After Story 267

After Story 267

He was watching a movie with his headphones on and glanced over at the time. It was 2 a.m.

Maru felt around next to him and stood up from the bed. The other owner of the bed seemed to be in the kitchen.

He opened the door and poked his head outside. The first thing he noticed was the wind from the air conditioner in breeze mode, followed by his wife sitting at the dining table. She was watching something under the desk lamp lights.

She rubbed her creased forehead and was spinning a pen in her hand.

He watched her agonizing for a while before walking over. On the table was the storyboard she was creating and the script that Daemyung had written.

“Is it not going well?” he asked as he sat on the other side of the table.

“It’s something I’ve done numerous times, but it’s hard now that I have to do this again. Maybe it’s a problem that there are too many things in my head. I draw a few scenes on the storyboard and then design the cuts, but I keep erasing them because I feel like they’re duplicates.”

“You are a perfectionist after all.”

“Are you nagging me?”

“If you heard it like that, it means that you’re tired. I feel lonely on the bed, so when are you going to come in?”

“I’m not sure. I kept telling myself just one more hour, but the skies became dark before I knew it. What’s the time right now?”

“What do you think it is?”

“Around 11?”

“It’s 2 am, lady.”

“Already? I didn’t notice at all. Being young has its perks alright. With enough stamina, you don’t know if you’re getting tired even if you’ve sat for a long time,” Haneul said as she spun her shoulders around.

He got up and stood behind his wife. He started massaging her shoulders carefully.

“You should have some leisure for now. You know that time spent and quality isn’t always directly proportional.”

“Greed is something you can’t give up on even if you know it. My greed is telling me that I’ll get something better if I think about it a little more, so I can’t give up on it.”

Maru put a lot of strength into his thumb and pressed. Haneul turned her head around with an ouch.

“It hurts.”

“It’s supposed to.”

“You’re like a kid even if you get old.”

“There’s a great way to console a kid, and that’s to put him to sleep, what do you think?”

Haneul shook her head.

“I’ll hold onto this for a little longer. You know I like doing this even if I suffer from it.”

“Then I can’t help it. I have no choice but to use the wide bed by myself.”

He put some water in the coffee pot.

“Coffee isn’t good at this hour. Buckwheat tea? Or corn tea?”

“Buckwheat tea.”

He poured some tea into the mug with his wife’s name on it. His wife, who smelled the savory buckwheat, smiled.

“Being like this reminds me of that time. Both of us were starving with the goal of becoming writers and spent our days in a single-room apartment until we had no choice but to go find work.”

Maru nodded before replying,

“It’s vague, but we did that about a dozen times, huh? In a few of them, I died by slipping to my death because of malnutrition.”

He fell to death from a pedestrian bridge because of dizziness, fell sideways on the road because of dizziness and then got caught in a traffic accident, going to the mountains to clear his head then slipped to his death — many different deaths flashed through his mind.

“It’s somewhat funny to talk about death with a laugh,” his wife said as she lifted her mug.

“Whether it’s you or me, neither of us is normal.”

“If you experience something like that, you should be abnormal. There’s no way a sane mind would be able to endure all that.”

His wife pushed the mug to the side and spoke,

“We’ve lived for such a long time, but there’s one thing that each of us doesn’t know about.”

“What is it?”

“I haven’t experienced death, and you haven’t seen me die.”

“They’re both things I want to delay as much as possible in this life.”

“Since we’re on the topic, promise me one thing,” his wife said with force.

She looked completely serious. He looked at his wife’s lips.

“You have to live longer than me. That’s the one thing I want from you, sweetie. I don’t want to be the watching side anymore.”

“That doesn’t go the way I want.”

“So watch out for anything. Watch out for cars, watch out for people, watch out for airplanes. I half-wish I could just make you stay still at home. Locking you up doesn’t sound half-bad either.”

She relaxed her expression and spoke in a joking tone. However, he could feel the worry in her voice. Just as she said, he had experienced countless deaths but had never seen the last moments of his wife, while on the contrary, his wife had seen his death just as many times.

Dying and watching your beloved die. They were both terrible things.

“It’s really over now, huh.”

“Good work spending all these years in marriages with me. In the next life, you should meet a better man and live a comfortable life.”

“Next life? Even if I’m given something like that, I’m going to refuse. I’ve lived as much as I want. I lived too much, even. You know how hopeless it feels to watch a drama that doesn’t end.”

He took a sip of the buckwheat tea before asking,

“What do you think will be waiting for us this time if our hearts stop beating?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe there’s unexpectedly nothing. Our souls will escape our bodies and have a talk with god before going poof. We won’t be born as livestock or people. There’s just nothing.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad either.”

His wife put down her pen. Her gaze was looking outside the veranda. Maru also turned around to look outside the veranda.

“Do you think god is still watching us?”

“Maybe he found a new set of toys and doesn’t have interest in us anymore.”

His wife nodded before turning off the desk lamp.

“Are you going to sleep?” he asked.

“I feel sleepy after drinking that tea.”

“I am awake now after all that talking.”

“Then you should design some cuts in my stead. I’ll sleep your worth as well.”

Haneul went into the bedroom. He turned on the desk lamp, brought the storyboard in front of him, and laid them out. Just as he was flipping through the pages while drinking the rest of the buckwheat tea, he heard the door to the bedroom opening.

“Aren’t you coming in?” his wife said while frowning. “The bed is too wide. It’s lonely by myself.”

“I said that before.”

“So come quickly.”

“You know you’re very selfish at times, right?”

“You should be understanding as the selfless one.”

He turned off the desk lamp and went into the bedroom. Lying on the bed, his wife put her arms out, saying – come quickly and hug me.

He approached slowly into her embrace.

After hugging him for a while, his wife loosened her arm and lay on her side. He brushed up her draping hair and covered her shoulder with his hand.

Their eyes met at eye level. She looked at him for a while with her mouth closed before speaking,

“Sweetie.”

“Yes?”

“You need to trim your eyebrows.”

“That’s not the right thing to say in this mood.”

“You’re not supposed to do that between family. Rather than that, your eyebrows grow really quickly. Should we shave half of it off and microblade it?”

His wife mischievously stroked his eyebrows. He let her have his face for a while before grabbing the back of her neck with the hand that covered her shoulder. Their lips made contact before falling apart.

“Am I still charming?” his wife asked.

He did not reply. That was a question he didn’t need to answer.

* * *

“Unni, did you not sleep well last night?”

Haneul, who was yawning, smiled and shook her head.

“I did have a good sleep. But I was doing something else.”

“Something else?”

She winked towards her manager who was tilting her head. The manager, who looked at her in puzzlement, picked up her phone.

“Yes, okay. We’ll head to the parking lot right now.”

The manager hung up and spoke,

“You just need to go up and go straight to the event venue. The start is in 20 minutes.”

“Do I look really tired?” Haneul asked as she touched her earrings.

“No. I asked because you were yawning.”

The manager started the car. When they went to the underground parking lot, people from the event host team were waiting.

“The crowd is huge. Everyone is eager to see you.”

“Sounds like many people came.”

“You’ll be surprised once you get up there. We did expect it to be crowded, but I didn’t think it would be this bad. Thanks to that, we had to mobilize all the safety guards from the company.”

“Please watch out not to inconvenience or endanger the visitors.”

“Of course.”

She was guided to the 3rd floor of the event venue. When they left the staircase made for staff only, she could see the people filling up the event venue.

Cameras that she had modeled for were lined up and next to them was a desk for her fan signing event.

The emcee was interacting with the audience while giving them a few quizzes.

“How many people are there in the hall?”

“Around two hundred. If we let any more people in, there will be problems with safety, so we’re controlling them for now.”

“An hour won’t be enough then. Do we have to finish the event in an hour?”

“For that, we’ll have to talk with the management of the facility here.”

“Then please inquire if we can have more time.”

Haneul checked her attire before walking into the venue. The people waiting there cheered and reached their hands out towards her.

She grabbed the hands of the people who were near her before walking over to the desk. She greeted the emcee before getting the mic.

“Hello.”

The fans who had gathered responded to her – hello you’re pretty, I love you, etc.

She smiled and spoke.

“Today’s pretty hot, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s really hot!” someone replied in a loud voice.

“Thank you for coming even in weather like this. But I didn’t know so many people would be here. I thought this would be a really small fan signing event, but looking at things now, I think I’ll be spending the whole time giving autographs.”

She chatted for a bit with the fans before sitting down.

The procession was similar to most fan-signing events. She answered questions that she had received from the fans beforehand, talked about what was going on recently, and then talked about the camera she modeled for from time to time.

If it was a stuck-up company, they would’ve asked her to say prepared advertising lines, but this company didn’t have any of that.

“Then let us begin the fan signing event. Please come up starting from the front. We don’t want you to get hurt, so come slowly. Also, since we have limited time, be considerate of others and have a short and fulfilling chat with Miss Haneul.”

After the emcee’s commentary, the people approached the desk. The person who was receiving the first autograph was a girl who looked to be in high school.

“Unni, can’t you lock hands once?”

“Why not?”

She locked her hands and looked at the fan in front of her. The fan made a teary face and stomped her feet.

“Not like that, with me.”

“Alright, here, your hand.”

She grabbed her fan’s hand.

“I’m a huge fan of yours.”

“Thanks. What’s your name?”

“Kang Eunha.”

“Eunha. Your name is really pretty.”

“You too.”

With love – she wrote on the paper before writing the name of the fan below it as well. She returned the autograph paper and was about to say goodbye, but the fan spoke first,

“Unni, if you break up with Maru-oppa, you should come to me.”

She responded with a smile.

“No, I’m not going to break up.”

The first fan waved her hand and went down the platform.