#ummmm optional sparknotes...?:

He had scared you — enough to have lost most of your snack, you think mournfully, glancing at the ground. It just— He had just appeared beside you — out of nowhere, out of nothing. Like a ghost.

When the man reaches out hesitantly, you think he’s going to pat your hands, for some reason — but he doesn’t touch you at all.

“Here,” he says instead, smiling politely at you, “I caught some of them, at least.”

More than a handful of nuts falls into your palm — certainly more than you’d dropped. Maybe even more than you bought, because it’s difficult to hold them all; your gaze drops from his face back to your hands, pulling your arms in closer, cupping the bounty against the front of your jeogori in an attempt not to spill again.

“Oh no,” he says, quiet and mildly sorrowful, “your clothes will stain.”

It’s — an odd thing to say to a girl obviously not from wealth, objectively speaking. Your head flicks back up, studying him. “These robes aren’t exactly fine silk. They’ll wash.”

And you’ve been alone so long; you haven’t spoken to anyone but your animals and the grandma who lets you steal a corner of her stall to make sales in years — but it’s still inexcusably inappropriate, how casually you speak to him. Immediately, you’re wincing, ducking your head as though anticipating a blow; stupid, stupid, stupid, letting your guard down around a wealthy man—

But the man in question only laughs, like you’d just told the most delightful joke he’d heard all day. “I guess they will,” he agrees, friendly and just as casual — and when you lift your head to peek, he’s grinning. “Still, I’m pretty good at laundry, if you need some tips.”

It’s the first good look you’ve gotten at his face, close and head-on — and he’s stunning; he’s almost too beautiful to look at. His eyes are dark and elegantly shaped, with a strong nose and pink, pouty lips; his jaw is sharp, and his skin is even and pale in a way you didn’t think real people’s could be.

Rich people are really made of different stuff, you think dizzily, blinking at him.

Maybe you’re still dazed by the time you speak, because you don’t correct your speech or tone at all. “You don’t look like you’ve ever done laundry a day in your life.”

“I’ve done a lot in my long life,” he jokes, smile widening. “I’m practically ancient, you know.”

He introduces himself as Chan, and just Chan, though you’re sure he has a family name. He’s surprisingly forthcoming, if in strange ways; he isn’t from this village, he says, but he’s here for work at the moment. He’s not sure how long he’ll be staying, exactly. You ask about some of the things you’d wondered in your long winter alone — if he’s married, if he has a family. “No, no,” he says, waving it off, but there’s a shiftiness to his expression that makes you suspicious. “None of that.”

Chan also insists he’s much, much older than you, though judging by the way he won’t specify, you’re almost certain he’s full of it. He finally tells you, walking you to the village gates, that he’s year of the ox — and you gasp, betrayed.

“I’m year of the dragon!” you say. “We’re only a few years apart!”

But Chan just gives you that distant smile of his — enigmatic, blurry around the corners — and doesn’t comment.

“Well, I should get going before the sun sets,” you say to fill the silence, glancing away from him and towards the winding path that leads up into the hills — to home. “Maybe I’ll see you again?”

There’s a smile in Chan’s voice, but it’s wistful and strained. “I hope not.”

You whip around to look at him — only to find empty air. Even when you scan the horizon, there’s nobody there.

It’s easy enough to find him on your next trip, though — and the one after that, and the one after that. In fact, Chan is always remarkably easy to spot, sticking out like a sore thumb in his formal black robes, all layers intact and unruffled even as spring moves into summer. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the weather didn’t affect him at all; even the wind doesn’t seem to touch him. Your braid whips into your face and your skirts riot against your legs — but by the time you blink your eyes open post-gust, you find Chan there serene and unruffled, gleefully laughing at the leaves caught in your hair.

If he is unmarried as he says — or honestly, even if he isn’t — then it isn’t really appropriate for the two of you to spend so much time together: not in the crowded market, and certainly not when you duck into alleyways to chat, or hike up the hills to watch birds and count clouds. Still, you have no family, and if he’s to be believed, neither does he — and it’s been so long since you’ve had a friend. You’re sure your chickens are tired of hearing you talk by now.

You never do unravel the mystery of him — and in between words and meetings, you do start to wonder. Chan, who is so hard to place, and so pale, who floats through the crowds like they aren’t there, who always dresses in the same formal black robes, who claims to work in the village even though you have never heard a single person but you call his name—

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, flopping down in the grass beside you with a sigh. He’s ditched the hat so as not to crumple the brim; in the light, his skin seems to nearly glow.

You trace his side profile with your eyes, quietly thoughtful. “How is your work going?”

A grimace crosses Chan’s face before he catches and corrects it. “It’s going,” he mumbles, keeping his eyes closed. “I mean, it’s work.”

Like this, your arm is so close to his that you’re nearly touching — and yet you can’t feel a flicker of body heat, not even through your thinnest summer linens, not even with his dark silk baking in the sun.

You hum but don’t say anything, just eyeing the curve of his nose and jut of his lips, memorizing his outline until he opens his eyes and looks at you.

When he turns his head, he’s so close that you should be able to feel his breath. But even when you watch the shaky exhale leave his chest, it doesn’t touch you.

There’s something you’re supposed to say, but you don’t want to say it. Instead, you say, “I hope you can stay for a long time. I’d miss you too much if you left.”

A dark, complicated look flashes across his lovely face. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Shifting onto an elbow, you lean over until you’re nearly on top of him. When your hand cups his cheek, his skin is ice-cold.

“I think I do,” you whisper.

Chan watches you wide-eyed, nearly frightened; another breath comes in his mouth, expanding his ribcage, but it doesn’t move a speck after that. Like he’s holding it in, you think, leaning down, closing your eyes. Or like—

Your back hits the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of you. Chan clamors on top of you, holding your wrists down, and you open your eyes and mouth at once, ready to give him a piece of your mind — and pause.

Chan’s eyes are wild, pupils a narrow pinprick; more than that, they’re cloudy, unnaturally light and pale. Like death, you think, staring; like decay.

“You,” he starts, thin and wheezing, before tossing the words away with a shake of his head. His eyes squeeze shut as he continues to hold you down — but when they open again, seconds or a lifetime later, they’re back to their comforting, familiar dark brown.

“Do you have orange trees at your house?” he asks quietly.

Orange trees? You blink at him, a little affronted by the subject change. “There are a few, yeah,” you say anyway. “Are you craving citrus? I think it’s too late in the season—”

“Just a few?” he murmurs, uncharacteristically interrupting you, his thumb stroking the inside of your wrist where your pulse jumps and sputters. Just as urgently, he shifts both your wrists into one of his hands, too fast for you to pull away, his other hovering loosely over your waist. “Your jangdo— Is it silver?”

Your affronted blinks intensify. “Channie, do I look like I come from people who can afford silver?”

Your jangdo — your knife, that you looted from your mother’s body when she died like some common thief — isn’t even visible over your clothes; how would he have known that you wear it on that side—?

Still, there’s no missing it: his hand stops to hover over your hip, precisely where you can feel the press of skin-warmed metal through your underclothes.

Some of the weight seems to slip off his shoulders when he looks up and grins at you. “It’s silver,” he says knowingly, and then frees your wrist just to pinch your cheek before rolling off of you. When he stretches back into the grass in his original position, hatless and eyes contently closed, he looks as light as you’ve ever seen him. “That’s good, then.”

It’s so baffling you don’t even try to finish kissing him. And he doesn’t treat you any differently either for the short rest of the day, not even when you say goodbye at the gate with your usual exchange.

“See you soon,” you say, waving before turning onto the mountain path.

“I hope not,” he says back, smile audible, gone from view just like always by the time you turn around.

You think about it later, lying awake. Your mother was quite the storyteller, so you’ve heard tales, of course, of jeoseung saja: mindless servants of Yeomna, sent to collect mortals and drag them kicking and screaming into the land of the dead. But you had always felt a certain amount of sadness for them; after all, they were human once, too. Sure, some say the jeoseung saja deserve their afterlife of labor for some crime or misdeed committed while living — but how could anything be worth the weight of forever? To walk among humans and know you’re not one of them? To be able to touch them, like Chan can touch you, without ever being acknowledged? No one in the village knows Chan; no one even notices him. Whenever he walks through a crowd, whenever he plays around or raises his voice, whenever his sleeves smack into bodies and his hat bumps into heads — no one ever turns or notices or laughs or pokes fun. No one but you.

Maybe you should be scared. After all, if you can see a jeoseung saja, if you’ve become close with one, if you’re drawn to one the way you’re drawn to Chan — does that mean your end is near? That you’re close to death, in more ways than one?

There are no answers here, in your isolated little house with no one but your animals for company. Still, you trace your jangdo where it still rests on your hip, bite your lip, and wonder.

In the days before your next journey to town, you get a message from the granddaughter of the friendly woman who lets you use her stall. Don’t come to the village, it says simply, on surprisingly expensive paper; and you don’t think you can remember ever telling her precisely where you lived. Plague.

Your first thought, irrationally, is to worry for Chan. Your next is almost as ridiculous: to worry for him again, but not for fear that he’ll catch his next death, but that he’ll overwork himself. Your third and final worry — the most damning of them all — is that after the plague has run its course, he’ll leave.

It’s unlikely, of course, that it will wipe out the whole village; surely there will still be people to escort to the underworld once it’s over. But then, this town had gone decades without a man in black; who’s to say, really—

You hold out three whole days, out of respect for the young woman who had sent you the warning. On the fourth day, you go down the mountain.

The town gates haven’t even gone into view before a cold hand wrenches a tight hold of your wrist.

“Didn’t you get the message?” Chan asks, his voice appearing before the rest of him, flickering into being like a flame — and it’s as harsh as you’ve ever heard him, stern and unbending as a blade. “This whole village is deathly ill. Go home.”

He throws your wrist aside like it’s nothing. You rub it idly, watching him.

“How did you know about that message?” you ask calmly.

Chan doesn’t quite flinch, but his face hardens in a way similar to a flinch. And you wonder, suddenly, if that nice old woman and her granddaughter are dead. If they’ve been dead for about four whole days.

“It’s not your fault,” you say suddenly, tilting your head to the side. “It’s just sickness. Even animals die of that.”

For the first time since you’ve known him, Chan has a second of looking genuinely, startlingly angry with you. “You shouldn’t speak that way of life.”

“Can’t I?” you ask, head tilting even further. “I’m alive, right?”

Chan studies you like a puzzle, eyes flicking between both of yours like one holds an answer the other doesn’t. But maybe he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, because eventually, he sighs, knocking his hat askew when he pushes an exasperated hand onto his forehead.

Still, there’s a soft vulnerability in his eyes when he next looks at you — like a magpie’s underbelly, like the tender joints of a crab. You could pop him open if you pressed too hard.

“Go home,” he murmurs, hands hovering just under yours like the first time you met, voice beseeching and low. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

In the midday light, Chan is nearly see-through, blending into the forest shadows. His edges are blurry, barely there — but when you focus, it’s so easy to find him: Chan, your friend. Chan, who you know. Chan, who is a harbinger of death — and you don’t even care. It doesn’t even matter.

When he touches you, cupping your hands between his, his skin is so cold. But there’s so much warmth in his voice — uneasy, anxious warmth — when he looks you in the eyes and says, “Please?”

This time, when you go up on tiptoe and press your lips as close to his as you can manage, he doesn’t stop you; he’s still as a statue, completely unhelpful, so that you hit his chin instead of his mouth.

“Okay,” you say, coming back down, watching a flush of blood spread unnaturally under his dead skin. “But come home soon, okay? I’ll stay up for you.”

Chan blinks at you, doe-eyed and wonder-struck. You giggle and turn on your heel.

“See you soon,” you call, lighthearted and singsong, as though the only town you’ve ever known isn’t dying out of eyesight behind your back.

You wait patiently for his response: I hope not. But it never comes — and by the time you turn around to check, Chan is already gone.

That night, instead of sleeping, you creep out in your bedclothes to look for the orange trees. There’s a copse of them after all, out on the hill where your mother is buried; this late into summer, the wildflowers bloom all around them, fireflies flickering messages where they rise from the dead. Barefoot, you duck beneath the foliage, tuck your feet under you, and wait.

There’s no sound or flash of light to signify Chan’s arrival; he just appears between one breath and the next, a stretch of shadow in your mother’s meadow, pale eyes gleaming in the dark. His teeth, too, seem to catch the light when he grins, voice carrying over to you teasing and low. “You found the orange trees.”

There’s a certain tension to his tone of voice that you don’t understand — and you wish, suddenly, that you’d paid attention to more of your mother’s stories of the jeoseung saja, instead of just those of the other, more wild beasts of the mountains.

“Like I told you,” you say, motioning vaguely above you, “it’s too late in the season for fruit.”

Chan laughs, boyish and so full of life it’s startling, nearly wrong. “It doesn’t matter,” he tells you with a lazy grin, drifting closer just to plop down well out of reach. “They’ll protect you from me, anyway.”

Before you can process the words, he flops down on his back, hat and all. Immediately, the fireflies start dancing circles around him like his own personal light show.

“Oh,” you say, “so that’s what they do.”

Then, before Chan can reply — you duck out from under the trees, and fling yourself at him.

A low ‘oof’ leaves Chan’s mouth, though once again, there’s no accompanying gust of breath. “What kind of person doesn’t know that orange trees protect you from things like me?” he gripes even as he gathers you in his arms with a giddy smile, shifting you up and over him until you’re straddling his hips, his arms loose around your waist.

“The ignorant, orphaned kind who lives alone in the mountains,” you deadpan, knocking his big stupid hat off his head and grabbing the front of his robes. “The kind that fell in love with you.”

His eyes go so big you can see yourself in them — you and the meadow and the dancing fireflies, and all his years you’ll never see, because you weren’t even born yet. But you only get to look for so long, because then your eyes are closing, and you’re kissing him.

On the way back to the house a couple hours later, fingers and toes freezing from the damp night air, lips smiling and kiss-bruised, you introduce him to your chickens. He bows at every new name, strangely serious, like he’s just a normal boy trying to make good impressions on your family.

There’s nothing normal about his tone of voice when he lies awake with you, though, fingers running aimlessly through your loose hair. If anything, he sounds more weighed down by all the years you now know he carries than ever when he says, “You’ll die one day, you know.”

Looking up, you squint at him in the dark. “Wow, very romantic. Is this the lip service you give to all the girls?”

But Chan doesn’t even take the opportunity to deny the existence of said girls or even make an innuendo. “I’m serious,” he tells your ceiling, brows furrowed, jaws set. “You’re— Even if the plague doesn’t get you, you’re still…”

His voice trails off, hesitant and small. You blink at him. “Mortal,” you finish on his behalf.

“Yeah,” Chan mumbles, looking away. “That.”

Humming, you lay your head back down on his chest, setting your had over where his heartbeat should be. “Well, we all kind of are, aren’t we? I mean, even you’ll die one day, right?”

“Me?” he asks, eyebrows jolting up. “Baby, I’m dead.”

He’s never said it before, not in so many words — and it sets you laughing, curling in on yourself with the force of it.

“Sure,” you say once you’ve recovered, patting his heartless chest, “but — you know. You’ll get to die again. For good this time. Contract not renewed, employment terminated, laid off—”

“You’re very blasé about this, you know,” Chan murmurs, brushing your cheek with his fingertips. Then, with a bit more humor, “And what do you mean, ‘get to die’? Like it’s a good thing?”

You remember Chan in the village when you’d met him, blurry and alone, how he’d run from you instinctively but how instantly he’d lit up when you spoke to him like a friend. You think of Chan in your meadow, Chan weaving grass into knots and flowers into bracelets, Chan laughing as you’d tried to throw dried fruit into his mouth.

Then you think about Chan earlier today: looming in the woods as a specter of death, faded and miserable. Alone again, until you managed to reach him.

“Of course it’s a good thing,” you say confidently. “If I have to die, then so do you. Those are the rules.”

The corner of Chan’s mouth twitches once, twice — then he laughs, so hard he slams the back of his head on your pillow.

“Okay,” he agrees easily, capturing you in a bear hug, “I’ll make sure to file a petition in your name.”

You’re not sure if he’s kidding or not — is the underworld run through paperwork and petitions? — but it doesn’t matter; the sentiment has already locked into you. You’re sure of it, even if you don’t know why, even if you don’t have a reason. You’re completely sure.

When you wake, Chan is gone — but you find him easily enough, sitting out on the ground with your chickens, talking to them in a ridiculous baby voice that doesn’t really suit a servant of Yeomna. You laugh at him, blatant and delighted. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“There’s time,” he says, grinning back — and you should probably be bothered by the momentary disregard for life between the two of you, but you’re too distracted by the realization that there’s a knife and a vaguely duck-shaped piece of wood in his lap.

He kisses you briefly before he leaves — gone as quick as ever, between one blink and the next. You only linger a moment longer where he left you before you go to your mother’s hill and start the process of uprooting your orange trees.