What We Left Behind

Chapter One: The Woman is Crazily Obsessed with Him

There were things in life that disappeared.

Without any prior forecasting at all.

It was like one day they were there, intermingling and interacting with everything, having a place in the environment, and then suddenly one day they were not.

And then, one day they vanished.

Like a child's cosy, old socks.

Like a little shoe of a dirty doll.

Like a kid lost in the fair.

They just disappeared. One day the kid was crying for his mom, bawling his eyes out, and then the very next second a stranger passed by him, obstructing him from the view of the outer world.

The kid was never seen again.

His mom looked, a lot, for months, but it was like he was wiped off the face of the earth.

Just gone.

Vanished into thin air.

Yeona straightened out the creases on the old parchment of newspaper, her steely eyes fixed onto the two photographs taken years ago. They were placed beside each other, both having the same background setting. But in the first, the boy was there, his wide eyes looking around, holding someone's hand off camera, and in the next photo, he wasn't.

The time stamps were mentioned at the bottom corner of the photographs, the interval of time between shooting them being just one second.

There.

The boy had vanished.

Yeona stared at it until the photo was burnt into her memory, until it felt like it would be all she would see when she closed her eyes.

This newspaper could vanish too. Then she gently took hold of the big parchment which was on the verge of falling apart, and she folded it right along the middle. She had to keep it safe.

It was proof of there being a world no one else had seen. Except Erix. He had brought this paper along with himself; he called it a newspaper, but for Yeona it was just something she couldn't understand. All those photos and words, pressed together in close alignment.

She stood up.

The infirmary was streaming of an orange glow, the sun just beginning to dip into the horizon, still giving them glimpses of it from behind the sandstone city walls and the mountain ranges beyond. Wavering sunlight streamed in, falling on the occupied bed, colouring its occupant's face in the heavenly hue.

Erix was alive.

It wasn't a fact. It was a prayer.

Let Erix be alive. Bring life back into him.

Yeona couldn't convince the spirits to breathe life back into this young man, but she had clutched her heart and cried the first time she had checked Erix's pulse.

She couldn't find any.

He had been dead, as everyone had declared, but then the next day he had come alive. As if by magic.

He had come alive, again just as confused as ever. He had looked around with wild eyes and a horrified expression, always, as if he couldn't figure out where he was, and where he was supposed to be. He denied all their attempts to tell him that he had been declared dead.

And then it happened again. And again. He sometimes took longer to come back, sometimes came back within seconds.

But he was gone anyway. Every single time. He always seemed dead but then something miraculous brought him back to life.