Pomegranate

Lee Hyo-seok

A strange, familiar taste lingered on Jae-hui's tongue. After a moment, she realized it was the taste of pomegranate — and her heart leapt as if she'd glimpsed a rainbow. The image of a pomegranate painted on an old folding screen rose up from memory. Ripe clusters split open to reveal red seeds, and beside that screen, her mother always sat with a worried face, a bowl of medicine nearby.

Jae-hui had been lying ill for the past few days. Her fever rose, and old memories kept drifting back. Now, her mother was gone, the screen was gone, and the pomegranate was gone too — only the fragrance of memory remained.

Leafing through a book at her bedside, she was startled to come across the name of a novelist. Junbo. It was the boy from her old school days. Even the story itself seemed to mirror their own childhood.

Jae-hui had always been near the top of her class, and Junbo was known for his sharp, clever eyes. They were never particularly close, yet Jae-hui always felt strangely empty whenever his figure was missing from a crowd. Whenever she wore something new, he was the first person she wanted to show it to. When a teacher praised her, she quietly hoped word of it would reach his ears.

One spring, on a school outing into the mountains, Junbo climbed out onto a dangerous ledge to pick azaleas growing along the cliff. When Jae-hui reached out in worry, he brushed her off gruffly, insisting he was fine. Then his foot slipped, and as his body lurched forward, Jae-hui threw herself down and grabbed his foot. He didn't fall — but his arm was badly scraped in the process.

"You got hurt because of me."
"You think I picked these flowers for you?"

His stubborn answer left her both hurt and quietly amused.

Not long after, Junbo fell ill and missed even his own graduation ceremony before leaving for Seoul to continue his studies. Jae-hui wouldn't see any trace of him again until many years later — through this very novel bearing his name.

Jae-hui's own life hadn't been an easy one. She recalled moving to Seoul with her father as a child, then returning to her hometown to grow up. After finishing school, she watched her father's business slowly collapse, and in the end, she agreed to a marriage she didn't truly want, for his sake. Her husband was a bank clerk — but the marriage turned out to be, in every sense, a grave. After a life of recklessness, he embezzled money from the bank and disappeared without a trace.

Jae-hui eventually returned to teach at the very school she once attended as a child. Among her students, she often saw echoes of her own childhood.

There was a stubborn boy named Gamnam, and a kind-hearted girl named Aesun. Gamnam was poor and often went without lunch — and strangely, on those days, Aesun would go without lunch too. One day, curious, Jae-hui secretly checked Aesun's desk during lunchtime and found that she did, in fact, have her own lunch packed. Yet on the days Gamnam went hungry, Aesun quietly chose to go hungry as well.

When Jae-hui asked her why, Aesun answered simply:

"If Gamnam can't eat, I don't feel like eating either."

That evening, walking home, Jae-hui wept quietly under her blanket. It had been a long time since she'd encountered something so purely good.

From that day on, she cherished both children even more. And in that moment, her own childhood came rushing back to her with an ache she hadn't felt in years.

Now, having found Junbo's name in a book, Jae-hui lay in bed once more with fever rising, tear-tracks tracing faint lines at the corners of her eyes. Outside, the last thin light of the afternoon fell pale yellow across the window, and her pillow was already damp with tears.