A soft wailing cut through the silent atmosphere of the empty playground. Jaejoong looked up from the hole he was digging in the sandbox but saw no one else besides himself. The playground was always empty at this time of the day, even though the place was encompassed by four apartment buildings.

Whenever he whined to his mother that he was bored since there wasn’t anyone else his age to play with, she would say that it couldn’t be helped because the residents there were mostly either old people living alone or single working men and women. There weren’t any other children around besides Jaejoong while the only adult there was his mother, though she was dozing on a bench nearby.

So when the wailing died down to mere sobs, he climbed up from his kneeling position on the sand and decided to abandon his attempt to dig a hole big enough to bury an empty shoebox he found in his mother’s closet.

He brushed the sand off his knees and dusted his hands together so that they were as clean as possible. Pouting in curiosity, he padded off in a random direction, turning around to a different one whenever he thought that the sound was getting softer.

A minute later, he huffed. He couldn’t see anyone but he could hear someone. And relying on his sense of hearing was useless since there was always a chance that whenever he thought it was getting softer due to the growing distance from him and the source, it could also mean that the person was only making the sound softer—distance might not have anything to do with the loudness