very children he orphaned. It got to the point that the villagers began to pay Dae-Ho just to speak for them about residential problems, like the overflow of village sewage or the lack of proper irrigation for their crops. They feared so much to speak out about these issues that they would slip him a few chon or won merely to have him speak on their behalves. And even with the government always in his right ear and his propaganda conscience at the other, DaeHo couldn’t help but feel guilty. Of all things , he would think, speaking at least should be free . A twig snapped into the silence, then another and it took one more before Dae-Ho realized footsteps were approaching. The person’s feet dawdled and stepped nearly inaudible as if they purposely slinked towards him and tiptoeing so quietly in fact that at times it sounded as if they barely touched the ground. Did they know ? He thought but wasted no time in lifting his rifle towards the tiny opening in the bushes that he crawled through twelve hours earlier. His instincts flinched into place. His hand and trigger finger remained steady, his breathing stayed measured and constant and his eyelids not once fell into a blink. In the army they trained soldiers like Dae-Ho to make the unnatural natural and Dae-Ho felt most natural now with the trigger as an extension of his fist and the scope an extension of his eyes. The shadow came first, swallowing light already crooked and dimmed under the evening sun. Then the bushes shuddered and with it the rustle of half dead leaves and an array of shadows shifting Dae-Ho’s features in and out of shade and light. Not a moment later stubby feet came into view, followed by a waist wrapped in diapers, until finally the head of a baby boy no older than eighteen months was revealed. Dae-Ho’s finger sprang from the trigger immediately and he lowered the rifle. He could see the boy clearer now with the scope gone and his squinted eyes opening. Russet smudges lined the undoubtedly handme-down cloth diapers with blue patterned flowers that had faded nearly completely into the white. One of the boy’s hands lay on his little belly, also smudged in that reddish-brown hue, probably from the plowed potato fields in the villages to the north. His other hand dug into his nose lined with trails of snot that stopped at his upper lips. Standing barely half a meter high the boy could see clearly into the low-slung cavity that Dae-Ho had crawled into and consequently turned to Dae-Ho. With a whimper and lack of hesitation the boy stepped under the thorny bushes with Dae-Ho in site like the light at the end of the tunnel. “Go back,” Dae-Ho whispered but his voice only seemed to lead the boys towards him. “Go back,” Dae-Ho repeated, this time with a flap of his hand. Yet the little boy continued towards Dae-Ho with his hands stretched at his sides as if mimicking an airplane. When in fact the uneven patches of soil and stones laid out in front of him drove the boy to flatten his arms onto the air as if holding on to invisible crutches. theMeadow 111
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQ3NA==