MFLA 18

Chapter 18: Contextual Errors

“Ah, right!” Ho-sik suddenly changed the topic.

“Muru, don’t you remember our captain?”

“Huh?”

Is it my turn now? Muru quickly glanced at Tarim. Tarim gave a barely noticeable nod.

“Um… I don’t really remember. I was too young.”

“Well, that makes sense. Just because you live in the same neighborhood doesn’t mean you know everyone.”

Ho-sik affirmed his own point and stuffed a rice ball wrapped in seaweed into his mouth.

“You guys all knew the captain though, right?”

Even while chewing, Ho-sik explained their background.

“My mom’s been best friends with the captain’s aunt since high school. The aunt’s a native of Junsan but met the captain while visiting Gwangalli in Busan and ended up marrying him. I heard the captain gave her a legendary kind of love. He even moved to Junsan! When I was little, the captain and his aunt even changed my diapers. These guys got close in middle school, and those two have been friends since elementary school.”

“Nope. I wasn’t close with Tarim in elementary.”

Lee-gyeom slurped the end of a bean sprout tail as he added,

“Tarim transferred in during third grade. But since he was always hanging around you, Muru, we didn’t get a chance to become friends. After you moved away, we were in different classes even in fourth grade, so we just occasionally played soccer. We only really got close after we were assigned to the same middle school.”

“Did that really happen?” Tarim murmured. Lee-gyeom, energized by the trip down memory lane, continued enthusiastically.

“Back then, I was the kind of guy who had to cart my Valentine’s chocolates away in a handcart.”

“Yeah, right. What a lie.”

Ho-sik shot him down, and Lee-gyeom immediately called a witness.

“I’m serious! Tarim, you remember, right?”

“It wasn’t a handcart. Maybe one shopping bag.”

“Whatever! But then, this transfer student from Seoul shows up and steals my throne.”

Lee-gyeom put down his spoon and solemnly clasped his hands in front of his face.

“It was a coup d’état…”

“Oh, please!”

Ho-sik’s blunt interruption cut Lee-gyeom’s nostalgia short.

“You two must’ve been glued together back then.”

Ho-sik glanced between Muru and Tarim with a suspicious gaze. The two laughed awkwardly, voices trailing off.

When Lee-gyeom set down his empty soup bowl, Tarim stood up from the table to get him more bean sprout soup. As he dipped the ladle into the pot, Lee-gyeom blurted out something brainless.

“After that ‘incident’ in third grade, everyone in town was really worried about Muru, but it was lucky Tarim stepped in to take care of her.”

Clang!
The stainless ladle clanged against the stainless pot and fell to the floor.

Muru asked,

“What incident?”

Silence.
Everyone at the table experienced the déjà vu Muru had earlier. This silence felt oddly familiar.

“Uh… well…”

Ho-sik had a look like What are you talking about?, while Lee-gyeom looked like Why are you asking about something everyone already knows?
There wasn’t much difference on the surface, but that’s how Ju Muru perceived it.

“What happened? Why were people worried about me?”

Lee-gyeom’s face drained of color in real time. He looked at Muru, then Tarim, then the ceiling.

It was Tarim who came to the rescue.

Bang!

Tarim slammed a soup bowl in front of Lee-gyeom and solemnly declared two words:

“Your parents’ divorce.”

Lee-gyeom slowly raised his head to look at Tarim’s square jaw, which was trembling ever so slightly. Hang in there, buddy. Clean up this mess your trash mouth made.

“Divorce…? But didn’t that happen right before I moved to Gangneung? Tarim, you transferred in during the second semester of third grade, and I moved after finishing third grade, during winter break.”

The soup bowl, not yet emptied, had a few spoonfuls of broth and three bean sprouts lying quietly in it.
Lee-gyeom drank slowly, trying to bow out of this memory battle.

“…The family was in crisis.”

“All through third grade?”

“They argued a lot…”

“But Lee-gyeom called it that incident. So wasn’t it one major event, not just frequent fights…?”

While tearing apart a potato pancake, Ho-sik watched the situation unfold and quietly admired it all. As expected of a writer. She even picks out contextual inconsistencies.

“Well…”

Tarim’s ad-lib seemed to be running on low battery. Now it was time for the source of the incident—Lee-gyeom—to step in.
He hurriedly pulled out his smartphone and put it to his ear.

“Yes, Mr. Mayor!!”

Pretending to receive a call that obviously didn’t come, he quickly left the table.

“Yes, yes. That happened?! I’ll be right there! Immediately!”

Ho-sik, having already finished his meal, stood up confidently from his seat.

Now, only the two of them remained at the table.
Muru quietly stared at the sweating Tarim, then picked up her spoon again.
Breakfast ended in a heavy silence.

✽ ✽ ✽

That evening, Goo Baek-mo was lying diagonally across the floor of the Vivari Super storeroom, watching TV.
The little “evening drinking” business run in the backroom of the supermarket operated on a reservation basis, and tonight there was just one customer.

As the reservation time approached, the sound of a heavy engine grew louder and then stopped in front of the store.
Dingling. The doorbell chimed as the customer entered.
Baek-mo slid open the paper door to the storeroom.

“Tarim, is that you?”

Tonight’s customer was Park Tarim.
While Tarim, wearing a dark expression, opened the fridge, Baek-mo pulled down the store’s shutters. Business for the day was officially closed.

“How about seafood pancake for snacks?”

“Sounds good.”

“Let’s go up.”

Baek-mo opened a small door built into the back wall of the storeroom.
Tarim took off his shoes at the entrance and slipped inside, holding a bottle of soju in each hand.

After descending six narrow, dark wooden steps, a hidden space appeared.
Beneath the Vivari Super lay a studio-sized space as wide as the store above.

The building, originally a single-story house built in 1970, had included a basement due to wartime civil defense regulations. The original homeowners had turned it into a semi-basement with ventilation windows along the upper walls.

Because of the building’s age, most locals had forgotten this wide space even existed beneath the store.
Ventilation fans now blocked the windows from outside view.

This was Baek-mo’s real home.

“Still flawless every time.”

Tarim commented as he collapsed onto the couch.
Baek-mo pulled frozen seafood mix from the fridge.

“What’s flawless?”

“From the outside, no one would ever guess you live like this.”

Tarim looked around the interior, still impressed.
One side was a bedroom, the other a full kitchen with a large ventilation hood. A sofa and coffee table had been placed for courtesy, but most of the space was…

“What even is this place?”

“A special investigation HQ from a crime show?”

Exactly.
Metal situation boards covered two walls, with a double-sided glass board on wheels placed between them.

The boards were covered in newspaper clippings, photos, and notes, all connected by red yarn. The glass board was also scrawled with messy handwriting.

Two large monitors, high-spec desktop PCs, and a dedicated internet line completed the setup.

Waiting for the frying pan to heat, Baek-mo took off his floral pants and padded vest and changed into black leather pants and a skull-printed T-shirt.

“Why bother changing? It’s your house.”

“Gotta set the mood. I’m not just the neighborhood store dog anymore, right?”

Tarim chuckled.

Soon, a piping hot seafood pancake and two soju glasses were placed on the table.
As Tarim tore off a piece of pancake with his chopsticks, he asked,

“Does Winter nuna come often?”

“Every day. All that stuff’s hers.”

Baek-mo pointed toward the computers as he slid one of the equally filled glasses toward Tarim.
Clink. The soju glasses met, and the two men downed their shots in one go.

“Late at night?”

“You think she’d come during the day? She slips in after midnight and watches the monitors all night.”

“What’s she doing?”

“How should I know? But lately, she’s been banging away at that keyboard longer than usual.”

Baek-mo munched on squid bits as he spoke.

“Ever since Muru came to your place.”

Tarim, in the middle of pouring the second shot, frowned.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But if she’s doing what she used to do, that’s not good.”

“She wouldn’t. She even signed a contract with Ho-sik swearing she’d quit.”

“Ho-sik, that guy…”

Baek-mo chuckled to himself, amused by whatever he was imagining.

“A fiery love, huh?”

“She really likes him, even though…”

“It’s youth if it hurts.”

“If it hurts, you’re just a patient.”

The two men downed half the pancake and a bottle of soju, exchanging small talk.

“I’m sleeping here tonight.”

“Ah, so now we’re getting to the point. You’re sleeping here? Did Muru get mad?”

“…Not mad, exactly.”

Tarim, holding his glass to his lips, sank into deep thought.

After Lee-gyeom’s verbal slip that morning, Muru had acted like nothing happened.
She went to the library, took walks, greeted Aunt Kang-shin who brought side dishes, and curled up on the sofa to read e-books.

But in between those actions, a quiet sadness leaked out—one Tarim couldn’t miss.