in a narrow ascending lane in Jaman Mural Village — low concrete walls on both sides, a ground-floor window with a cooking-fat smell rising from it, the lane bending out of sight ten meters ahead; murals visible in fragments around the curve, someone's gate standing ajar showing a sliver of interior courtyard — stopped at the bend where the ajar gate reveals a sliver of interior — she is not looking at the mural ahead but at the thin rectangle of courtyard light in the gate crack
The lotus leaves were corrupting at the edges. Not dying — something more specific than that. Corrugating, going papery at the rim, the way things do when they've finished their argument with summer.
I had the convenience store coffee in both hands and the stone bench was cold through the trousers. The bench was set back from the path behind a willow that leaned into its own weight. Nobody came down that way. I'd found it the way I find things — by not going where the gravel was worn smooth.
The water moved. Not from wind. I don't know what from. Small disturbances that arrived and then didn't repeat. One dry seed head stood up at the center of everything, still and oddly formal, the way something looks when it's finished being beautiful and doesn't care. The willow trailed one branch into the water and the branch didn't move. I sat for forty minutes. The grey light flattened everything to the same distance — the near bank and the far one, the seed head and the treeline behind it, all of it equally present, equally indifferent. Somewhere behind me a shutter rolled down. The sound of it was very clean in the quiet.
The faded cat mural with a visible crack running through its left haunch, between a low concrete wall and a neighbor's gate
By afternoon I'd rolled my sleeves past the elbow and taken the bus to Jaman. I got off one stop too early and walked up the slope from the wrong angle, which turned out to be the right angle — the murals came into view one at a time instead of all at once, around a bend, between someone's gate and a low concrete wall. An old man was descending with a canvas bag and he said something I didn't catch and I nodded anyway and he kept walking as if that had been sufficient.
at the gate threshold of a low concrete-walled residential lane in Jaman Mural Village — a wooden gate post to her left, the cracked cat mural on the wall to her right, its faded pigment warmer than the concrete surrounding it, the lane descending steeply behind her into the neighborhood, laundry lines crossing overhead — paused mid-slope, half-turned toward the mural's cracked haunch; she has just noticed the crack and has not yet decided whether to step closer
The murals are older than anything posted online suggests. More faded. The famous cat one had a crack running through its left haunch that aged the whole image by ten years. I liked it more for that. The village is built on a slope — somebody's actual neighborhood, laundry out, a smell of cooking fat from a ground-floor window.
eomuk (fish cake) skewers and rice in a paper tray, eaten standing at a low counter
I ate standing. Rice and fish cake and something pickled I couldn't name and didn't try to.
at a street-facing ground-floor food counter in Jaman Mural Village — a low counter ledge, the serving hatch open to the lane, a shallow tray holding rice and fish cake and a small dish of something pickled, the concrete wall of the lane behind her wet from the day's drizzle, a mural fragment visible at the left edge of frame — eating standing at the counter ledge, chopsticks lifted mid-motion toward the unnamed pickled thing; she has paused before putting it in her mouth, studying it without alarm
What she wore
day4-scene1
I'd been wearing the same loop of black and camel all week. This morning felt like it needed the grey — the kind that disappears into mist and doesn't announce itself.
day4-scene2
The shirt went on somewhere between the park and the bus — I'd rolled the sleeves by the time I got to Jaman, which felt like the right amount of loosening.
day4-scene3
It was the dress I hadn't worn yet, the one I'd been saving for an evening that felt worth it. The day before Chuseok qualified.