As the snow fell down, two young men sat in a coffee shop, looking out the window and hovering over steaming cups of hot chocolate. The elder regarded the retreating waitress with small eyes as the younger stared intently at an unknown object outside.

“She’s pretty,” the elder said absentmindedly. “She’s really pretty.”

When the younger didn’t respond, the elder turned to him.

“Myungsoo-yah,” he persisted. “Did you see her?”

“Hm?” The younger shifted his blank stare to his hyung. “No, I was...watching the snow.”

“You like it that much?”

“When I was in high school, I told myself that I would one day watch the snow fall down next to the woman I loved. But that never happened. Now that I’m in college, I guess I forgot about it.”

“You mean it hasn’t happened yet,” the elder corrected. “Hey, don’t you have a few minutes before you have to leave for class? Let’s take a selca. It’s a nice day for it.”

Myungsoo took out his phone, and the two leaned across the table until their smiling faces were side by side. The camera flashed. And before long, the moment was forgotten.

The day was a warm one. In the busy streets of Seoul, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians mingled. Street vendors sold summer treats. Businesses passed out flyers and coupons. Signs jutted out into the already crowded sidewalks, boasting their superior patbingsu and bubble tea. Sunlight stretched through the tree branches. Summer was in the air.

The street was noisy from the sounds of traffic and passersby. But if one person had stopped and really listened, they might have heard one old man’s faint cries for help.

The old man was truly old. His face and hands were lined with wrinkles, his eyes seeming to peer out from under bags of skin with some effort. His hair was snowy; his mouth was puckered. But what really distinguished the elderly Mr. Park Byungsik, aside from his frantic yet quiet yells and his clumsy, untimed running through the crowds, was the fact that he had just broken a promise of eighty years.

He could recall the day when, as a boy of seven, he had found the small box deep in the drawer of his grandmother’s dressing table. Oh, it had been so long ago. Before the two Koreas. Before the war. The country had still been under Japanese rule. His grandmother had paled when she saw the box in his hands, and had formed a tiht, thin line. Byungsik, don’t you ever open that, she’d said.

But I can’t; it’s locked.

I said, do not ever open that box. Promise me that you will never open it, Byungsik.

But it’s-

Listen to me, child! Promise me you will make sure it is never opened.

Yes, grandmother. I promise.

She left the key to him when she died, only the metal on a strand of leather. There was no need for a note of explanation. And so he had watched over it carefully, never opening it, keeping it out of the sight and reach of his wife and now-grown children and grandchildren. He was not sure what was inside the box, and he had never again felt the need to find out until his beloved wife fell ill.

She had become sicker and sicker. He knew that they were both very old, and that one of them might die sooner or later, but what he could not accept was his wife being in pain and discomfort. But he didn’t have enough money to buy her the treatment she needed. He had suspected that something valuable of his grandmother’s was inside the box, and that was why she did not want him to open it or let it fall into the hands of another person. But as his wife grew more frail and his expenditures steadily increased, he had begun to wonder if he might use whatever was in the box to pay for his wife’s care. The heat was getting to his sickly wife, and he couldn’t even afford to pay for air conditioning. Surely his grandmother would not mind where she was, as it was a noble cause.

And so one bright summer day, Park Byungsik, tired of waiting, took the key and opened his grandmother’s box in the back of the ramyeon shop he operated below his living quarters.

The minute he opened it, he knew why his grandmother had made him promise not to, and he knew that breaking his promise to her had been a mistake.

First, he saw a flash of light and the mist, tinged with an icy blue. Second, he heard an echoing string of laughter. He had been around long enough to recognize with complete certainty the spirit that he had released.

And then, with a loud popping noise, the spirit took off. Park Byungsik leapt up with suprising agility for an old man and followed, nearly overturning his chair in the process. As he dogded around people on the sidewalks, he gave a feeble cry.

“Help! Help! I’ve let out an ice spirit!”

But no one seemed to hear him. No one seemed to see the spirit, either, though as its releaser, Park Byungsik could clearly see its bitter blue outline catching on the sunlight. He clutched to the box and key as though they were his lifeforce. It seemed to propel the spirit forward. Of course, the spirit didn’t fancy returning to its prison, so it fled.

Park Byungsik ran farther than he thought he would ever run at age eighty-seven. He had crossed into a different area of Seoul entirely, but he was gaining on the spirit. It turned down an alley, and so did he, sighting a dead end with much relief. Finally, he thought, he would be able to trap it in the box once again, return home, and seek forgiveness for breaking his grandmother’s trust and releasing a spirit in the first place.

The spirit knew it had come to the end of its course. It had nowhere to go but up. As Park Byungsik watched in dismay, the spirit sailed up, up, up, until it reached an open window of the adjacent apartment building on the fifth floor. And just like that, in Park Byungsik’s eyes, the spirit had vanished.

Park Byungsik sighed dejectedly. No good had come of his broken promise. He turned to go home. There was nothing more he could do. After all, wouldn’t an ice spirit flee the summer environment? Relief flooded over him again. Ice spirits were nasty, terrible things. Creatures that brought only bad luck.

The spirit, however, had reached its goal. It was indeed an ice spirit, lost in summer Seoul, but its survival instincts had kicked in. In the street outside the alley, it had detected the slightest trail of cold. It had followed it down the alley an up through the open window into an apartment shared by seven boys. The moment the spirit entered, it knew it had found the only place it could survive. The atmosphere of the room was nothing less than frigid.

“Woohyun, if you move out, we’re going to have trouble paying the rent here.”

“Can’t you guys just figure it out amongst yourselves? Gosh, Hoya, I finally have a job like I wanted; can’t I try to get the lifestyle that goes with it? This apartment’s really nice, but it’s way too crowded with all of us living here.”

The first boy frowned and looked as though he were about to make a candid reply, but he closed his mouth when their hyung began to speak.

“Yah! Woohyun! We work at the same company!” A boy with small yet handsome eyes exclaimed in exasperation. “But you don’t see me trying to move out, do you? There’s no need to. Can’t you just take one for the team?”

Woohyun huffed and folded his arms.

A tall boy cut in. “You’re probably just trying to meet some girl or something. That’s not even fair to the rest of us.” He gulped after he said it, knowing he had spoken too soon.

“YAH!” Woohyun’s face turned red.

“Lee Sungyeol!” The boy with small eyes said with a warning tone. “That’s enough.”

“Maybe he’s right,” Hoya muttered.

“Lee Howon, you too? Are you trying to make thing wor-” The small-eyed boy was cut off by another boy, previously silent, who had been staring blankly ahead but now turned his stare to the others, who had forgotten he was there.

“Enough.” He turned to Woohyun. “We’re splitting the rent for this apartment among four people. And only you and Sunggyu have what would be considered well-paying jobs. If you leave, we’re going to be struggling.”

“Why don’t you get a job, Myungsoo?” Woohyun shot back, earning a silent glare from Myungsoo, who retreated back into his thoughts. Except now, his thoughts were angry ones.

A slim, flower-like boy entered the room.

“You guys are being SO LOUD. I can barely even study with all of this”

“Well, maybe if you were older and a little less expensive, I’d be able to move out when I wanted to!”

“What do you mean, expensive? You mean because I don’t have a job or something? Because I don’t have parents sending me checks every month? Besides, Myungsoo and Sungyeol are in college, anyway. Watch who you’re talking to.”

“You better watch how you address your hyung.”

“Woohyun, don’t pick on Sungjong. It’s not his fault he’s still in high school,” Sungyeol said, wary of Woohyun’s suddenly large temper.

“**** right it’s not my fault,” Sungjong spat, garnering a chorus of yells from the others at his rude speech.

Sunggyu exhaled angrily like a bull. “That’s it. I can’t believe Dongwoo isn’t awake. He’s always sleeping through important stuff.” He shook the boy on the couch, whose mouth was hanging open as he slept. “YAH! JANG DONGWOO! WAKE UP!”

Dongwoo, unphased by Sunggyu’s yelling, continued to sleep.

“Ah, jinjja!” Sunggyu burst out, kicking Dongwoo’s side in the process.

Dongwoo shot up from the couch, his normally calm and cheerful face drawn into a deep frown. “What was that for? Hyung, why couldn’t you just wake me up normally like Myungsoo does?”

The spirit surveyed the room, satisfied. The room was filled with the boys’ cold stares at one another, distanced by their fierce argument. In the middle of the summer, it had been the coldest environment the ice spirit could find. Without a host, it would perish. The spirit set its targets and released itself.

The seven boys felt nothing more than a draft. But the cold spirit had divided itself and begun to inhabit them, turning their hearts to ice the very minute it touched them. Each seemed to shiver for a moment, wondering if it was the aura of anger from their fight or an unlikely draft from the window. But it was neither. It was the insufficient warning that their souls had been claimed by the ice spirit, and before long, they would know nothing. Their expressions hardened. Their shoulders squared. Only Myungsoo, who was still sitting on the floor next to the couch, broke his gaze with the air in front of him and looked up briefly.

“추워,” he said. It’s cold.