༺Masterpiece༻

XVIII :: Disbelief

"Ashtray,
Cigarettes and wine
A sharp pain
A wood bind twine.

It was tied, it was knot
It tore the the arms but not
The pride he held in his eyes
When his blade worked his way
Through her little life."

⊱ ───ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ─── ⊰

"Mai! Mai!" Seokjin hastened through the large stairwell, stumbling on every other step as his hands reached out to hold her.

"Hyung, stop. What happened?"

"Mai, Ahyun," Seokjin paused to catch his breath. His eyes looked into Mai, agony capsized in them. A weight of pulling an alive body wrecked him. When humans packed into cities and invaded beautiful jungles, the world erupted in an admonishing roar, the same roar built it's nest inside the man.

"Hyung, i understand how marrying off your 13 year old daughter has caused Ahyun to lock herself up but trust me, if you hurt yourself, how will she live? Tell me?" Mai gently held the man and sat him down on a chair, wiping his tears.

Aein, Seokjin's daughter, was found alive three weeks after they had started to believe that she was dead. But the state in which they discovered her tampered body along the bank of the faint stream, was as dead as the stream itself.

The local club head, Park Shin Ju, had met Seokjin that other day, suggesting that he marries her to someone by the time anyone finds out about how she had been deliberated. Seokjin couldn't bear the pain of seeing his only child, the one he earned after years of being diagnosed with chemotherapy induced infertility, to suffer the tarnished life of an outcast.

But how could he marry a child to someone? How could he be such a demon?

That day, Park Min Seong, Shin Ju's son, had stepped up to marry her.

"No, no. Mai, no. Ahyun hung herself. She killed herself." Seokjin's body shivered with every word. Ahyun was his bestfriend. He married her only to save her from a Japanese trade but he fell for her, harder and harder. She was still so young, in her early thirties.

"What?"

⊱ ───ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ─── ⊰

"And that's how you ended up being in the business?"

"Well, I was dumb, arrogant, idiot. My halmeom gave me everything, everything she could and yet I wanted to be like the cool kids. They'd always fit in. They'd have money and I didn't." Jimin had settled down on the corner of floor, his body clinging onto the sofa.

When the wind kissed the trees, the water licked the shores, animals burrowed into the dirt, and people gazed up at the compassionate stars, the world became a beckoning whisper. I had nothing to say to soothe his searing burns of melancholy.

"I worked there every Friday through Sunday. I danced on the floor and some rich magnate would pick me up and fuck me up till I was a boneless piece of meat." He hung his head down.

"How many?"

"How many?" His eyes peered into my soul. "12 per night when the crowd was minimum. 20 if the crowd was good."

I gasped. 12 was the minimum? I suppressed my bewilderment, stopping myself from screaming but my face well elucidated what I wanted to express. Jimin chuckled, a face now covered in full scars of time. Time heals everything, yes it does. But it doesn't conceal the scars and even if it does, they don't stop existing.