THE RESTLESS AUTUMN (completed) (a full-length novel)

Genesis

Chapter 3

Euna opened her eyes to a screaming alarm at five in the morning. She was relieved to find herself in a place without bars and without the raunchy smell of urine in the air. The sound, which she woke up to every single day for the past five years, turned out to be a dream. She took a full fifteen minutes to freshen up after tidying up the nook that she now considered her room. Waking up inside his house made her feel like being reborn. She was for the first time moving in unrestrained pace, with a certain lightness in her heart and an irrepressible spark in her soul. Despite Ji-heon’s reminder last night, she still persisted to clean the house, knowing her abstinence would only make it worse. In a matter of hours she covered almost every part of the house except the master’s bedroom, which was locked. With a little amount of energy to spare, she decided she would use it to launder her soiled shirt and jeans that were among the three sets of clothing she owned. But a small stain on the kitchen wall caught her eye on her way to the laundry room. She ignored the urge but a little while later went back to scrub it off again. Many of her inmates had found this habit odd. Nobody knew why but cleaning became her therapy while inside the prison. She endured long hours of toiling, volunteering chores for everyone, working until her hands hurt and her body completely worn-out. It was withal her perfect refuge from the daily brawls, a thorough escape from a debilitating reality, which she had long accepted as her fate.

“You’ve been cleaning it everyday. It’s so shiny I can see my reflection on it,” Jeun-young remarked while lying on the upper bunk, thumbing through pages of a two-year old coverless news magazine. Euna nodded and continued to scrub the toilet seat even if there were no more visible stains. Jeun-young sat up and threw a tattered wash cloth at her. She waited for Euna to turn around but the latter kept her head low. “Thank you,” Jeun-young said, shifting into a lotus position.

Euna glanced over her shoulder and asked, “For what?”

“I heard you were the one who did CPR on me yesterday.” Jeun-young got down from the bunker at this point and walked up to Euna. “Good thing you only got here days ago. If you’ve been here a little longer you probably won’t give a damn.” She lit a stick and watched Euna scrub the bowl from behind.

“I’ll do it even if I knew you were a bastard.”

“Really?” asked Jeun Young after blowing smoke into the air. “How noble.” She stepped closer until she was standing adjacent to Euna. Without warning, she forced up some phlegm from her throat, spat into the bowl then threw in the barely-smoked cigarette. “Would you still save me if I told you to pick it up with your bare hands?”

Euna stared into the bowl as if she was staring into a blank space. In a matter of seconds she reached down and picked the cigarette stick out of the water and said, “Yes, I will.”

Jeun-young was startled but hid it with a smirk. Looking away, she murmured under her breath that the newcomer had just earned a full immunity without even knowing it.

Her heart skipped this morning at the sight of the noodle cups on the countertop. She had no one to blame but herself for quickly falling into a deep sleep last night. Her fingertips touched the cups, imagining the pair of hands holding it the night before. After crisscrossing on several possibilities she cast those thoughts away, remembering the rage in his eyes when he first saw her again. It was past three in the afternoon when she decided to cook the noodles and have her long delayed meal. In her respite she found time to take notice of the things that brought life to the house, particularly a cherry wood bookshelf containing most of his favorite things. These must’ve been transported back days ago and somebody could have prearranged it for him, she thought. Her fascination rose with his choice of reading materials, particularly some new titles that made her curious. On the lower deck she found some CDs, which she recalled were his favorites and some artists she had never heard before. She grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from her belongings and went back to copy the names and the titles. Her hand shook while she wrote everything down. Totally immersed, she didn’t hear the arrival of the car and eventually, the footsteps behind her.