Chapter 21.1

Chapter 21.1

I wasn’t the kind to dream often.

Maybe it was because life in this prison already felt like one long, absurd dream, so when I finally managed to fall asleep, my mind just wanted to rest.

But that night, I dreamed. For the first time in a long while. And it was a strange one.

Everything except sight felt vividly real, the smells, the taste, the touch, the sounds. Yet even with all that, the dream itself had an abstract, hazy quality to it.

I smelled oiled cloth and heard the soft scrape of a blade cutting through something. Then came the scent of freshly baked flour, warm and sweet, and the delicate touch of fragrant fabric brushing against my face.

A cool, solid body heat pressed against me, followed by the searing sensation of holding something burning hot, like iron straight from the forge. Then it all dissolved into sound.

“How have you been?”

Just a simple greeting, the kind you’d say after a night apart.

But the moment I heard it, a wave of sorrow and longing welled up inside me. I didn’t even recognize who had spoken, or whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman, but I missed them terribly. It felt like suddenly returning to a home I’d once fled from, the kind of ache that made me want to cry.

“…Hh… hhuh…”

I wept into the emptiness, sobbing hard enough that my whole body trembled. When I was half-awake again, I felt that my cheeks were wet. It happens sometimes, when a dream is so sad that even your real body ends up crying.

Then came a sound, a soft rustling, a hand stroking from my forehead up over my crown.

What the hell now? I opened my eyes slowly, and what I saw startled me a little.

The palm touching my forehead was rough with calluses. A woman’s wrinkled hand, dry and coarse, was gently brushing back my hair. Even when I blinked up at her to show I was awake, she just kept stroking my head.

Lowering my damp eyes, I glanced at the number sewn to her chest: inmate 4731. “Sole,” they called her.

We’d never even spoken before, but now this old woman was caressing me as though she were my mother, her touch soft, slow, and unbearably kind.

“…Wh-what are you doing?”

I whispered, and ‘Sole’* pulled something crinkly from her chest pocket and placed it in my hand. It was an Apollo snack bar, so wrinkled it must’ve been hidden there for days.

*Korean 발바닥 (Balbadak) – a nickname in Korean prisons to describe someone who’s quiet, lowly, or always crouched on the ground. A person who’s “beneath everyone else” or who spends all their time sitting on the cold floor. 발바닥 literally means “sole of the foot.” For this translation, top shorten it, we used ‘Sole’.

“Wh-why are you giving this to me…?”

She didn’t answer. She just shook her head softly, patted my head one more time, and quietly returned to her bedding.

“…”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Did I even know this woman? Had we ever spoken before?

Not just in this cell—probably in the entire prison—there couldn’t have been many who had ever had a real conversation with her.

Sole looked to be in her late sixties. Even Wangnyeo didn’t mess with her. When people tried to pick a fight, she would just stare blankly into the air, or hunch toward the wall, muttering to herself while doing something with her hands. From afar, it looked like she was scratching the wall.

She never caused any harm, but there was something eerie about her, so I’d never really interacted with her either. Which made it even harder to understand why she’d handed me something like that.

Normally, I’d have turned it over in my head, trying to figure out what she meant by it, but there was no malice in her actions.

Whatever. Let it be. Nothing in this damn prison makes sense anyway.

I closed my eyes again.

When I opened them later, it was the start of another identical day. Morning roll call, breakfast rations, preparing to head to the workshop. Only this time, it was shower day. The one day a week we were allowed to wash.

I grabbed a faded plastic basin, tossed in a towel, a bar of soap, and my tin of Vaseline.

The women in the shared cell lined up single file in the hallway. The air inside had been chilly, but the hallway was brutally cold, biting straight through the back of my neck. When the front of the line started moving, I dragged my feet to follow.

“Today’s shower time, a special fifteen minutes!”

Section Chief Park barked it out as if he were granting us some kind of blessing.