Kim Myungsoo

---

 

The doorbell buzzed again. Myungsoo had come back from the hardware store. Howon had left a few pieces of the over-cooked reheated fried chicken for him.

 

“Okay Sungjong. Let me get this straight. You’re supposed to be dead,  but Soya came to save you. But you’re not dead, and that’s why she’s a human vegetable preserved in a glass case in her backyard.”

 

Sungjong set down his teacup. The teapot was empty, but he wanted to drink more. “That’s a really blunt way to summarize it, but you could say it like that.”

 

“You said you know the cure. An enchanted mirror. How is it the cure? How will it help her wake up again? When did you find out? How do you know it’s it? Where is it?” Howon’s mind was overflowing with questions, questions, and more questions. He wanted to know anything that would bring her back to life. Anything.

 

Sungjong glanced down the hall to see Myungsoo fixing the door, then turned back toward Howon and cleared his throat. “Well you see. That’s the thing. I don’t know if it’ll work. It’s just a suspicion, but I think it’s a very valid one, even though it sounds really crazy and made up.

 

“Uh, Sungjong,” Howon tried to talk before the boy before him continued with his spiel.  

 

“You’re probably doubting me right now, aren’t you? You must think I’m some crazy fool who’s too invested in finding a cure that I’m to the point of just pulling things out of thin air or something, don’t you?”  

 

“Dude, Sungjong. I don’t think any of that. Just get to the point already, I believe you, okay?” Howon sighed. "Just, where is the mirror you keep referring to if you know it's the cure?"

 

Sungjong bit on his tongue for a moment. "That, I... I don't know."

 

"You don't know? Then what do we do?"

 

"That's why I came to see you, genius. I came to seek help, because maybe you'd know where it is."

 

Howon gave an exasperated sigh. How would he know where the mirror is? He didn't even know what it looked like, how big it was, detail, details, details--he had no details to help him look.

 

Sungjong lifted the lid off the empty teapot and set it next to the pot. He reached his slender fingers into it and pulled out the wilted tea leaves and set them on the space in front of him.

 

"I've seen it before," he said, and his hands shaped the leaves into a an oval no longer than half a finger's length. "Its silhouette is something like this," he notes, and then he takes another pile of leaves and makes an identical oval next to the first.

 

Howon analyzed the two piles of tea leaves across the table. "There are two mirrors?"

 

"No, not two mirrors. There was only one mirror, and it was in a locket," he explained, and he carefully slid the second pile on top of the first. "No one would expect there to be a mirror inside a locket, since lockets usually held pictures."

 

Howon scratched his chin. "So we are looking for a locket with a mirror inside it? Good god, this will be harder than I thought. How do you know it's enchanted though?"

 

Sungjong looked down at his pile of tea leaves. "Well..."

 

"Done fixing your door," Myungsoo said as he walked in and seated himself next to Sungjong. He saw the few pieces of fried chicken left on the plate beside Howon. "Are you going to eat that?"

 

"No, we saved it for you," Howon replied as he gently shoved the plate to Myungsoo. "Might be a little cold though."

 

"Oh, that's alright. I like chicken cold anyway," he reassured him as he picked up a piece of chicken and took a bite of it.

 

Sungjong rolled his eyes at his companion, irritated at how easily Myungsoo could take food so easily from Howon.

 

"This," he put his arm around Myungsoo's shoulder, "is how I know it's enchanted."

 

Howon stared at the boy eating fried chicken in his apartment and a puzzled look fell over his face. Myungsoo continued to chew and swallow, like it was the best chicken he's ever had.

 

"Myungsoo is? I don't get it. At all. This whacky kid who’s going around vandalizing people’s doors is psychic or something?"

 

Myungsoo looked up from the food, a blank look on his face.

 

“He’s not psychic, he’s enchanted,” Sungjong corrected. “I don’t even know how to explain it, but he’s the one who made the enchanted mirror. In the form of a locket, so that she could wear it.”

 

“She?”

 

“Yes, she. As in Soya.”

 

Howon was now far beyond lost. Did Sungjong--no--did Myungsoo cause Soya to become like this?

 

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Sungjong, defending his companion. “Myungsoo did nothing but create the trinket that allowed me to live and let her remain frozen in time.”

 

Myungsoo finally finished eating his chicken, and decided to give some input. “Do you really want to wake her up?”

 

Howon nodded, for it was something he’d been wishing to happen for the last seven years. How many more days, weeks, years would have to go by as he continued to age, while she was still physically sixteen?

 

“Break the mirror.”

 

--

 

 

“Hello?”

 

“Dongwoo, it’s me, Howon. Are you at home right now?”

 

“Yeah, of course. Why? You just left a couple of hours ago.”

 

“Stay right there! I’m coming over in ten minutes from my place.”

 

“Your place? Ten minutes?? Drive carefully!”

 

And the line cut off. Dongwoo set his cell phone back onto his desk and pulled out the leather-bound journal that Soya had gotten him for his thirteenth birthday. After the first day of using it as an exploration log, the rest of the book became a diary to his sister, things that he wish he could say to her but couldn’t because she wasn’t there.

 

Past the pages with drawings of trees and bugs and leaves, there was a sketch of the shiny thing he and Soya had found the day before Soya went into her indefinite sleep. He never got to see what was inside it, since his sister had tucked it into her pocket when they got back to the house.

 

“Dongwoo! Dongwoo!” Howon shouted from the front gate of Dongwoo’s house. Dongwoo quickly ran downstairs from his room to unlock the gate and let him in. He hadn’t expected more than one guest, though.

 

When Sungjong and Myungsoo trailed in behind Howon, Dongwoo did a double take on who the two younger boys even were.

 

“Oh my god... aren’t you Sungjong?” Even after nearly a decade of not directly seeing the boy, he could still tell by the boy’s bright big eyes, accented jawline, and pale skin that he was the boy he used to play with before he moved away.

 

Sungjong shyly nodded. It had been way too long.

 

“You’ve grown up so well!” Dongwoo smiled and gave the boy a big hug. “How dare you never visit! Well you do, to drop off the flower--that is you, right? But you never come say hi to me!”

 

“Can we cut the greetings short?” Myungsoo yawned. “It’s getting late. Where’s the mirror?”

 

Dongwoo loosened his embrace and looked at Myungsoo, who he hadn’t been formally introduced to.

 

“Mirror?”

 

“The locket. There’s a mirror in the locket,” Myungsoo explained.

 

Dongwoo wasn’t quite sure what Myungsoo was talking about, until he reminded himself of the image he had just seen moments before his guests arrived. “Wait one moment,” he said, and he darted up the stairs to grab his journal with the sketch.

 

He panted as he scurried back down the stairs and showed Myungsoo the book. “Is this the locket you’re talking about?”

 

Myungsoo had barely looked at the drawing for a second when Howon tugged the book from his hands. It resembled the tea leaves that Sungjong had shaped earlier that evening.

 

Myungsoo nodded. “So where is it?”

 

Dongwoo was about to say he didn’t know, but then he realized that he did know. It had been around Soya’s neck when she was put into the greenhouse case.

 

--

 

“Will she die if we open the case?” Dongwoo asked, worried for what little was left of his sister’s life.

 

Myungsoo shrugged. “She shouldn’t. There’s nothing connected to the case, as far as I’m concerned. Doesn’t this glass box block out oxygen? Oh it doesn’t matter. Just open it and remove the locket from her neck. I’ll do the incantation to break the seal.”

 

The group decided that Sungjong would be best suited for unclasping the necklace, and so he wrapped his delicate fingers behind Soya’s neck and undid the clasp. Just as the clasp loosened, he felt a single tear drop from each eye and onto the girl he hovered over. He handed the locket to Myungsoo.

 

Of all the years Howon had visited Soya in the greenhouse, he had never noticed that she even wore a necklace. He stared at the ground in shame, for not being as observant as he wished he were.

 

Myungsoo pulled out a small knife from his pocket and slashed his right ring finger. He looked over to Sungjong, and Sungjong stepped forward, reaching out his left hand to Myungsoo. Myungsoo then slashed Sungjong’s left ring finger, and dripped seven drops of blood onto the mirror.

 

For the first time in seven years, Dongwoo finally sees the inside of that shiny object he found in the woods seven years ago. This made his sister like this? He couldn’t believe the cure they had sought had been right under their noses--or rather, right under her sister’s nose--for eternity and no one thought to suspect the necklace of anything.

 

He saw Sungjong walk over to Soya’s body, and whisper something gently into her ear as Myungsoo dropped the locket onto the ground and mutter something unintelligible, then finally slammed the pointed knife through the locket mirror.

I’m sorry that I loved you. Live in peace as I rest now.