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Hell is comfortable.
The molten ground feels like home. He remembers home in fragments of mold in the wood cracks, the wetness between his fingertips when he traces them down the well. They had a home. Jinu remembers it as theirs. It was hell.
Hell is comfortable. Someone is screaming, but Jinu reminds himself that nothing is alive in hell. Jinu stretches his hand in the darkness and lets it unfold.
Jinu mulls over the screaming soul, his feet grounded in the soil of the damned, and thinks, mine. He thinks, home.
There used to be a well. It was old. His sister used to scoop water every morning. It sometimes can be the only thing they have for the day. Jinu hated it. He hated the smile on his sister’s face. Well, at least our Jinu is big and strong. The flies in the house. It was always summer in that house. He hated it. He thinks he hated his sister.
“Jinu,” he says. Jinu looks up. Hell stares at him. He stares back.
“You have done a good job.”
Jinu likes the praise; the transactional nature of it— he has once exchanged souls for a compliment. He has killed for less.
“I have to admit,” hell says, “I am surprised.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were capable of emotions.”
The fire is bright against his clothes, but it doesn’t burn. Jinu is a wisp in the hot air, waiting to be told where to blow. “Cockiness is a sin too, do you know that?” The fire crackles. “I was hoping you’d be miserable here. Your kind tends to be miserable. Frail and prone to regret and believe yourself to be guilty as if it were a bad thing.”
Jinu looks at the way fire crinkled his clothes. He smoothens it with a smile. “My kind?”
“Oh, your kind…. The indecisive kind. The ones who don’t know if they belong with the demons or the humans.”
Jinu wonders. He reaches out— his hand into the fire. It doesn’t burn. He opens his mouth, and realizes that he hasn’t felt thirsty in ages.
“I belong here,” he says. The fire crackles like it knows, and Jinu blows west.
He can’t sleep. He doesn’t need to sleep. It’s loud.
Rumi asks him what’s wrong. Her voice buzzes like the wings of a fruit fly, the slight crackle of heat. He shuts his eyes.
They are using each other. Jinu likes it. The transaction. You sell a pottery for five yang. He used to go to the market with his sister. She is smiling at him. She is screaming at him. He hated her.
“The cicadas,” he says. She nods. Her hair is beautiful in the night. Sliver of it shines bright— and Jinu hears the screams again. “They are loud.”
“Do you need to shut the windows?”
Jinu shakes his head. “I have a headache.” He can’t sleep anyway.
She must know that demons can’t have headaches. She’s been killing enough of them to know. But she might think like he is like her— half human, half demon, and Jinu hopes that she applies the human rule to him, that he is capable of pain, of sorrow, of fear— things that demons feed of.
She places her hands on his forehead. “Do you want some medicine?”
“I’m pretty sure it won’t work.”
She shrugs. Her hair is beautiful, again, and Jinu is stuck with the same observation as he stares— the color splattering on the bed like unruly waves. Jinu’s fingers twitch with the urge to touch them— he is amused, sometimes, by hunger. The primal urge to feel.
“It works for me,” she says.
“You’re half human.”
“And you were human before.”
“Woo-woo,” Jinu deadpans. “Now I take their souls.”
He wonders if he will let her see one day, the gaped mouth of a mother begging for mercy. It’s human to beg, but Jinu knows she was begging for her daughter’s life. She cradled the child in her arms. It’s interesting, the way humans think it would make a difference, that something can be protected if you just wrap your arms around it.
Jinu’s head hurts. “My head hurts,” he repeats. It brings out a laugh from her. Jinu moves his hands away.
Rumi forgets who he is. She smiles at him, eyes crinkling. “Take some medicine, then.”
He will. I didn’t know that demons can get headaches, she doesn’t say. You are one, Jinu would have replied. Either of them moves.
“Good night, Rumi,” Jinu whispers in the night.
The flies are always loud. In the darkness, Jinu watches her warp her arms around herself as she drifts to sleep. Jinu stretches his hand out in the dark. He opens his palm and find death there, the rotting corpse of an unruly fruit fly.
Kpop is the current trend in Korea involving idols, often in the form of girl or boy only groups performing songs and dances on stage, he reads. Back in the palace, he was asked to perform in front of officials. He was laughed off stage. He was cheered on. The results don’t matter as long the entertainment is provided.
Jinu drinks from the well. Jinu drinks the water and takes in the mold and thinks, theirs. He has killed them.
He holds the souls in his hand, and thinks, mine. He destroys them with a flick of his hand and goes home.