[ year 2018 ]

She'd finished her lunch a few minutes ago. At this moment, she was washing the dishes at the sink. The dishes weren’t that much since she lived alone. Her spectacles kept on sliding down slowly due to the oily surface on her nose. With the back of her hand, she pushed the frame of the spectacle to a comfortable position.

She wiped her hand with a paper towel and then, threw it in the rubbish bin. After making sure everything in the kitchen had turned off, she left the area as she tied her hair into a loose bundle again. Stopping at the middle of the living room, she rested her hand on both of her hips, releasing a quick sigh.

Hani Kwon observed the living room with a tight look on her face. Due to the sunshine rays, she could see the existence of dusts floating in the air, making her assumed how long had it been since she last cleaned the house. The house was big enough for a solo like her, but she wasn’t fond leaving the house dirty.

Coffee tins on the table, ramen cups were left open with half-empty soup and broken chopsticks messily laying inside the cups

There were no noodles or any signs of artificial vegetables in it.

. Different types of fruit skins – avocados, bananas, green apples, oranges and grapes – were laying everywhere on the table and they looked like they were going to rot; Hani grimaced at that. Fortunately, the fruits were seedless or else, the dirtier the table would look.

She quickly moved to gather trashes and threw them into a rubbish bag. As she did, she reminded herself to bring them down to throw in the waste and recycle the plastic materials, papers and cans.

Due to her busyness as a novel writer, she didn't have time to clean the house. It wasn’t that her agency was pushing her to finish her manuscript. Ideas kept popping up in her mind at that time, and she wasn’t going to let the ideas went away just because of her procrastinating. Her phone had been off for five days too. She knew that she was going to receive spam notification since she had been offline for a long time.

“Ey,” Hani sighed.

Numerous miscalls, and messages appeared on her phone’s screen. She swiped the useless notification and then, stopped. A suspicious message coming from an unnamed number had her eyebrows creased.

She pushed her spectacles to a comfortable position again and clicked on the message twice.

The message said: “be aware of the dark, as the black mix well with any red. In the past, you should have fled. Don’t think you aren’t warned, be careful if you are unarmed.”

Truth to be told, that was not the first time she got a mysterious message. A message from the same phone number. It seemed to her that the anonymous person was trying to send her a rhyme message. The rhyme message sounded awkward, therefore she presumed it was made by someone lacked of literacy skills.

Hani shook her head while thinking who could have sent her that message. It had been two years and it was exactly when she started her career as a writer.

When she got weird messages for the first time, she thought a friend or a family member played a prank on her since she had been living alone for a long time. However, all of them denied the accusation. Who sent her the message then?

Reported this disturbance with her mother thrice to the police station, but they were unable to track the true owner of the number and the information registered was reported to be a fake user. Even the telecommunication was surprised to find out the registration of the user was fake but there was nothing they could do to help as none of their CCTV footages or photo of the user helped.

Scrolling up, there were about fifty messages from the anonymous person. The messages were sent sporadically. She could never guess what date and at what time the anonymous person would send such message again.

One of the past messages said, “come out, come out wherever you are. Your hair strand is standing out.”

It was a child song that children used to play hide-and-seek. After receiving the message, she couldn’t see the children song the same anymore. The message was as though this anonymous person warned her that they found her.

The ringtone from her phone snapped her out of her thoughts. Looking at her phone, she noticed her best friend’s name with sparkle emoji on both sides. Then, she realized that it was an incoming call.

She swiftly clicked on the green button and attached the phone on her ear. “Hey!”

“Ayo. Wanna go out for chicken and beer?”

“You know too well I don’t drink beer.”

“Aw, right! Fruit flavored soju then.”

Hani stayed silent for a long time, thinking.

“Hani? Anything else you want?”

“Actually, no.”

“Okay, I’m hanging up!”

“Wait! Faye, I have a favor to ask.”

Faye was quiet for a few seconds. “O…kay.”

Hani released a soft sigh. “Come to my place.”

“Are we not going to hang out at the gazebo?”

“No. I think it’s too dangerous for me.”

“Hani?”

Silence. But Hani decided to break it fast. “Yeah?”

“Is everything okay?”

Hani shook her head, closing her eyes as her head dropped. “I don’t think so,” she muttered.