A small white car moves fast down a long winding road. Yellow lights flicker shadows across the passenger’s faces. 

The road is empty aside the white lines and street lamps that separate the darkness from the shadows and the right from the left.

A young boy, age around ten lays across the back seat of the car, covered in a dark blanket, groaning. If it weren’t for his face pulled out from the blanket, he would have become part of the seat and no one would have ever known that it was he who was making the sounds.

The woman driving is assumed to be his mother. She races past each lamp post, looking back every third or fourth flicker to see her sons face contorted in agony and childish amusement.

She worries for her son, unsure of his every movement.

It has been this way since his earlier years. Never has she understood his illness. Never have the local doctors either. And now, past midnight she is once again trying to find answers in the only place she knows. The centre of Seoul itself, The Seoul Institution of Modern Medicine.

The boy in the back weakly laughs at a passing shadow, amused by the reoccurring patterns and the new ones that form every time they pass a new lamppost. His eyes squint in pain, but his mouth curls up into a cat like smile.

“Nearly there baby, just a few more hours.” His mother whispers, the boy not paying any attention to her as he becomes hypnotised.

He follows each new light into the distance, trying to catch their disappearance before finding another. He doesn’t. The new yellow light forms too quickly, coming up fast before disappearing behind a new yellow light.

And then the yellow lights fade into darkness. Not showing themselves to the white car, or the dividing lanes. They simply disappear and for once the boy can finally see where they go, fading from a bright blinding glow to a small firefly in the distance until it looks like nothing more than a dying star. And then darkness.

Eventually the boy feels the agony in his chest reside, pulling back into his arms before trailing down his fingers and leaving, just like the lights. And with his eyes, he follows his pain out of his body, watching it flutter into the darkness and disperse.

He knows that it will be back, that the pain will always be a part of him, but for now he can imagine it going out to infect others. To seize their bodies in a crippling way. It is a comforting thought to see that others feel the same way as he, but he knows that it is just a dream of his own making.

Slowly his eyes flutter closed. His lips move but no words escape. His mother turns her head and smiles to herself, seeing her child curled up in a ball.

Finally he can sleep. She thinks to herself, before pulling the car over to the dirt strip on the other side of a solid white line. I might as well get some too, before he wakes up.