painful, as I try to move my body, and remind myself why I shouldn't drink this much.

Yet, when I hear something thudding on the floor and hurried steps, I manage to face the daylight attacking my eyes, and weakly get up on my bed. I watch Cho-Hee as she starts packing her clothes into her backpack while trying to wipe her tears and hold her phone to her ear.

I hurry out of bed to force her to sit down and pack her stuff until she hangs up. "What's happening?"

"My mom... she's at the hospital. She broke her ankle."

"Shit... is she okay?"

"Yeah, they said it wasn't anything serious."

"That's great news! Why are you crying then... ah, well, then again, you cry for every little thing..."

"I was just so scared! I work all the time and I never stay with her. But she's an old woman now, and she can't even reach things on top of drawers and... what if one day, they call me to say that she had a deadly fall?" She lets go of her phone and starts crying, her hands covering her red face.

"Hey..." I get up and awkwardly stand there for a second, before getting closer to her and patting her head. "Come on, don't say that. We both know your mom's so strong, she'll probably bury the two of us before she dies. Trust me, she's at least sticking around until she can wed you off. And we both know that'll happen in a very long, long, long, looong—"

"Ya!" She throws one hand at me, weakly laughing despite the tears still pouring down her cheeks.

"Come on, let's get you to the train station. Go and see her."

"But, today's New Year's, and it's your father's—"

"Stop worrying about me."

"No, I can't— you should come with me. You'll stay at my place and—"

"No way! Your mom hates having guests over, she'll see me as a nest of dirt. We don't want her to try to clean up every part of the house with a broken ankle, right?"

"But..."

"I'll call you tonight, we'll spend New Year's through the phone."

She looks around for a bit more, pouting and still hesitating. But I leave her no more time to think about it and throw her backpack at her. I quickly go to the bathroom and then come outside, Cho-Hee already waiting for me by the car.

I try to cheer up all the way to the train station with her favorite topics, like the latest celebrity guests in Running Man, the album Taeyeon is about to release, the iced latte I'll get her in Starbucks the next time she comes back, and while she listens and even answers in popular memes like she usually does, she still seems too concerned. Not just for her mom, for me too. She offers me multiple times to come with her, but I refuse until the moment we're finally on the right track, waiting for her train.

"Ya! Stop it, already! I told you, I'm not coming with you and put your mother in embarrassment."

"But—"

"Besides..." I cut her off, before she can ask me again to come with her, "I need time alone for Gijesa."

It might be a low blow, but I know she won't let go unless I say that. Indeed, she doesn't add anything else, and we just wait for her train in silence. When it finally arrives, I sigh and pat her head to comfort her one last time. But she catches my hand and drags me into a long hug, embracing me to the point where I can hear some of my bones cracking, while I let my arms hang around awkwardly, trying to get off.

"Ya! Let me go, you know I hate hugs!"

When she finally lets go, she takes up a sad and tired expression and starts bowing. "Yes, your majesty, alright, alright, I'll do it."

"Should've known you were about to do a meme again..." I sigh, clicking my tongue with a smirk.

"Byeeee, I love you!" She waves at me before jumping inside the train, the moment the doors were about to close.

We keep waving at each other until the train disappears into the horizon, and I'm left all alone.

Again.

I take a deep breath and get to my car, driving all the way back, feeling something heavy in my chest. That something never gets away, anyway. But I blame it on the alcohol, my hungry and upset stomach and not a very regenerating sleep. I don't know until when I can blame it on mundane things, but I guess it'll be until the day I no longer can even decide.

So, on my deathbed?

Ugh, that's it, I can't even stay alone with myself for longer than thirty minutes. I need to get out of this car.

That's precisely what I do, when I finally manage to find a parking spot near a groceries market. I put on some music through my headphones to hear anything else but my thoughts, and start wandering around the shop, buying some meat, rice, vegetables to prepare soup and as condiments and fruits like persimmons and apples. My dad's favorites.

I don't stay in the shop for too long, because the most important thing I need to buy right now is his favorite meal : fish. And as I go to the Noryangjin Market, and try to make way in this flood of people and smell, I remember precisely why I don't eat fish.

I never could stand its smell, so I've always hated it, especially because my dad just loved to take me to the open fish markets where I had to witness people chopping dead fish heads while aggressively yelling to make me buy dead animals staring right at me with their little lifeless black eyes. I can't say the squid or crab stalls were any better, so I just had no place to hide in those markets, just like now. But he still loved to take me with him after work, taking his time to buy the best fish and haggling for the price based on his judgment of the quality, as if he truly knew anything about fishes at all. Then he told me "That's how we used to do it where I'm coming from, back in the day!" despite growing up in the heart of Busan and never even going to the sea until he was a teenager, in the most famous port city in Korea.

Ha! That man was a fraud.

So I better buy him the best fish out there, to show him that even I know more about sea food than he ever did.

"Ya! Fish lady. Can't you help me choose the best one here?" I turn to stare at the dead fish lady, who's been following me ever since I entered the market, definitely not looking as disgusted as the dead bride and myself, but rather judgmental, smelling every stall as if she still could. I don't mind talking this openly to her like this in public, because there are so many people here, shoving and yelling at each other that they'll hardly notice a weird woman talking alone.

"You're stupid. You should have come here at dawn, that's when there are seafood auctions and you can get the fresher ones if you're quick enough." Did this dead fish lady plain right insult me? Ghosts don't have enough respect for the living, nowadays.

"Just help me choose one," I sigh, clicking my tongue, already getting a headache from all the noise. Besides, my stomach still doesn't feel good enough to not make me puke from this smell if I stay here a bit longer.

"Come with me."

So, when she said that, I thought she would just bring me to a stall a bit further from there, and quickly weigh all of her options to point me out to the best one and that's it, we get the hell out of this market.

But, no.

She went full on Street Food Fighter, made me go through the whole market, stopping in front of every stall to take in the smell, weighing every fish with her eyes, making me watch fishermen disemboweling their fishes and leaving pools of blood, and touch them to tell her how they feel, then leave with a hateful comment about how they were amateurs and walk up to the next stall, while I'm the one being yelled at by the owners because it was "no touch unless you buy".

And she did that for an hour straight, until she finally showed me a small fish and told me that "It doesn't look half bad."

So not only did I leave by wanting to puke during the whole car ride, not helped with the dead bride's commentary on how the dead fishes will even haunt her on the other side, but I spent one hour in hell just to get a fish that "doesn't look half bad"?

And now I have to wait in the busy traffic because of the holidays?

I will soon put in my resignation regarding life, thank you very much.

"Listen to me, I will tell you about the exact way you cook a fish—" starts the dead fish lady.

"Do you think my husband feels as lonely as those dead fishes with their sad little black eyes?" follows on the dead bride.

"You know what? I just remembered why I don't hang out with you guys!" I yell, at the same time yet another scooter squeezes through into the traffic and I honk at him.

"But—" they both try, before I cut them.

"Get lost or I'll exorcize you with salt!"

"But you don't even have salt with you—"

I don't let the dead fish lady finish, and quickly search through my groceries bags, making them both disappear in a blue smoke. Yet I, indeed, don't even have any salt. But, really, I'd much rather get lost in my own thoughts rather than having to listen to them one more second. And they're the least annoying ghosts I have ever encountered even since I see many of them.

It started when I was thirteen years old, and I still don't know why. I don't even know whether they're hallucinations or not, which might be an option, according to my therapist.

Because I saw my first ghost when I woke up in the hospital, after the accident that cost my dad's life. And the person I saw was my dad himself.

I saw him in the darkness of that room, barely lit with the dim light of the monitors, beeping at every heartbeat, faster as I started to pull on the intravenous lines in my arms to get away from the bed, screaming at the top of my lungs for someone to hear me when every muscle in my body hurt. I saw him even when I still had a bandage on my head, covering my left eye that hadn't been spared by a small glass. I saw him clearly through the foggy veil on the only available eye I had at that time.

I saw him clear as daylight.

I looked at the blood coming out of my scratched knees, while for him, it was pouring from the open wound on the top of his skull, as if it had broken in two. The glass that left me with tiny cuts had cut him deep in the chest and the arms. The impact that left my body with barely visible scars had snapped his neck, placed in a weird angle.

But despite the pain he must have been in, despite the fact that I looked like I had just fallen off a bike while he was the victim of a crushed car, despite the fact that I should have looked like him, be in pain like him, that I should have been with him... he looked at me.

And he smiled at me, until nurses barged in the room with my sister, crying possibly for the first time in her life seeing me like this.

He gave me that same smile when I brought good grades at home, when I offered him little gifts without ever claiming them or when I went to his workplace to pick him up because I couldn't wait any longer to see him without ever admitting it. Then, he disappeared.

And I've never seen him, nor his smile, ever again.

My therapist told me that I'm suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and something called survivor's guilt. That it's what explained the times when I feel like I couldn't breathe for no other reason than the quick thought of my dad going through my mind. That it's why I think I'm seeing wounded people all over the street, begging me to help them because I feel so helpless and guilty by not being able to help my father at the time. That it's why I feel so disconnected from the world and have to remind myself that my body can still feel something by harming it, because I still don't believe that I actually belong here after that accident.

I stopped talking about the ghosts to the therapist, right after she suggested to my sister, who became my legal guardian at the time, that I should be hospitalized in a mental institution. So, I just started to pretend that I was fine. Not even just about the ghost thing, I started to pretend about... everything.

At least, my sister stopped worrying.

But I could never clear my head from these thoughts ; no medication has helped me to do so completely. Or maybe I should have used them the right way, instead of renouncing to anything that could possibly keep me alive in a world where I have to survive against my will while my father didn't. I've spent these past years just hoping that some kind of solution will pop up before me. That I will know my own personal enlightenment through an unexpected meeting or event like they always do in the movies. I wish everything could just go away and I can find some kind of peace deep within my restless soul.

But things never seem to go my way.

Even now, I'm begging the sky for some kind of miracle. But all it sends my way is rain. It's raining while I'm still inside a car in the middle of a highway, just like that day. We're the last day of December, the last day of the year : it should be snowing. Maybe if there was snow that day, the roads would have been blocked, and my father couldn't have answered my call to come and pick me up from Cho-Hee's place. Maybe if there was snow, I couldn't even have met up with Cho-Hee. We would have stayed at home, eating sweet potatoes while watching a show. Even my sister would have joined us at some point, even if it was just to nitpick every flaw in the variety shows we loved and eat more sweet potatoes than us, even stealing mine. We would have fought. But at least, my father would still have been there to loudly complain about how much we fought and that all he wanted was two normal nice girls, but all he got was two uncivilized animals. Then, we would have laughed it all off and gone to sleep peacefully.

If only there was snow that day.

But there was rain, just like today.

It keeps pouring, even as I finally pull over two streets below my house and start walking, not even feeling my feet touch the ground or the weight of the groceries bags I'm holding. Only the streams of rain touching my skin and wetting my clothes keep my body awake, while my mind has already drifted far away. Never in the moment, never thinking about the future.

I'm still stuck under the rain of that day.

I don't see the people I'm walking past. I don't hear the music in my headphones. I feel like I don't even know where I'm going at this point. My home? Is that place really my home? Why am I going there? Why am I still walking? Why am I still here?

I don't wake up from these questions during my endless walk.

Until I bump into someone, and the world seems to come to light once again, pulling me from the abyss of my mind.

"Sorry..." I mumble, not even hearing my voice because of the... wait, why isn't there any music in my headphones?

And... is that a hand holding my arm?

I turn around abruptly to face the man I just bumped into, now stretching his bony fingers with several golden and silver rings over my arm. His long and graceful legs in purple silk pants are making him one head taller than me. His jacket, of the same color and material as his pants, is a bit wider for his slim torso, and I can only partly see, thanks to his black shirt half-unbuttoned at the top, an impressive tattoo that's stretching all the way to his slender neck : an enormous dragon with blue, red and yellow scales, flying over a disturbed sea struck by the lightnings at the background, on a rainy sky. The ancient art style of the tattoo almost reminds of an old drawing on parchment, when the face of the stranger itself seems sketched from a painting of an emperor who belongs to an extinct era. His square jaw shaped with precision and high cheekbones are covered with a dark stubble. His features are hardened by his narrow and furrowed eyebrows, as his purple-pitched eyes survey me, partly covered by his soft-looking black hair falling on the sides like thin curtains. He seems young, probably around the same age as me, and yet at the same time, older than I could ever be. As if the experiences of thousands of years were all over his flawless skin.

I feel so mesmerized by his appearance, that I forget, for the first three seconds, that he's still holding me by my arm. But when I finally realize it, I pull back immediately. At first, he holds a strong grip, so when he eventually lets go, it's at the expense of my groceries bag that I let go, while trying to jerk back.

I reach for the bag, worried about the fresh ingredients in it that will fall in the mud of the street floor. But halfway through its fall, the bag just stops and so does my little scream. It hangs in the middle of the air, with only an apple coming out of it and remaining right where it is, with a raindrop ready to touch it.

But it doesn't fall on the apple either.

In reality, the raindrops all around me have stopped their race too. All the people talking are now stuck with their mouths wide open, ready to answer or to laugh, while those who were walking remain with one lifted foot that doesn't touch the ground yet. The wind has stopped with the passing cars now dwelling on the road without going further, and there isn't a slightest dirt in motion. I can even see my neighbor, the old lady, with her head coming out of her window, staring at me with a mean look, as if ready to scold me about the noise we've made with Cho-Hee last night. But she doesn't talk. She doesn't move. She's just like the rest of the world around me.

I spin around, trying to understand whether I'm hallucinating or not. I even pinch myself to determine whether I just dozed off in my car because I'm still stuck in traffic or not. But I'm not dreaming and I'm not having a very realistic hallucination either.

Everything is frozen in time like a picture.

Except for me and that stranger in front of me.

The moment I finally look back at him, I see that his features are no longer hard-looking. They've softened, as he now looks at me with a mean smirk, his eyes now lighted and looking more pink than purple.

When he opens his mouth for the first time, it's a deep voice that seems very distant yet very familial that's coming out of it, the kind that could play in my sweetest dreams or haunt my worst nightmares, something human but inhumane at the same time.

"また会おう,死神."

And as if he had never even existed, the stranger disappears in the blink of an eye.

My bag then suddenly falls on the ground and the rain starts pouring on it again. The music in my headphones comes back at the same time as the people around me carry on their conversations, walk their ways and drive their cars while my neighbor opens her mouth to start complaining right under my wide-open eyes. I hastily cut the music, not to listen to her, but just to try and sort out my mind about what just went down.

When I frantically look around to search for the stranger, it's the two ghost ladies I see, both of them coming out under the stairs where they usually wait for me. But this time, they don't look like their usual selves, that I just saw not even an hour ago inside the car. I've already seen fear on their faces countless times when I've threatened to exorcize them with salt. Yet, what's haunting their features right now is something beyond fear.

It's an utter dread that has them shaking the same way I do, their skins looking more pale than they ever could in their state, proving me that the terror that makes them stutter in front of me can even provoke physical reactions in people dead for a long time.

I take a deep breath and hastily retrieve my groceries bag on the floor. Then, I simply ignore my neighbor, still insulting me, and start climbing my stairs two by two and calling the fish lady and the bride inside my apartment.

I drink a big glass of water, trying to calm my shaking hands, and sit down in front of the ghosts, remaining near the main entrance and staring at each other, looking still very distraught but at least, now they seem to be able to talk without stuttering too much, exchanging in a conversation that's so quick that my numbed brain can't make out a word.

"Does one of you mind explaining to me what happened out there?" I blurt, swallowing the lump in my throat. "You also saw what happened, right? I don't understand, that man, he seemed—"

"Don't talk about him out loud!" the bride shrieks, waving her hands in front of her, obviously panicked. "He could still be listening." She looks around, as if trying to spot something.

"He spoke in Japanese, no?" the fish lady asks her, now approaching the windows and looking through the blinds that I didn't pull up this morning when I left in a hurry with Cho-Hee. "I heard a lot of it in the marketplace, but I can't make out what he said."

"He talked to me in Japanese? Why?"

"He told you that he'll 'see you again soon' but that last word... I didn't understand it."

"Shinigami. He told her, 'I'll see you around, Shinigami.'" the bride almost whispers that unknown word.

"What does it mean?" Instead of answering me directly, the bride simply sinks into my couch and puts her hands on her forehead to shake her head, looking like she could cry any second if ghosts are still capable of doing that.

"It's what he is. He talked to you as if you were... akin to him."

The fish lady rushes over to the bride, her eyes now wide open. She catches her by the arm and makes her get on her feet to hide her behind her tiny and old body, as if she could protect her from... wait, why is she staring at me this way?

"Ya... I don't know why he's got you so scared and what you're thinking, but I don't know that man. I don't even know what shinigami means, so I certainly don't know why he called me that and—"

"We better go now, then. Because I don't want to be around you when you'll understand what it means."

And just like that, both of them disappear in a blue smoke, leaving me with the clear intuition that this time, there will be no coming back.

Leaving me with a head full of questions and an even deeper loneliness.