water
there was water at the moment of creation
waters of darkness
and there are waters in my imagination
deep where my heart is
sunlight
how can I trust it in its basin glimmer
shadowed by drowning
when I crook a finger to light, it grows dimmer
wave over wave is resounding
gasping
air trapped in memory has no more pride than a prison
my lungs, they keep trying
multiply fishes, God said, yet my heart finds division
I hope this is dying.
.
Her fists are hard. Every blow jerks his arms upward, the reflex of the not-yet-dead, urging him to fight back.
He doesn't.
(He doesn't really fight at all, he hasn't since the day that evil stepped outside him, though it never left.)
See: there is such a thing as a sacrificial gift. The priest would know that. Hwa Pyung doesn't have faith as other men do; he does not need to believe in something he has not seen.
He has seen everything.
Gil-young doesn't kill him. She runs, a rod of unyielding steel bent sharp by truth.
He does not forgive her; she owes him nothing. He has no right to absolve anyone else's sins.
Hwa Pyung is not a fighter. It is his one protest, to live cheerfully in the light places, steadily in the dark, lonely in the past and the present and the future, but smiling whenever he can.
Do you see? The sacrifice. It is ongoing. It lasts, like faith does, for men who stay blind.
.
Her hands are bloody. The blood is his, hers, and of course—her mother's. This road, this forsaken place. The specter of some injustice had loomed over her, and now she cannot remember why she was angry. Why did she let her mother go without a word? What was she trying to prove?
(She knows. That, she knows. All children want to prove that their judgment is immortal.)
(Few of them ever see it put to the test.)
She punched him too many times, even if he is a rascal and a liar. She hurt him, because she is hurting. Only, hurt doesn't seem to be the right word for it. Hurt is too small, like a rotted bud—when it is really the whole tree that is black and gutted and turned out wrong to aching air.
Gil-young is no poet. She does not know how these thoughts come to her, here and now. Doesn't know why her mind can spin a fairytale of grief, when it can't ever seem to shift away from the wooden binary focus of one night and every other day.
(She lives in the day-time, does Gil-young.)
She will not cry in front of her partner. She is not a child, though she suspects there were only children standing in the headlights on that fated, crooked road…only children, then and now. She chokes down noodles and the tears come like blood does, too much and too soon and forced out by the heart.
She cries in front of her partner, black bean paste clinging to her lips. She cries like a fist fallen too may time—and never enough.
She cries like it will never be enough.
.
In the searing glow of too many revelations, they fall apart. He, the beginning; she, the end.
And Yoon stands alone, trapped in the middle of what Mateo could not save.
(His brother.)
(It was his brother.)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
God above all. God above spirits, creator and renewer. Holy, holy, holy.
Hwa Pyung speaks words of kindness, of insight—more than Yoon might have expected from such a rogue—but nothing can convince any of them that there is something holy here.
They are survivors, Yoon thinks, when Gil-young has driven off with bruised knuckles, with pain splitting her open like a knife turned inward. They all stood here once before, and they lived.
He thinks he's going to be the first to die, this time around. He wonders if Hwa Pyung will see it. He wonders if it matters, that they found each other. He wonders how much of the coldness he feels crawling up his arms is fear, and how much is a righteous belief that as a priest, he must know best.
(He doesn't. He doesn't know best. He only does his best, and sometimes, not even that.)
The man on the ground is bleeding. The man on the ground began it all, not through his own fault.
They are alone here, they are alone and always here, at this crossroads, whether they want to be or not.
Yoon knows he should believe that only faith can save them.
It seems cruel that faith is for the blind.