Lemon

by Kwon Yeo-Sun

For over sixteen years, I’ve pondered, prodded, and worked every detail embroiled in the case known as “The High School Beauty Murder”—to the point I often fool myself into thinking I’d personally witnessed the circumstances now stamped on my mind’s eye.

Some people appear uneasy no matter what they do, and this boy was one of them.

Life begins without reason and ends without reason.

It was both familiar and unfamiliar, one I’d seen long ago yet never seen, and one I wanted to both avoid and scrutinize.

Her beauty was urgent, precarious, like the piercing wail of a speeding ambulance.

Fortunately, their hodgepodge of ordinariness pulled me back to reality.

I had the sudden urge to lash out at Da-on, just as you’d want to kick an injured dog that had growled at you. Though I knew it wasn’t right, I wanted to say something to hurt Da-on. I wanted to attack her, because she’d attacked me.

If there’s no ambiguity or flexibility in law, why would we need politics or diplomacy? People say there is but one law, that everyone’s equal before the law, but they have no clue. Nope, they sure don’t. The law isn’t some machine, and people who deal with laws aren’t machines, so how could it be applied equally every single time?

“Death turns us into junk. In the blink of an eye, we become meaningless, like scraps.”

A few years after Taerim’s wedding, I’d heard at another alumni meet-up that her baby girl had been abducted.

“I want to believe…but I can’t. How can I, when things I can’t possibly understand are happening all over the world?”