The Elephant Between Us || SKZ

chapter twenty-six

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THE SETTLING OF THE DUST

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"Jeongin?" Shaking her head, Jeongmin stood up and, sparring a glance at the sun rising outside, gathered the courage to speak to her brother about what she had just said: she couldn't just cross her arms and let him dwell over it. "Look, you know I didn't mean-" Reaching the bedroom doorframe, Jeongmin stopped, her shock causing her to silently observe him packing their clothes. "What are you doing??"

"We're running away."

That hit her just like that white chocolate ice cream she had once begged her mother for: she had wanted it badly, yet she had no clue it would taste so terribly. Watching Jeongin packing the second bag felt as if she had licked the tip of that creamy sh.t, regret stopping her tongue from moving. 

If a word described her at that precise moment, it would probably be unease.
Indeed, she was the one who had just suggested running away, but there was a huge difference, a giant gap, between speaking of it and literally doing it the following minute: it was going too fast and Jeongmin couldn't find the brakes. For two seconds, her body lost its conscience, causing her to go against the doorframe and her head to hit the wood.

"Come." Even raising his gaze for about three seconds, Jeongin didn't stop his hands from packing. "We gotta be fast if we don't want Felix to follow the breadcrumbs." 

He chuckled, and she had to swallow her fearful discomfort in order to kneel by his side, packing the remaining things at a much slower speed when compared to her brother.

The previous times they had left their home with bags on their backs had been totally different. 

The first time was just like everything humans try out for the first time: a lot of planning and fearing and crying, but no results. In fact, it didn't last two days. She was a seventeen-year-old girl with high dreams, strong convictions and growing hormones that, fearing a drunk father, left her mother and brother by the hand of a guy she had met one week before.

The second time was just like the first but with a lot more reasoning and some extra awareness. Their mother had just been discharged from the hospital when Jeongin, a recent twenty-two-year-old boy with a tough coffee dependency and an entire life ahead of his eyes, took his sister and mother's hands and, with a bag on each shoulder, entered a train. It was midnight, and the way they had to cover their mouths with their palms to silence their will to laugh in relief was still somewhere in their minds. Jeongin called the police on that night and, four days later, a man was found dead on the river next to their house.
His family was, for some reason, all missing.

Jeongmin was twenty the third time they ran away. She was studying journalism, to their mother's huge contentment, when that same guy appeared in her life again, but with tattoos and a shirt saying 'FEAR THE MUSKIES' — the name of a freshwater hunting fish with quite challenging and territorial behaviour. He was not that good-looking and reeked of weed, yet he said the right words at the right time, all the time. He knew how to show off, how to position his hand on her shoulder and especially how to slide it to her back without her conscious consent — before she knew it, he was laying his fingers on the inner side of her thigh.
That guy knew how to catch the fish he wanted, and she took too long to realize that 'MUSKIES' was the name of a northern gang.

With the promise they'd come back home once the dust settled, Jeongin took her hand and travelled to the other side of the country, but two hundred twelve kilometres wouldn't be enough and, fourteen months later, they had to leave again, for the fourth and last — they thought — time.

That guy was Minho, Lee Minho, and the wounds he had left on her body, the wounds she had to cover over and over again, hurt just like they did on the day they were opened.

"I'm afraid, Jeongin." Jeongmin stopped and, sitting on her feet, stared at the messy bed with clothes, toothbrushes, banknotes and packs of cookies.

Jeongin had never heard her saying those two words, and maybe that was why he stopped too, doing just the same as her, staring at the exact same things as her. 

The following silence nurtured her fear; before she could notice, the bones on her fingers trembled against her tensed muscles and the blood in her veins stopped moving. Jeongmin barely blinked, an unexpected cold tear falling from her right eye.

"What do you see..." Jeongin paused, his eyes locked on the window in front, in the sun peacefully rising on the horizon; his body stopped in time. "...when you're afraid?" Jeongmin said nothing — she too looked at the outside: at the birds, free and calm, flying through the breeze as the first sunrays illuminated their nests. "I see the window of our house." He said. "I see the window of the corridor on the second floor at night, the gleaming shapes of the river, the buildings behind the empty parking lot... I see the stars and the lights and the bus, and nothing will stop me from seeing the moon from that window once again. Absolutely nothing."

Then, he looked at her and, with a gentle smile stretching his pursed lips, allowed her to see the soft gleam in his eyes, too.

"Let's give this a chance." Jeongin rested his hand on hers and, slightly shrugging his shoulders, chuckled out of an adventurous and kind of insane apprehension.

"This is so crazy." At that point, she was too chuckling, her thin fingers coming up to dry the fearful portions of tears distributed on the edges of her eyes.

The clock pointer touched the number eight the second Jeongin zipped his bag, his eyebrows unconsciously raising as he seemed to hear some noise from behind the door.

Just something hitting the floor, probably.

It's a building, after all.

They were deleting that short chapter from their lives and, as much as Jeongmin could deny it, she had had some, just some, good moments in that village, in that place at the end of the world, in that elephant's piece of grave.

"Don't forget your cap, Jeongmin!"

As Jeongmin got rid of their phones by the toilet, Jeongin counted the money they would need for the bus, thinking of places they could safely stay the night — they would be hiding from way too many people now, looking for a safe spot in the middle of traps, literally toasting their rotten lemons.

If Jeongmin hadn't arrived at his side in front of the door in those following three seconds, Jeongin would have looked back at what they were doing. In fact, he had to look into the core of her eyes to bravely open the door.

But, finding that person, he quickly regretted doing it.

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