Donghae

                We headed back to the burning room. I was pushing the trolley and he was walking behind me with his head held low. He didn’t look very good; I wanted to embrace him and let him cry on my shoulder, but I also wanted him to do that for me too. My thoughts were conflicting each other and they sent my mind into a wave of pain. For a moment I saw a peculiar image of him standing in front of me with blood on his coat.

                I stopped in the middle of the room and he bumped into my back. I turned around and hugged him close to my body. I heard his sniffles that were muffled by my broad chest and it made me hold him tighter. We stayed still for a while longer and then I let go. He wiped his eyes and averted his eyes from mine. He must have been feeling awful. I could only imagine what it must feel like to be him, so confused and upset and even more. I wanted all of this to come to an end, and soon.

                “Okay, let’s get this over with then.” I said, trying to change the strange atmosphere building between us.

                He nodded and moved towards the body on the floor. This time we were able to quickly lift the corpse onto the metal trolley without much trouble. I rolled it over to the large machine and stopped in front of the small square door. I opened it and paused. I was just about to shove a dead body into a cremator. I felt strange about what I was going to do. Not just because the entire predicament was far from what I had imagined I would ever be doing in my life, it was because I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I didn’t even feel grossed out or in shock from handling a dead person. I saw it as something that had to be done. A task that needed completing. A problem that needed to be solved so that we could quickly go home and be done with this. At least, that’s what I’d like to think I thought of it as. It may explain how there wasn’t anything going through my head.

                I was disposing of a murder victim like I was making my morning coffee. It was insanely disturbing, but it wasn’t like I could stop. If I stopped what would become of him? My poor boy with the blood covered coat. I had to protect him, and that’s why I didn’t think about this, that’s why I merely did.