Autumn brought light rain showers, chasing people indoors into their cozy homes.  The scent of moist soil aded the chilling air, a refreshing change from humid summer heat that no one took notice of, working adults and students alike hurrying along damp pavements, their heads under umbrellas bowed as though unwilling to face anyone.

A single lone figure lurked along the domineering walls running around a drab building that might have once been bright yellow, hands stowed in the warmth of a worn and faded hoodie.  Eyes hidden beneath the loose hood flicked over the metal sign.  Soo Man Glass Factory.  Perhaps once it had been shining in pride; now, time weathered the engraving until it resembled the workers streaming out.  Faded and tired.

One dirty shoe scuffed into a pile of fallen leaves, withdrew, shook off particles of soil – some stubbornly refused and the shoe’s owner was too lazy, anyways – then the other dove in.  Left, right, left, right.  There was something fascinating, a certain beauty, about dirt speckled on frayed gray canvas.

When he looked up again, the last straggling few are tiny dolls in the distance.  Finally.  Thin rubber soles almost slide across the tarred road to the entrance, then halts at the sound of efficient footsteps on asphalt.  Too late, he turned back towards the entrance.

“Excuse me, but who are you?” the words freeze him on the spot, and his blood freezes too, at the next sentence.  “If you’re up to some funny business, I’ll have the security guards on you.”

Instinctively, he glances through the guard post’s open windows, where two men, one tall and lanky, the other one shorter and... not as lanky, sat opposite each other, seeming to be playing some action-packed game on what he concluded to be an iPad.  He could only see the shorter guard’s kindly face, but one never knew.  Looks could be deceiving after all.

He considered his options carefully.  Not that he really had any – the only thing he could do now was tell the truth.  The difference was how much he decided to let on.  “I mean no harm.  I just… I wanted to take some of the thrown out pieces.”

By now, the worker has rounded in front of him wordlessly.  His naturally wide eyes make it hard to determine if the unusual confession surprised him, and dark eyes sheltered by the hood study him from the ebony curls to the small boots near falling apart.  One hand leaves the dirty, dull blue-grey overall’s pocket long enough to brush a lock of hair back to its rightful position, hovers indecisively midway back, then moves up again to shield his squinting eyes from the light drizzle only just begun.

“Well, you could have asked.  I’m sure the supervisor wouldn’t mind sparing any number of ruined products.”  So saying, he goes and leans in at the guard post’s half-opened window to inform them that he and an ‘unexpected guest’ would be staying slightly later, therefore could they please try to remember and not jump on them like they had the previous time.

Message gotten through, he turns back and starts up the gentle sloping driveway without so much of a backwards glance at the ‘unexpected guest’.  Halfway up and no second set of footsteps, he calls out, not breaking his stride, “C’mon, let’s go meet Mr. Oh.”

And a pattering slightly heavier than the rain follows.

“Mr. Oh?  Sorry for interrupting, but could we see you for a few minutes?”

The request is greeted by a muffled sound which the Guest can’t decipher, and the Worker pushes the door open quietly.  Together, they approach a desk cluttered with haphazard stacks of papers mildly resembling the messy jumble of skyscrapers that is called the city.

Elbows resting on the table, fingers clasped in front of his face, the supervisor’s unfathomable black holes for eyes assess them.  In specific, the owner of similar murky orbs.

“What is it now?” he asks, undercurrents of impatience and displeasure running deep in his tone.  Unseen, the Guest’s lips curl upwards in a bittersweet smirk.

The Worker’s calm demeanor chooses this time to slip.  Or maybe the unnerving question is like a camouflaged root on the forest floor over which prey fall.  Either way, the Worker takes some time to formulate a barely satisfactory answer in the stuttered form of, “Y-yes… well, the thing is… we haven’t thrown out our ruined products yet, so I thought that maybe- I mean, I thought it wouldn’t matter if he wanted it.  I met him on my way home.  Actually, it’s technically just-”

“I wanted to seek permission to take some ruined pieces of glass, if that’s fine by you?”

“Impertinent,” Mr. Oh states, as though concluding a thought.  Mayhap it was a trick of the weak light filtering in through tinted glass windows, the smirk that tugged up not the corners of his mouth but his eyes ever so subtly.

Another tense blanket of suffocating silence descended, clearly choking the raven haired worker, pushing him from foot to foot, unable to stand still while his supervisor turned the matter carefully over in his head.  He darted glances to the figure statuesque beside him, and wondered how he could remain so indifferent.  And remembered that if Mr. Oh was irked, the one whose paycheck would be torn and thrown into the furnace would be his.

In an abrupt movement, the supervisor unclasped his hands, leaning back into the shadows of his intimidating leather throne, and swiveled 180 degrees.  A slight pause, then, “Be my guest.”

Wide eyes blinked, startled – once, twice, thrice.  Nothing follows: no catch, no condition, no bargain, just a dismissal.  Bowing at half-waist out of habit, the Worker grabs a handful of his guest’s hoodie material, unnecessarily half-dragging the latter out.

Like an enchantment fading away, the Worker goes back to his first self, each step they take in the opposite direction of the office.

Their companionable crunching of gravel is interrupted by the Guest’s smooth, silky tones inquiring in detached curiousity, “Is he always like that?”

The Worker exhaled a breath of air slowly. “Well… it depends, really.  Our bad luck to have caught him in one of his darker moods.”

“What do you mean, depends?”

As if unwilling to elaborate yet eager to share, he drags out each syllable reluctantly.  “He… he wasn’t always like that.  Once, he was the most liked supervisor because he didn’t discriminate against us lowly glassblowers.  He even had a brother who was, according to him, a ‘Glassblowing protégé’.  Long story short, something must’ve happened, because he became withdrawn.  Usually he’s just cold, but there are times when he’s… like that.  But that’s just what I’ve heard from my co-workers.  I only joined three years ago.”

“What’s your name?”

The sudden switch in topic throws the Worker off-balance.  “Huh?”

“I asked you what your name is.”

“Oh, uh, Kyungsoo.  Do Kyungsoo.  What about you?”

“Kai; you may call me Kai.”

They find the discarded creations filling up what was usually used for trash in the dumpster.  Under the pale moonlight, those piled atop glint, looking almost perfect until one climbs up and into the huge metal cart to examine at close hand.

“How long more are you going to take?”  The last time Kyungsoo checked his watch, it had been nine.  If he checked it now, it would be time to leave, but then if anything went wrong, the responsibility was his to shoulder.  A sigh escapes his frozen, bluing lips.

Glass continued crashing into one another.

Done with being ignored, Kyungsoo heaved himself off his cold metal-backed seat, pins and needles instantly sending tingles up his half-asleep legs.  Ten wobbly steps out of the cart’s shadows, he tilts his head up and shouts out to the silhouette a shade darker than the skies, “Hey, I’m talking to you!  Answer me or I’ll call the guards on you!”

“Yeah, yeah.  I’ll be down in a few minutes.”  And of course Kyungsoo can’t see the other’s face, yet he could see the eye-rolling that goes with this retort.  It irks him, the ungratefulness. 

He stands there, waiting for the ‘few minutes’ to pass, mesmerized by the lithe body moving almost gracefully atop the dump of a stage, hypnotized by the way he sifts through the pile methodically albeit with a sense of not knowing what he was finding.  Though of course, that’s not possible, is it, if he specifically came with that purpose at the tip of his tongue?

In his head, Kyungsoo laughed at his strange thoughts, not knowing how close he was to hitting home.

He doesn’t remember walking back to reclaim his waiting spot, but he must have, because when he opens his eyes and looks around, that’s where he is.  His reliable watch informs him that it’s six now, definitely the morning – the sun doesn’t appear at night, does it now? – and points out that he’s just spent the entire night passed out here.

Suddenly, the memory of a hooded stranger comes flooding back to him, causing his spine to straighten and his head to bang painfully against the cart.  Startled by the vibration he sent running up the wall of the cart, a twisted glass bottle hurtles to an early thousand-shard death.  An undefinable ringing throbs at his temple, and it’s all Kyungsoo can do to hold down the bile rising up his throat.

He shuts out the spinning landscape, slumping against the metal.  Honestly, if he didn’t know any better, he would have diagnosed this as a hangover.

When the world has righted itself, Kyungsoo cautiously gets to his feet, using the wet gravel road and frozen metal to support him.  Something falls onto his feet softly in a heap of old grey material.  A hoodie, he realizes, picking it up.  Unconsciously, he put it to his nose and inhaled.  It smelled earthy, like the owner had worn it out in the autumn rain too often. 

Instinctively he knew who it belonged to: perhaps the not-so-stranger coming that evening.

He did.  He came that evening, and Kyungsoo gave the hoodie back against a voice which told him to hide it in the depths of his closet.  Kai accepted it, as though it was natural to sacrifice one’s source of warmth for an almost stranger.  “I can’t be bothered to find another worker as foolish as you to be my pass in here.”

He came the evening after, and the next, and the next, and the next.  

They didn’t really talk, most nights.  One night, soju lighting a fire in his stomach and consequentially his courage, Kyungsoo found himself working side by side with Kai.  They ended up lying on their platform, heads resting on laced fingers – the knobs were blue-black for a fortnight – and eyes fixated heavenwards.  He was drunk, and a talkative drunk at that.  In less than five minutes which no one counted, Kyungsoo summed up his dull life.

Maybe Kai knew he was drunk and wouldn’t remember, so he opened up a little more than usual.  All Kyungsoo could recall was his drunken self being by Kai’s seductively low voice, and something strange he’d said.  “I like flaws – I think they make things interesting.  But everyone else… everyone else can’t accept certain flaws.”

He came, until a week before winter.  And the evening he didn’t show up, a familiar shadow at the gates, Kyungsoo regretted not pestering him why.

Why never let his face be seen, forever keeping a part of his soul hidden under that mask?

Why leave him the hoodie every night when the both of them knew he could come in here independently now?

Why the obsession with discarded pieces?

Why?

The morning after that evening, Mr. Oh received a text from Kyungsoo, saying he would be on medical leave.  Bedridden with a cold and fever.

Autumn was late that year, and with each extra day of summer, Kyungsoo’s mood grew darker, his fuse shorter.  He hated summer.  Summer meant the nights were shorter; summer meant he worked for longer.  Summer meant the heat was greater; summer meant the hot shop was torture.

Gathering a large blob of molten glass at the tip of his blowpipe, then cooling the hissing unmolded material and bending down to blow into the other end, Kyungsoo went through the motions robotically.  It no longer sent a quiet thrill through his heart, watching the glass take shape.  It no longer amazed him when another piece was created by his own ability.

If anything, his perfect record in the last six months for not ruining a piece sickened him.  When he entered the office to receive his paycheck each month, Mr. Oh would praise him in a flat, uninterested voice for doing so well.  He would be sure to get a pay raise, he said.  And his words made Kyungsoo so unreasonably, so blindingly mad that he wanted to place his glass-scarred hands around that vulnerable milky white neck and choke him until he couldn’t plead for mercy. 

Yet each time, he would walk out placidly, masking the anger in his eyes, a crushed piece of paper for one million seven hundred and forty eight thousand, five hundred and ninety won balled in his white-knuckled hands.

No, his new-found ‘talent’ wasn’t anything to be proud of.  It was a curse, and he couldn’t break it.

Collars turned up, cap pulled down low, layered beneath a raincoat’s hood, and rain still found a way to trickle down the contour of his collarbones.  The newspaper tucked under his arm was a sodden mess, ink flowing in confused circles, a paragraph reporting on a ion ring running into the title of a missing poster.

Kyungsoo barely glanced at it before throwing it on his overcrowded coffee table, the momentum pushing a dangerously teetering object down to join a carpet of uncountable broken remnants.  He simply stepped on it with his shod feet, crossing the tiny space mistaken for a living room to a pathetic alcove labeled ‘Kitchen’ on the floor plan to ‘cook’ something edible – supposing he’d remembered to do his grocery shopping.

When he’d first bought this place, he remembered a shallow sense of pride.  The ironic taste of independence as he turned the key in the lock and walked himself into his self-given prison.  Back then, it didn’t matter his ‘apartment’ was only the right size to keep rabbits and the like.  Now?  Collections of unwanted glass creations littered the suffocating enclosed area.  Rubbish that had missed the overflowing dustbin lay passively on the floor.  There wasn’t an actual empty space for anything, per say, until you swept everything on it to a lower level.

A pot of expired instant noodles in his hand, Kyungsoo sat on a heap of unread newspapers, and ate his lunch surrounded by miserable substitutes of Kai.

It was nine o’clock and he was hurrying in the direction of the gate after spending a few extra hours to complete his quota, when a dull thud followed by a strangled cry broke the quiet of the night.  “Jongin!”

Against his better judgment, Kyungsoo’s feet carried him to a certain office.  The dark oaken door was open, spilling the glaring fluorescent light into the corridor, revealing a gruesome sight that left him immobilized, slack-jawed in horror.

Thick coarse rope looped around grand light fixture, the other end expertly knotted into a noose tightened around the dangling body’s neck.  Strong late autumn wind swung it back and fourth, round and round.  The raw material of the rope clawed at his face, and, as though thoughtfully, the suicidal person had pulled his hood up, covering most of his delicate, broken neck.  Dark red spots had begun to pool at the spot over which his feet couldn’t touch.  The swivel chair lay on its side, an unremorseful accomplice.

The sleeves of the hoodie were ripped off and carelessly flung on the ground, and Kyungsoo could see that where the right upper arm ended and flesh melded into a steel structure; but it was not the worst – the worst was his mutilated left arm, so twisted and heavily scarred it no longer resembled a limb, yellowed bone where flesh was missing.

Keeled over before this gory figure was a wreck – a wreck otherwise known as Mr. Oh.  Through a mist of shock, Kyungsoo vaguely registered that his supervisor seemed to be fighting for breath.  He willed himself to move, to pick up an all-too-familiar worn and faded sleeve, to put it up to his nose.  Earth, that’s what it smelled distinctly of.  No, no earth…

It was Kai.

What had happened after that revelation, Kyungsoo wasn’t exactly sure.  One of the guards had arrived on the scene and called for the police straight away.  Amidst the blur of red and blue lights flashing, of bright yellow tape cordoning off the area, of blue uniformed men taking a surprisingly comprehensible statement from him, Kyungsoo was in a daze, trying and failing to make sense of this twist in his story.

It was like that one time when he had blown a glass piece wrongly, knowing it would turn out wrong, yet not actually finding where it went wrong.

Months later, his supervisor finally pointed it out to him – the flaw, so susceptible he missed it with his amateur eyes.

“He was a close friend, quiet but always there for me.”

“Even though we were always fighting, I still loved him, and I grieve over the lost of someone who was like a brother to me.”

“Jongin was… the best glassblower.  I will forever be honoured to have worked with him before that accident.”

“I remember how in university, whenever exams rolled around, he would be the only one keeping his cheerfulness, lightening the mood anywhere, anytime.”

“Mr. Kim taught us so much; he saved us from our emotional hells.”

“When my parents passed away in a car crash, Jongin was the one who saved me from depression.  Jongin, if you can hear me now… thank you.  Thank you for being my angel.”

“We used to bicker a lot, over the most ridiculous things.  As we grew up, our lives took separate paths, and we never really met up after high school.  He will eternally remain as my good friend.”

“He had less than us, but he never hesitated to give away whatever little he had.  He was a Godsend.”

The eulogies were foreign to Kyungsoo’s ears, as foreign as these people gathered here today were.  One thing united them in their grief.  Whether they knew him as Kai, Jongin or Mr. Kim, he had touched their lives at some point in time, leaving an imprint set in stone.

Jongin, the friendly, outgoing child with an infectious cheerfulness; the son, the brother, the best friend, the classmate, the past lover.

Mr. Kim. with his incredible artistic skills he was happy to share; the teacher, the counselor, the savior.

Kai, changed after an accident which burned and melted away his dreams, struggling to find himself; the hooded stranger, the ruined glass pieces’ collector, the masked neighbour.

When it was his turn to pay his last respects to Kai, Kyungsoo stepped up and placed, alongside rows of flowers, his latest creation: a glass arm, colored shades of red, the fingers crooked, hand twisted awkwardly, skin uneven, flesh scorched off, bone showing.

It wasn’t perfect, and he had had many more attempts until it was art gallery quality, yet Kyungsoo knew instinctively that this was what Kai would want.  A gift of flaws.