There are holes in the road.

The government makes you pay lots and lots of taxes but they can’t fix the holes in the road.

Chanyeol thought about it glumly as he avoids the rainwater-filled holes, his sandals flapping loudly against the wet concrete. Would the tax on the milk he bought just now go to fixing holes on the road? Think about it—maybe if he bought lots and lots of milk, maybe the taxes on the milk would eventually be enough to repair the road. Then the village won’t have any big puddles everyone had to avoid. Nobody would be splashed when the odd motorcycle comes by.

What are taxes anyway? Mama and papa seem terribly concerned about it. It’s all they talk about on the dinner table while they’re eating the salted tuna. Chanyeol didn’t like grown-ups very much.

But he was a big boy now and he’d have to learn about taxes in ten years. And it’s terrible to think whether whatever you buy in the supermarket or the corner store if the milk you’ve bought would go to repairing the holes on the road.

The holes are so big that sometimes the lake overflows and the fish from the lake would go into the holes. And then whenever it stops raining and the water drains away the fish would be stuck in the holes and if the water completely dried up they would die and you’d see lots and lots of fishes in the holes on the road.

The government doesn’t care about fishes or holes in the road.

That just sounds about like a grown-up. They don’t care about anything. Except taxes. Or bills. Or how much they’ve spent for the week. Or whether the milk’s taxes would go on repairing the holes in the road so they can save a few more fishes.

Chanyeol doesn’t step into the holes just in case a poor little fishie’s swimming in one of them.

The rain never really stops around these parts. You’d see everyone here carry umbrellas, it was hopeless to hope for sun. The local farmers would have to have some sort of clever irrigation system so that their crops didn’t drown. It was common to see that crops are usually grown on some sort of mounds or hills, so that the water flows downwards and the crops wouldn’t submerge in water.

There’s this one hill just next to Chanyeol’s house—perhaps the tallest hill in the village. Chanyeol’s papa had once planned to become a farmer too, but the ground was too stubborn to grow any sort of crop at all, and now they just run a fish reservoir where they wouldn’t have to worry about the rainwater. The hill had a cherry blossom tree at the very top, only blooming once a year in spring, and the rest is covered in clovers and grass. The hill’s only about useful when it’s winter and Chanyeol’s sister and himself could climb to the very top and skid to the bottom, sliding right into the front door of their house.

Chanyeol looked up.

There’s someone on the hill.

Without an umbrella.

Chanyeol looked at his plastic bag containing the milk, before deciding that his mother could perhaps just wait for it a little longer. Leaning his umbrella backwards, he trudges onto the muddy earth and climbs the hill, treading on grass and clovers of sorts, squinting at the hazy figure that bent down, seemingly looking for something.

As he got closer and closer, Chanyeol sees the tiny petite figure, bending down occasionally to pick up a clover, peering at it closely before he places it on his woven basket. He was soaked through to his skin, his dungarees and his yellow shirt dampened by the water, and his feet didn’t have any socks, or shoes, or sandals or anything at all, which Chanyeol found rather silly for the village’s poor weather.

“What are you doing?” Chanyeol asks, now just standing right next to the boy. The latter seems to glower and he looks up, peering at Chanyeol through his dark eyes, and he stands up straight with the basket hanging from his small fingers.

“You sound like a grown-up.” he says, his lips pressed into a thin line, “They ask you, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ where they can clearly see what I’m doing with their own two eyes, unless you’re blind like grandpapa where he has to ask you what you’re doing, b-because he can’t see obviously, but you’ve climbed all the way up this hill so I think you can see what I’m doing. And just in case you still don’t know the answer, I’m collecting clovers.”

Chanyeol looks at the small boy, who gazes at him somewhat sternly before he bends down again and examines the ground, his fingers sifting through the greenery, picking up clover after clover, putting it in the basket.

“Why aren’t you wearing shoes?” Chanyeol asks another. The boy seems to growl at him.

“So I don’t crush the clovers, and I need them.” he crosses his arms. “That’s why I’m barefoot. So I don’t crush them as much. But you’re just like the other grown-ups and they like to step on things and they don’t care if they step on important things, they only care about keeping their feet dry and clean.”

“You sound like a grown-up.”

“That’s what the other grown-ups tell me.”

The boy sighs, his shoulders slumping. He sweeps back his wet hair and carries on with his ministrations, sifting through the grass with his nimble fingers.

Chanyeol looks at his feet, looking at them dolefully. He removed his sandals and stood them up next to the cherry blossom tree, before he stands next to the boy and held his umbrella over his soaked figure.

The boy hisses louder.

“Put that away.”

“You’ll catch a cold,” Chanyeol says, “I know. Caring about whether someone catches a cold on a rainy day is a grown-up thing too. You don’t need to mention it.”

The boy gets up slowly, taking a good look at Chanyeol. This time, he seems to smile rather sadly, shaking his head so that the wet strands of his hair falls onto his face. He grasps the umbrella and pushes it so that it covers Chanyeol once more, and the rain starts to trickle down his face again.

“You’ll catch a cold.” he says softly, for the first time in their encounter. “Take good care of your health.”

He crouches down again, picking a few more clovers. Chanyeol puts the umbrella over the boy’s head again, and he seems to chuckle.

“Grown-ups usually leave after this part.”

“And I’m not a grown-up. I’m ten years old.” Chanyeol replies, insistent on putting the umbrella over his head. The boy cracks a smile, but doesn’t say anything in return, resuming his task of collecting clovers—Chanyeol doesn’t know the point of it, but he puts the umbrella over his head anyways, following him wherever he went around the hill.

He would’ve liked to stay until the rain ceased, but around these parts, the rain never really stopped.

So he stays as long as he could, until the blurry dot of his mother from down the hill comes out of the house to shout his name.

/ / /

Chanyeol’s papa sells fish.

Once upon a time, his grandfathers’ grandfathers would’ve perhaps realised that the rain would never cease in the village. Everybody had crops of all sorts and they struggled to sell them in the market—because everybody sold them.

So they dug large squares in their fields and covered the bottom with plastic. With some workings of a pipe system, a few adult fishes and a little bit of luck, the Park family has been selling koi for generations to come.

Chanyeol? Chanyeol is unsure. His sister had took up the job of leaving the village to study in the city. Chanyeol wasn’t so sure whether he’d like to leave too, or inherit the fish farm when the time comes.

Whichever one pays to fix the holes in the road?

It’s after school, and Chanyeol’s walking back home with the same huge umbrella over his head so that his uniform wouldn’t soak. His boots clapped against the damp road, and he skillfully avoids the roads as usual, out of fear that the lake may have overflowed again and transported the poor unfortunate fish into the holes.

His house was just a few yards away, and he looks up, out of habit, to the hill that the cherry blossom tree reigned over.

There it is—the same small little boy from yesterday, with nothing to protect him from the pouring rain, his body bent down to look for something.

Chanyeol gazes at him for a while, before he bent down and took off his boots. He trudged onto the hill with only his socks on, dirtied by the watery mud, with his shoes pinched by one hand and the umbrella on the other. The boy’s figure becomes larger and larger and Chanyeol eventually sees him in the full, the boy’s dark eyes seeming to gleam as he gazes at the clovers.

Chanyeol puts the umbrella over his head, and it was a little while until the boy notices that the rain had stopped watering his body. The boy glares at him, before he looks back down on the earth once more.

“Oh.” he simply mumbles, “It’s you again.”

Chanyeol watches him sift his dainty fingers through the mass of greenery, before two of them would gently enclose into a clover’s stalk and he would swiftly pull it out, his head ducking in to examine the little plant. His dark eyes would then peer very, very closely at the green little thing and, with a look that somewhat resembles disappointment, he puts it down in the basket, and he would repeat the draining process.

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Looking at it.”

The boy looks at him exasperatedly, as if Chanyeol was stupid.

“To see if it has four leaves.”

“Why—“

“Shut up.”

Chanyeol closes his mouth. The boy didn’t seem to want to be bothered, though it seems that he didn’t mind the umbrella over his head. Chanyeol, in turn, was becoming thoroughly soaked from head to toe, but he was quite content in watching the boy collect clovers and peer at them individually.

The boy however, seems that he couldn’t quite shut out Chanyeol forever. At one point, he pivoted on one leg and turns around to look at Chanyeol, one elbow resting on his knee, and he scratches his pale cheek with a muddy hand as he looks at Chanyeol’s uniform with a disapproving look.

“School?”

“Yeah.”

“Ha!”

The boy exclaims and shook his head.

“School is useless.”

Chanyeol tilted his head, confused.

“Mama and papa said if you don’t go to school, you’ll be stupid.”

“If you go to school, you’re stupid.” the boy says indifferently, “Did your mama and papa go to school?”

“Yeah.”

“Then they’re stupid too.” the boy shook his head, turning around again to collect his clovers. Chanyeol was left puzzled.

“Why?”

“Because,” the boy huffed, “School only teaches you facts. They teach you to remember facts. They say ‘Oh, how does the rain evaporate?’ and you’d have to remember ‘because the sun is there’. And you have to remember lots and lots of facts and lots of the facts are useless and you don’t even need them. And they do tests to see if you remember those facts. And if you can’t remember the facts then they say you’re stupid. You’re stupid because you can’t remember facts, boo-hoo.”

The boy sets the basket down and looks up at Chanyeol, pressing his lips into a thin line, continuing his speech. “Maybe instead of asking why the rain evaporates, maybe they could ask why the rain evaporates. Then you’d have to think. Is it because it’s convenient for passer-byes? So that when a motorcycle comes by you don’t get splashed? Is it because a great big man in the sky told the rain water to evaporate?”

The boy resumes his task of collecting clovers once more. Chanyeol steps closer to him and opens his mouth to speak.

“It’s because they need to see that the water in the lake overflows and the fishes get stranded in the holes and by the water evaporating they could see all the poor fishes that dies so the government would think about directing the taxes to fix the holes so when the lake overflows the fish wouldn’t get stuck.”

The boy pauses in the middle of picking a clover and he peers at Chanyeol closely, squinting through the rain.

“What’s your name?” the boy asks.

“Chanyeol.”

The boy looks at him a little more and slowly nods. He cranes his neck around again and picks up a clover.

“My name is Baekhyun.” he says, his tone a little softer now, and he rakes his hair to the back of his head. “I never went to school.”

/ / /

The rain had went on pouring and pouring for three days.

Chanyeol thought about it. How could a rain last so long? It was as if someone filled up a giant bucket and poured it and the whole pouring lasted for a whole three days straight.

But Chanyeol couldn’t even make a tiny bucket pour water for three days. Even if he did it very carefully and very slowly, it couldn’t last even a minute. It seems impossible to do.

Chanyeol stares onto the floor. Mama sat on the sofa, drying his damp hair with a towel.

“Mama, what’s the point of seeing if a clover has four leaves?”

His mama stopped toweling his hair for a second, before she continues.

“Clovers usually have three leaves,” she says, “and it’s very rare to see a clover with four leaves. People say that if you find a four-leaf clover, it would bring you good luck and you can make a wish.”

Then she sighs.

“It’s funny, because four-leaf clovers are actually unlucky because they’ve formed four leaves instead of three leaves. It’s like a person being born with three arms instead. That’s unlucky.”

“Then which one is lucky if four-leaf clovers are unlucky and three-leaf clovers are lucky because they grow three leaves? Collecting four-leaf clovers or three-leaf clovers?”

His mama sighs, this time rather exasperatedly.

“What you should do,” she says, “is not waste your time on picking clovers up, because there’s no such thing as luck. There’s only hard work. Our fish farm is the result out of hard work, for example.”

“Well, breeding koi fishes depends on luck.” Chanyeol his thumb, “Sometimes the koi fishes mate and they don’t produce any eggs at all and that’s unlucky, so maybe the fish farm all depends on luck because it’s only luck that the fishes mate and they do produce eggs, and then—“

“Chanyeol, that’s enough now.” his mama says sternly, jerking his hair a little too hard, before she sighs again.

/ / /

Chanyeol is once more on his tracks to go home, the rain pouring above his head, with his boots clacking against the wet ground and hopping across the holes on the road.

Okay. Not really to go home. Once he sees the little dot on the hill with the barren cherry blossom on the top, he removes his boots and trudges all the way up only in his socks, walking towards the boy collecting clovers. Once more, he stands next to the boy and gives up his umbrella to him, Chanyeol feeling the rain beginning to seep down his neck.

Baekhyun peers at him with his dark eyes, though now he looks as if he’d been expecting Chanyeol, and he simply nods in acknowledgement of his presence. He carries on with his task of inspecting the picked clovers in silence, Chanyeol following him around whenever he moved.

“Have you ever found a four-leaf clover?” Chanyeol asks.

Baekhyun seems to chew on his lip anxiously.

“No. They said you’d find one four-leaf clover in 10,000 three-leaf clovers, but…” he mumbles, peering at this picked clover particularly closely. “Not yet.”

“How important is finding a four-leaf clover to you?”

Baekhyun puts the clover in the basket, seeming to mull the question over before he responds in a short tone.

“A matter of life and death.”

“Oh?”

“Mhmm.”

Baekhyun picks the last clover before he stood up, bumping his head slightly onto Chanyeol’s hand that held the umbrella. Baekhyun uncurls his limbs and stretched like a cat, his little mouth open in a yawn before he rubs his eyes, shuffling towards the tree.

“I’m taking a break.” he announces. Baekhyun takes his place under the branches of the cherry blossom tree, sidling against the trunk. Chanyeol simply follows, sitting down next to him with his legs crossed, putting the umbrella over both of their heads. Chanyeol looks at the basket of clovers between them.

“Why do you collect them? It’s easier to throw them away.”

“If I throw them away then I might re-pick them in the future, then that’d lengthen my search.” Baekhyun sighs. Chanyeol looks at him with a raised eyebrow.

“You seem to know lots and lots of complicated words.”

“I read a lot.”

“How old are you?”

Baekhyun seemed to think very hard about it, as if he’d forgotten his age.

“I’m ten.” he says, then, after counting on his fingers, “I’m almost eleven.”

“Lots of people remember their age by heart. You look like you don’t.”

“I don’t like filling up my head with useless facts.” Baekhyun says curtly, “People ask you ‘Oh, how old are you?’ and I’m ten, and what does that matter? It just means that the law says I can’t drink certain things, or do certain things, or go to certain places, and I have no interest in doing any of the three items so I don’t need to remember my age because I don’t care—and it just means I’ve been living for ten years, and so what does ‘ten years old’ supposed to signify if I have no use for it?”

“What about birthdays?” Chanyeol shifts in his seat, “You’d have to remember your age for birthdays.”

“Birthdays!” Baekhyun huffed, “All this dilly-dallying about how you’ve lived a certain age and just a year ago you were minus one of your current age! Why celebrate such a pointless number?”

Baekhyun seems lit out after answering the question.

Chanyeol looks down on his lap, drawing circles on the muddy earth.

“You don’t go to school,” Chanyeol mumbles, “What does your parent think?”

Baekhyun laughs.

“Why would they care? They work in the city. They won’t care if Byun Baekhyun doesn’t go to school. They only care about getting enough money so they can pay bills and taxes and all that pointless grown-up things they need to attend to and they think it’s more important than me. All these things about saving up for a big house. Or a better future. There’s no good in hoping for a better future when there is no good past behind us. Or any sort of past at all. The last time I saw them was when I was five years old and I can barely remember their faces. Do you call that a good past?”

Chanyeol rubbed out the circle from the ground and he looks at Baekhyun sympathetically.

“Maybe you hate remembering your age,” Chanyeol says softly, “Because your parents are never there for your birthday.”

Baekhyun seems to be put out.

Chanyeol sees his fierce face; it melts into this mellow, childish sadness, with a look of longing in his eyes. All his adult words seems to die down at his lips and his mature figure reduces and shrinks to this body of a simple ten-year-old child, who suddenly buries his face into his knees and looks out into the rain.

“I want to remember my age, like everyone else.” Baekhyun whispers, “And go to school. And ask stupid questions. And like birthdays. And be stupid and be told to memorize facts like everyone else.”

His dark eyes suddenly gleamed with tears.

“But I can’t, because my parents think paying bills and paying taxes is more important. They think their child is mature because he acts like a grown-up. A-And I don’t want to be a grown-up.”

Chanyeol saddens as he watches his friend, and he reaches out to pat his back as the little boy cries into his knees. Chanyeol wasn’t one for comfort—his mama and papa never cried and the fish in their pools hardly needed any emotional support to tend to—but he knows not to leave.

So then he stayed.

/ / /

Today seems to be a different kind of rain.

The raindrops are warm. The sun peeks out brightly from the midst of the clouds, but it still poured anyhow. Chanyeol is balancing on the edge of the pool, holding a bucket of fish feed, throwing it out into the water fistful by fistful. He watches as the koi surrounds a part of the pool that was concentrated by pellets, chuckling as he observes them open their mouth to consume them.

It’s a somewhat cheerful Saturday—as cheerful as it gets with the rain that the village gets. With the morning feeding done, Chanyeol goes back to his bedroom and looks out of the windows, looking out to the hill, hoping to see a certain someone.

There he is. The clover boy.

Chanyeol shouted his announcement of going out to play to his mother, fishing out the umbrella by the door before he runs out, taking his sandals off before he sprinted into the hill.

Baekhyun is there, examining a clover, but for the first time he acknowledges Chanyeol’s presence before he s his umbrella over his head. Baekhyun greets him with a simple hello and went back to his task, picking a clover after another.

As usual, Chanyeol follows him in silence, moving wherever he moved. The following hour was filled with silence, with the simple pitter patter of rain surrounding them, before Chanyeol breaks the ice.

“Are there grown-ups that never really get to be a grown-up?”

“Oh yes,” Baekhyun quips, “Artists and writers.”

“Really?”

“Creative adults are children who survive.” Baekhyun answers simply, “They still think about bills and taxes of course, but lesser than every other grown-up. You only become a grown-up when you start to write on napkins and pieces of paper on the train to work and calculate the amount of time you work in a week and how much you get by the end of that week and times that by 52, and whether that’ll cover the gas bills and water bills and electricity bills and food and the house rent and possibly the children if they’ve got some and maybe also the shoes they saw the other day at H&M.”

“52?”

“The amount of weeks in a year.” Baekhyun huffs. “I thought you’d learn such a useless fact in school already.”

“What if it’s a leap year?” Chanyeol asks, “Then what happens?”

Baekhyun seems to be in deep thought.

“Good question. How’d they figure that one out?”

Chanyeol shrugged.

Baekhyun have travelled halfway across the hill in a rotation now, and had got up to say that he needed a break. They both rest beneath the cherry blossom tree, watching the rain pour throughout the village, and Chanyeol looks up from the trunk.

“This tree has been here since I was born,” Chanyeol reached up. Baekhyun looked up too.

“My grandpapa said that the tree has been around since he was born.” Baekhyun pressed his knees together, hugging them as he looked up, “And a cherry blossom tree needs all the preparations it can get, otherwise it wouldn’t bloom for the spring.”

“If it blooms, then is it lucky?”

“Well, cherry blossom trees have different connotations to a four-leaf clover. They’re about affection, not luck.” Baekhyun sighs, “But I suppose it’s luck, too, because a cherry blossom tree can’t just move and get all the resources it needs. It relies on its surroundings. But if the surroundings doesn’t have what the cherry blossom needs, then I don’t suppose it’s bad luck, because the cherry blossom tree wouldn’t’ve existed anyhow.”

Chanyeol traces the lines on the tree trunk.

“Do you believe in luck, Baekhyun?” Chanyeol asks him.

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