The Cradle;

 Kim Eun-Kyung

'glittering’

The wind shook the star and passed away, and it fell into the far end of the darkness.               I met the river of stars flowing in the deep indigo sky, which remembered the night again on a neighboring mountainside a long time later. On a brilliant summer night, with stars pouring into the chest of the Milky Way, I asked the fireflies that had gone out if they had already died. There was no answer. I had the doubt cleared when I became an adult.

The stars that had fallen overnight twinkled through the morning fog that filled the fields.    After the refreshing light green morning of the season passed, the summer sunlight tightening the skin's surface had sunk into the time of fall, and when the sky turned dark blue, red persimmons fell into the yard. When a star is thrown deep into the sky, covered by a small hand, the longing becomes cold air and spreads white. I spent the afternoon with the sun shining far on the ground, sweetening it with candy, and as the east breeze carried the sun toward Seosan, it disappeared, leaving a lingering purple behind.

It had been a long since somebody built a Western style house in place of my mother's house during my childhood. Even that has now become empty and a very distant story. Once full of light green freshness, the fields were tightly filled with the roofs of agricultural and industrial complexes, and the dusty gravel roads disappeared deep beneath the asphalt. The village people who welcomed me as a granddaughter of one of their families also left for a long time to a distant place. The earthen wall has disappeared, and only the gray cement wall stands with a dry expression.

Every year, I have confirmed the existence of that time by reproducing the space and time that exists as a memory in color. The irregular arrangement of years, the uneven flow of time, and the time of childhood are summoned in color when encountering familiar objects. There was nothing left of my childhood. The air, the wind, and the smells that filled the season have disappeared, and only the felt memories remain.

When I threw a star deep into the sky and covered it with my five-year-old hand, a firefly flew up with a bright light.

*All writing rights belong to the author.