Yeseul Is seven years old and she’s sitting on her halmoni’s lap, eating one of her homemade rice cakes that she made especially for her. Yeseul secretly knows that she’s getting too old to be sitting on her grandma’s lap, as her grandma was growing older and frailer, but she would always pick her up with such ease that it didn’t seem she was straining at all. Her halmoni smelled like lemons and laundry starch and eventually like any pleasant memory Yesul would ever have, but for the meantime she smelled like home.

Yeseul’s halmoni has one glass eye, and it comes with a dozen of different origin stories, all equally ridiculous, and when Yeseul questions the liability of her tales, her grandma simply chuckles and responds with “Well dear, I must be getting too old to remember”.

The neighborhood children are afraid of Yeseul’s halmoni and her glass eye. They would always say that she’s a witch and her glass eye can see the future, but only half of it since her other eye is still healthy. They throw rocks at her house sometimes, but her halmoni never calls the cops, she just answers the door and calls them over for lunch, but they always run away giggling and screeching. Yeseul is always embarrassed whenever her halmoni is mentioned and she doesn’t always defend her in front of her friends, though she always means to. But Yeseul loves her grandma more than anything in the world, glass eye, rice cakes and all, so she leans against her halmoni’s sunken tummy as she rocks her on the creaky old chair and tells stories that don’t make sense, though she swears with conviction that they’re complete and utter nonfiction. But Yeseul’s favorite stories are about things that haven’t happened yet, like the story about the dark haired child with the left dimple and eyes like crescent moons.

“Every story has a beginning and an ending,” The grandma would say. “Just like every human, and just like you and I. But the most interesting part of every book is what happens in between.”

“What happens to me, halmoni?” Yeseul would ask every time.

“Well aegi,” Her grandma would chuckle. “If I tell you the entire story in advance, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy it properly, now will you?”

“No…” Yeseul would frown into her half eaten rice cake.

At that point, her grandma would lean over to turn Yesul’s face to hers with wrinkly fingers, slightly trembling, but her smile would be wide and unwavering. “But I can give you a hint.”

And Yesul’s smile would return immediately, a wholesome grin with not so wholesome teeth.

“This little girl right here,” Her halmoni would say and poke Yeseul’s tummy until she laughs her way out of her pout. “She would meet a very special someone; A child almost as little as she is, with hair as dark as night, and a crater on their left cheek.”

“And what happens to me and the child?”

“Oh, that’s for you to find out!” Her grandma exclaims, and Yeseul pouts again.

“Come on, halmoni!” Yeseul would whine. “Please give me another hint! Please, please, please…”

But her grandma would chuckle and smooth her hair over her little scalp, kissing the spot where all the strands meet and separate.

“I think it’s time for your nap, sweetheart.”