A random occurrence [2]
The school appeared not as a place of learning, but as a monolith of indifference rising from the pavement, its walls sun-bleached and cracked, its windows reflecting the sky with a sterile glare that made them seem more like blank eyes than glass.
Building 3, the farthest structure, stood squat and rectangular at the edge of the courtyard, concrete stairs curling up toward the second floor like a tongue rolling into a mouth.
Taejun passed through the school gate unnoticed, his steps uneven, head slightly bowed, as though he were trying to hold himself together by sheer will.
Each footfall sounded too loud in his ears, the clack of rubber soles echoing against the stone like a countdown.
Children ran past him, their voices shrill and bright, echoing off the courtyard walls in bubbles of laughter that popped too quickly to feel real.
A boy in a red jacket tripped and got up smiling.
A girl skipped in uneven circles while humming something unrecognizable.
They were loud, alive, and oblivious.
Their innocence hung in the air like soap suds, thin and luminous, floating up past the second-floor windows toward a sky that still burned with late-morning heat.
No one noticed the blood that had caked around the grooves in Taejun's shoes.
No one smelled the copper that still clung to his palms, faint but persistent, embedded in the skin despite his attempts to scrub it away at a public fountain.
He climbed the stairs slowly, each step an effort, the concrete warm beneath his feet and littered with dry leaves that scraped softly as he passed.
The upper floor corridor was dimmer, shaded from the sun, but the air didn't feel cooler.
It was thicker here, maybe heavier.
The hallway smelled faintly of mildew and stale pencil shavings, and the lights overhead flickered with a mechanical hum like dying insects trapped in plastic.
Rows of children's shoes lined the lockers along the wall, colorful and mismatched, each pair neatly placed as if awaiting their little owners to reclaim them.
Some shoes had cartoon stickers, others bore names written in trembling marker— bright colors, cheerful fonts, but something about the orderliness made the hairs on Taejun's neck rise.
Classroom 1-2 sat at the far end of the hall.
Its door, heavy and painted in flaking beige, hung ajar with a gentle creak that whispered each time the breeze touched it.
The glass window inset into the upper half was smudged with fingerprints, and behind it, shapes moved— shadows of children crossing the room, bent heads, swinging backpacks.
Laughter drifted through the crack in the doorway, muffled but persistent.
Taejun paused, hand hovering near the frame, heart throbbing slowly and thick in his chest.
The polished floor beneath his feet seemed to waver slightly, like a reflection on disturbed water.
He swallowed hard.
Something in him, deep and buried, whispered not to go in.
Not yet.
As if the door were a mouth waiting to close behind him.
He stepped through anyway.
The classroom greeted him with its usual clutter: low desks clustered into groups, plastic drawers bulging with worn-out crayons and bent rulers, posters peeling from the walls with slogans about kindness and responsibility, their edges curled into yellowing spirals.
The windows were open, but the air inside felt stale, as if it had been trapped for years.
At the far corner, Ms. Jang stood adjusting the television cart, her stiff smile stretched thin as she greeted the arriving students one by one with the same hollow cadence, the same overly measured warmth.
She didn't look at Taejun directly.
Her eyes passed over him like someone flipping through a page they'd already read too many times.
He sat at his desk, second row from the back, beside the wall where the sun painted striped shadows through the blinds.
The surface was covered in tiny pencil scratches, some deliberate, some wild, like the silent voices of every child who had ever sat there had been etched into the wood with desperate fingers.
The seat creaked under his weight, a quiet groan that faded too quickly, and he placed his backpack down with exaggerated care, not trusting his hands to do anything naturally.
His gaze wandered across the classroom, but nothing anchored him.
Children laughed, chattered, exchanged morning snacks and stickers and secrets.
Someone was chewing gum despite the rules.
A girl in pigtails tapped a rhythm against her chair with her fingers.
A boy near the window stared up at the clouds, blinking slowly, mouthing the shape of a thought he hadn't spoken aloud.
It all felt so far away, unreal, like a distant echo of life.
But the smell of blood still clung to him, worming its way into the fibers of his uniform, hidden beneath the scent of laundry soap and pencil shavings.
No one else noticed, not even the teacher, not the other children.
No one seemed to sense that he had walked through the soft remains of someone who had once laughed, once loved, once stood on her own two feet.
No one noticed that his hands trembled when he opened his pencil case, or that his eyes didn't track the board as Ms. Jang began her morning instructions.
He could still hear the flies.
Not buzzing, but crawling.
Their tiny feet skittering across open flesh.
The memory had followed him inside.
It hadn't stayed on the pavement, instead, it had latched to his back like a shadow, sticky and wet, and now it coiled itself in the corners of the classroom like something waiting to be seen.
He didn't know if it would ever leave.
Maybe it had always been here, hiding in the chalk dust and behind the colorful paper chains.
Maybe it had just been waiting for someone like him to recognize it.
She turned from the television cart, her movements smooth, rehearsed, like someone pretending to be human after watching hours of instructional footage.
Her smile stretched just a little too wide, eyes crinkling at the corners but remaining dry, glinting like varnished shells.
"Good morning, class," she said, her voice syrupy and low, carefully modulated, as though trying to keep something from leaking through the cracks.
The students chorused back their greeting with the hollow enthusiasm of routine, and Taejun forced his lips to part, mouthing the words silently.
Ms. Jang's gaze passed over them all, slow and cataloging, until it landed on him.
And then it stopped.
Not in a way that others would notice.
Her smile didn't waver, her posture didn't change, but her eyes settled on him like a hook sinking into flesh.
She moved to the front of the room, the click of her heels sharp and deliberate against the tile.
"Let's begin," she said, and began writing on the board with a long, slow stroke of white chalk.
The letters were too large, the words oddly spaced. Her handwriting was pristine, unnatural—like it had been etched into her bones rather than learned. Taejun stared as she wrote the day's schedule, and with each pass of the chalk, he noticed something wrong: the letters didn't line up. They slanted downward, curling toward the floor, almost as if dragged. Not one student noticed. A boy nearby sneezed into his sleeve. A girl asked for a tissue. Everything went on.
But Taejun kept staring.
The chalk squeaked, and when Ms. Jang turned back around, there was a thin smudge of dust across her cheek.
Only it wasn't chalk— it was red, faint, but unmistakably red, as if she'd dragged the side of her face against something wet, something iron-rich.
Her smile deepened as she picked up a folder and leafed through it with slow fingers, each nail clicking softly against the paper like insect legs.
She held it open, and for a moment— no more than a blink— Taejun swore the pages weren't filled with lesson plans or student charts, but photographs.
Something grainy, dark, framed by asphalt, something hunched and red.
He blinked again. The paper was clean.
"Taejun," she said suddenly, lifting her head without warning, and his name twisted in her mouth like she wasn't used to saying it. "Come here. Help me solve this problem, would you?"
He froze.
All heads turned toward him, but the room felt quieter than before— too quiet.
The whispering stopped, the shuffling of feet paused, even the humming of the light above him seemed to drop out of pitch.
Taejun stood, legs stiff, heart hammering painfully behind his ribs, each beat pressing into his throat.
As he walked to the front, the air grew warmer, as if the floor beneath him were heating with each step.
He could feel eyes on his back, not the kids, but something slower, rotting behind the drywall.
Ms. Jang handed him a pointer stick, her fingers brushing his hand.
They were cold, but it's not sweat, colder than sweat, more like condensation on the inside of something sealed too long.
She gestured toward the board.
"Point to the sentence, dear," she whispered, so close her breath slid against his ear like the underside of a slug. "Let's see if you can find the mistake."
He lifted the stick with shaking fingers and scanned the sentence.
There it was, an obvious grammar error, but the longer he stared, the more the letters began to crawl, sliding over one another, bleeding at the edges like ink soaking into meat.
The period at the end pulsed once, then split open, leaking something dark that trailed downward in slow, greasy lines.
No one else reacted.
Behind him, the students were watching, their faces slack.
The girl with pigtails was scratching her cheek so hard her nails had drawn blood.
It dripped down her neck unnoticed.
The boy with the gum had stopped chewing, his mouth hanging open, stringy saliva stretching from tooth to tooth.
They stared ahead, unmoving, eyes slightly too wide.
"Go on," Ms. Jang murmured. Her voice had thinned, hollowed. "You see it, don't you?"
He pointed, but not to the sentence.
His hand, almost of its own accord, shifted and aimed downward, toward the floor beneath the board.
There, just beneath the trim, was a sliver of something black.
A crack no wider than a pinky, but it pulsed faintly, and from it, something breathed.
A presence, rising from the unseen place behind the wall, like something buried.
Ms. Jang knelt beside him slowly, her knees creaking as she lowered herself to the floor.
Her smile never broke.
"Good boy," she whispered, tilting her head so her face was level with his.
Her eyes were wrong up close— there was too much white around the iris, and her pupils had thinned to vertical slits.
"You're the first one to see it."
She lifted her hand, reached toward the crack, and dug her fingernails in.
The wall groaned. The paint peeled back.
Blood— real blood, fresh and red and sticky, began to seep from the crack, soaking her fingers as she scraped.
Her nails bent, split.
One tore off completely with a wet snap and clattered to the floor beside her shoe, but she didn't flinch.
She kept tearing at the drywall, fingers working like an animal burrowing into meat.
Blood smeared the floor, dark and warm, trailing toward Taejun's shoes.
He couldn't move. He couldn't scream.
Behind him, the children began humming a low, broken song, off-key, repetitive, like a lullaby for something that had never known sleep.
She turned toward him again, face spattered, eyes wide, voice soft and giddy with reverence.
"Do you want to see what's inside, Taejun?"
He blinked. Once. Twice.
Ms. Jang was standing at the front again, her hands clean, her voice calm as she asked a math question to the class.
The board was dry.
No crack, no blood, no stench of rusted metal and heat-choked rot clinging to his nose like a wet rag.
The floor where she had gouged the wall was whole, untouched.
The girl with pigtails was drawing flowers on the corner of her workbook.
The boy with gum had gone back to chewing, idly scratching his chin.
No one had seen it.
No one had heard that low, animal-tearing sound, like ligaments snapping underwater.
No one had felt the thick smear of blood snaking across the tiles toward their shoes.
No one had heard the song.
Taejun sat in his chair again, though he didn't remember sitting.
His breath came shallow, caught beneath his ribs, and his palms left sweat-prints on the desk.
His fingers trembled.
His knees tapped beneath the surface like distant drums.
And the pointer stick was gone, or maybe he never held it.
Maybe none of that happened.
Maybe—
Maybe it was the corpse.
The thought gripped him like an answer flung at a drowning man.
Yes.
Yes, that was it.
The body. The blood. That twitching, half-swallowed scream the killer made before he vanished.
His mind had cracked, like glass touched by boiling water.
It had to be.
Trauma did that. He'd heard the word in shows, in school lessons— trauma.
People saw things, weird things.
The brain's short-circuited under pressure invents images as a defense mechanism.
Maybe it hadn't been her nail that tore off.
Maybe there hadn't been humming.
But something still itched beneath his skin, just behind his ears, like water stuck inside, pressing, swelling, refusing to drain.
He could feel it: the way her voice had softened into reverence, the way she'd leaned in as if sharing a secret with someone long dead.
The way she'd whispered, "You're the first one to see it."
Why would his brain invent that?
He didn't know.
He just wanted the clock to move, to tick faster.
But when he looked, it hadn't budged.
The same minute as before. 10:16.
The same bent second-hand shivering in place like it was afraid to advance.
The ticking had stopped.
He turned to ask the boy next to him if he'd noticed, but the boy was staring straight ahead, his pencil still in his hand, mid-air, unmoving. Like someone had paused him.
Taejun flinched and looked away, heart lurching.
It's just you, he thought.
It's just your brain. This is normal.
You're fine.
You're fine.
You're fine.
But Ms. Jang was still smiling, writing more words again, except with her back turned.
Her shoulder blades moved oddly beneath her blouse, as if there were something under the skin, stretching, coiling, pushing for space.
One movement too many. One twitch is too fluid, like her bones were adjusting. Like her shape didn't want to stay human anymore.
He shut his eyes.
And when he opened them, she was walking down the aisle, passing out worksheets.
Her perfume was faint, floral, and synthetic, but under it, something sharp clung to the air.
A sterile, chemical tang like a hospital mask just before a surgical saw begins to hum.
She passed his desk. Their eyes met.
And though her smile was the same, bright, composed, and effortless, Taejun swore he saw the faintest smear of something dark beneath her fingernails. N
His stomach lurched.
He looked down at his worksheet.
The letters blurred, the numbers floated.
It's just a trauma, he whispered in his head, over and over. It's just a trauma.
But from the front of the room, Ms. Jang's voice floated back— soft, sweet, and as smooth as a finger tracing a wound.
"Eyes on your paper, Taejun."