THREE

Jinwoo is pissed, and Ji Young hears all about it on his hike back to his tower. He hears about how inconsiderate Taeyeon is while he shimmies between two sides of a rock’s cleft, sucking in his stomach to slip through.

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh?” Ji Young half-wheezes, winded from the ascent back eastwards. He looks sadly up at the rope dangling from the thirty-foot rock face in front of him that connects with the trail above. It’s easy enough to descend the face, but it’s a pain to climb back up after a day’s exercise.

Jinwoo harrumphs haughtily. “Me? Harsh? As if. If anything, I’ve spoiled the two of you in your time here. I’m not so sunny with anyone else.”

“You don’t work with anyone else,” Ji Young points out. He slides his harness on under his thighs and secures the rope to his carabiner, hefting himself up and feeling the pull in his shoulders. He’s not small anymore, nor is he by any means weak, but his lats ache with the strain.

“Well, I wasn’t so nice with the two fire-watchers who preceded you guys. They were real jerks. Cut and run as soon as fire season was over,” Jinwoo complains through the line.

Ji Young shimmies higher up the cliff face. Sweat is already beading along his brow and tanning the back of his neck. He wishes, not for the first time, that he had a bathtub back at his tower instead of a tepid water spigot that Jinwoo tries to call a shower. “That’s the job,” he says through clenched teeth, “Technically, we’re not supposed to stay in the watchtowers year-round. You lucked out with us.”

“I guess. Where else am I going to find two hard workers with zero ties to the outside world? Which, coming back to my original point, is why I spoil you both so much.”

“I have a threadbare blanket and a faulty power generator.”

“I told you, I’m working on that. Where are you, by the way? I don’t see you in your tower.” Jinwoo’s line goes staticky for a moment like it always does when he descends the steps of his tower. Being furthest north, Jinwoo has the best radio reception out of all of them. He can call all the way down to Joo Eun’s southern medical center and, on a good day, can use the little television he keeps hidden away in his wardrobe. When he descends, the quality of his radio signal deteriorates into indistinct mumbles like the rest of them.

“Please tell me that you’re not going to take up spying too,” Ji Young huffs, pulling himself to lie flat on his stomach at the top of the rock wall. “It’s bad enough to have one peeping tom in the business. You and Taeyeon are really giving fire-watchers a bad name.”

Jinwoo grumbles. “I have better things to do than watching you day and night. I’m still mad about Taeyeon. Thank you for betraying his confidence and tattling to me.”

“It isn’t tattling if I know he’s listening to us,” Ji Young laughs. He unclips his harness and stands at the edge of the small cliff looking down. The soil out here is dark brown and spotted with black-and-white pieces of granite that gleam in the late afternoon sun. From his perch above the gully, he can see over the treetops below and out into the distance. He’s not as high as he is in his tower, but he’s high enough to see Bear Creek winding happily southward. “I’m headed back to the tower. Supply drops take all day.”

“Anything unusual to report?” Jinwoo asks. He curses a moment later, and Ji Young hears the telltale snap of a branch that tells him Jinwoo’s just been backhanded by a tree.

Ji Young shrugs even though Jinwoo can’t see him. “Unless you count Taeyeon’s newfound interest in jorts, no. I haven’t actually seen anyone today—not even our usual hikers. It’s a bit lonely, actually.”

“It’s still early in the season,” Jinwoo reminds him. “Give it time, and before you know it, you’ll be up to your ears in tourists camping offroad and illegal firework shows. Joo Eun said there are hundreds of people coming in through the south gate. They should be here in the coming days, so enjoy your peace while it lasts.”

“Got it. Anything else?” Ji Young doesn’t mean to come across as cranky, but it’s late and he’s starving, and he’d left off at a really good part of his book last night. His yellow shirt has turned to a sickly shade of light brown from sweat and grime, and Ji Young would kill to be able to shave. It’s the small pleasures in life that keep him going. Jinwoo is impinging on his small pleasures.

With a hum, Jinwoo says, “That should be everything. Make sure you’re practicing with your heliographs, alright? I know you and Taeyeon hate them, but there’s a reason that we have them. Someday you’re going to be glad that you know how to use them.”

“Undoubtedly.” Ji Young sees his tower rising a few more miles in the distance and picks up his pace to a slow jog. “I’ll see you bright and early at five-thirty tomorrow, okay, hyung?”

“Don’t remind me,” comes Jinwoo’s response. Radio silence descends afterwards, and Ji Young clicks his walkie to his hip again to race up the final slope home.

It’s interesting to Ji Young how his fire tower has assumed that status in his life— home . It’s really nothing more than a wooden crows-nest built on hundred-foot stilts, but it’s comforting. His is the last tower that hasn’t yet been retrofitted to be galvanized metal, but Ji Young sort of likes that it’s made of the same wood that surrounds it. It smells like earth and sky and all of the things that Ji Young loves about being out here.

Underneath the tower is Ji Young’s manual generator to be used in emergencies, and his outhouse-slash-shower room lies a few meters away under the shade of the tower. There’s a pile of wood kindling stacked against the shack and a small stone firepit dug into the ground. Technically, he’s not supposed to have a firepit, but what Jinwoo doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Ji Young trudges up the hundred or so stairs to his loft in the sky and comes trudging right back down a few minutes later with a towel, his soap-on-a-rope, and a spare pair of pajama bottoms in hand. He makes quick work of washing all of the day’s grime away underneath the spray of the water spigot and pats himself dry. He makes a mental note to do his washing tomorrow and hangs his towel out on the clothesline.

Dinner is a pot of freeze-dried pot of spaghetti rehydrated with water and cooked over his small campfire. Sparks fly out in crackles of red-gold, lifting into the air briefly like fireflies before burning out in small bursts of glory. Ji Young watches the flicker of the light and eats his spaghetti in silence, wondering how he managed to end up here.

Here, in the place where he’s safe for the first time in his life. Where he’s surrounded by the quiet of the trees and the companionship of his books. Where nothing in the outside world can really touch him. And though the solitude sometimes gets to him, Ji Young’s long since made his peace with the fact that he’s going to grow old and die alone out here. Even that in and of itself is a small comfort.

He’s not tied to anyone or anything. He doesn’t have to worry about letting someone down or getting hurt again.

And if the worst thing that happens is that Ji Young gets sick of himself, well—there are always ways to deal with that further down the line.

So Ji Young dries his hair off in the warm glow of the fire and gazes up at the constellations overhead, recalling the stories of each in his mind as he contemplates how tiny he is in comparison. Infinitesimally, indescribably small and unimportant when compared to Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Hercules.

Every night, sitting here at his bonfire by himself, Ji Young finds himself falling in love with the forest all over again, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

...🪵...

The peace doesn’t last through the night.

It never does.

For a moment, caught between a nightmare and reality, Ji Young struggles to breathe. Behind his closed eyes, he can feel the press of fingers that weigh him down, holding tight around his throat and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing tight until his head feels all light and fuzzy and he’s not sure which way is up.

Water rushes up his nose and into his ears. Ji Young thrashes below the surface, vision hazy under the linoleum lights that swing in above the water. Someone is screaming in the background, but it isn’t him. It can’t be him, because the moment Ji Young opens up his mouth to shout, water pours in and down his lungs like liquid fire.

It burns, Ji Young remembers thinking as he scrabbles mightily at the grip on his throat, raking his nails across the calloused hands holding him under. It burns. Make it stop.

You can make it stop any time you want, the small, insidious little voice whispers into his ear. You have the power to make it stop. Just take a few deep breaths and this will all be over.

But I don’t want to die, Ji Young thinks desperately, even as he feels the life draining away from his limbs. I don’t want to die here. I’ve barely lived.

The voice in his ear laughs darkly. I don’t think you really have much of a choice, it whispers melancholically, He wants you dead. And what he wants, he gets.

The hands around Ji Young’s throat squeeze tighter. Ji Young thrashes violently once again, giving his last-ditch effort at salvation all of his remaining strength, and—

Falls to the wooden floor.

For a moment, Ji Young just lies there, staring up at the ceiling that spins dizzily above him, trying to get his bearings.

“You’re alright. It was just a nightmare,” Ji Young says out loud, just to prove it to himself. His hands shake as he runs his fingers over his neck. He can still feel the ghost of the hands that pinned him underwater. He can even still feel the water itself.

A quick swipe across his forehead tells Ji Young that it’s not water—he’s just sweat through his clothes. Better than the alternative, he sighs. He lies on the floor a minute longer and scrubs at his eyes, counting on his fingers the days since he managed to sleep through the night. It’s been ten days.

The nightmares always get worse around this time of year.

Ji Young heaves himself up to sitting and nearly has a heart attack when he finds that he can’t move his legs. He looks down. His sheet is tangled around his leg in what appears to be a very intricate sailor’s knot, and Ji Young disentangles himself with hands shaky from panic. Only once he’s lobbed the sheet back onto his wooden bed does the worst of the feeling begin to dispel.

Pushing himself to sit back against the wall, Ji Young wraps his arms around his knees and drops his head. He sits there and breathes deeply through the spinning. He really needs to make an appointment to see Joo Eun. He needs to, but he’d rather not. Because dealing with a few nightmares is better than having to tell someone everything that’s happened to him. It’s better than watching the looks of pity swim over their faces as they understand for the first time just how fragile he is. How pathetic, how weak, how-

“No,” Ji Young says decisively as the negative voice in his head starts to sound a bit too much like the man from his past. “You’re not weak,” he tells himself, using the affirmations Joo Eun told him to try. “You’re strong. You’re safe. You have people who care about you.”

The pull of the downward spiral is relentless, but Ji Young resists with all his might. He won’t let it win this time. He won’t give it the power to make him miserable again. It’s already taken enough from him, and it won’t take tonight as well.

Like he always does to ward off the ghosts of his past, Ji Young lugs himself to his feet and staggers over to his desk by the window. He tugs open his blinds, pulls on his zip-up jacket, and grabs his binoculars. The sky is clear tonight, and Ji Young can see the moon starting to rise in the distance. A look at his clock tells him that it’s just past midnight.

Ji Young settles into his chair and looks out into the night, binoculars held in one hand and his pen in the other, watching for nothing and everything.

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