I was sitting in the very back of a rattling intercity bus, staring out the window at nothing in particular.
The small company I'd worked for had shut down a few months ago. I'd seen it coming, but the company couldn't keep up with a market that changed every year, and eventually it just collapsed.
I didn't have any special skills — just a high school diploma — and I'd been genuinely grateful every day to be driving a truck for some run-down regional outfit. But after the company went under, I scraped by jumping between part-time jobs, and even that got harder and harder to manage.
I was worried about basic survival. My entire net worth was the security deposit on my studio apartment — five hundred thousand won — and I'd already burned through half of it on back rent.
I kept sending out résumés everywhere, desperate, but nobody was calling back a guy with no skills, no track record, and only a high school diploma.
Hope was running out. Life was edging toward a cliff. It had been hard to hold on.
Then last night, I got a text from Grandpa. We hadn't been in contact for years.
I'd lived with Grandpa growing up, after my parents died when I was young.
Grandpa was deaf and mute.
He ran a repair shop in a small town in Gangwon Province. Calling it a repair shop was generous — it was more like a fix-anything shack. He handled old cars, farm tractors, all kinds of small machinery.
Since he couldn't speak, he'd communicate prices and timelines with hand gestures, or write things on a chalkboard.
After I got older, I learned sign language and started interpreting for him, helping out at the shop. I lived with Grandpa until I was twenty.
I was exempt from military service, so around that age I started sending out applications to small companies in the area. One of them got back to me. The pay wasn't great, but it was something.
Taking the job meant moving about three hours away. I packed up what little I had and said goodbye to Grandpa.
The last thing I remember is holding his hand and promising to visit for Chuseok.
Not long after I left, a text came in.
*don't bother coming for chuseok. grandpa's going to finally take that trip he never got around to. eat well and take care of yourself.*
I tried calling, but of course he couldn't talk on the phone. I kept texting him. No reply ever came.
Worried, I went back to the house one weekend. He wasn't there. The place was neat and tidy, everything put away.
I asked around — neighbors, people from the town center who knew him. Nobody had any idea where he'd gone.
Just like that, with a single text, the only family I had vanished.
I felt hurt. Resentful. Angry. But as time passed, those feelings faded.
It wasn't that I forgot him. I still wondered about him sometimes. Worried. Got annoyed all over again. Missed him badly. Whenever that happened, I'd send a text. No reply, ever.
Eventually even those occasional texts tapered off, and Grandpa slowly drifted to the edges of my life.
That was about ten years ago.
So when that text came in last night, it hit me like a shock of cold water.
*come home tomorrow. don't skip this.*
That's why I'm on this bus for the first time in years. Outside the window, the scenery is starting to look familiar.
When I stepped off the bus at the town center terminal, the smell of the place hit me all at once — something I hadn't realized I'd forgotten.
And with that smell came a slow leak of memories, feelings I hadn't touched in years.
The people in town never really liked Grandpa.
He couldn't speak, and on top of that he was stone-faced, sometimes downright difficult. People used to say if he could talk, he'd be even harder to deal with.
But his repair shop never ran out of customers. His work was meticulous, and his prices were almost unreasonably low.
I went to elementary and middle school here. For high school, I took a bus about thirty minutes out.
I didn't have many friends as a kid, and the few I did have all left for jobs in bigger cities. There was nobody close to me left in this town.
Grandpa's house was a solid hour's walk from here.
I thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't one in sight, and my wallet couldn't really afford it anyway. So I started walking.
Along the way, I passed the spot where Grandpa's repair shop used to be. The building was gone. A convenience store stood in its place.
I stopped in, bought a Coke, and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. The intercity bus had been rough, and the motion sickness still hadn't fully cleared.
Looking around, almost none of the nearby shops looked the way I remembered them.
I'd half-hoped to spot a familiar face or two, but the streets were nearly empty.
"Jinwoo? Is that you?"
Someone came out of the convenience store and called over to me.
I turned around. It was the clerk who'd just rung me up. Did I know him?
"Yeah, that's me. Who are you?"
He gave a tired laugh and stuck out his hand.
"You don't remember me. I'm Taehyung — same class, sixth grade."
"Oh…"
It was hazy, but something faintly clicked. We hadn't been close. I was a quiet kid, and from what I could recall, so was he. He'd grown up here, same as me. We'd barely talked. There wasn't much to remember.
"Sorry, it's been so long. I didn't recognize you."
"Ha, it's fine. I wasn't sure it was you either when you came in to pay."
An awkward silence settled in. I felt a little bad about not remembering him, but I also didn't have much to say.
"So what brings you back? Didn't you move away for a job?"
I hesitated for a second. It would take a while to explain, but there was nothing to hide.
"Got a message from my grandpa."
"Your grandpa? Oh — the guy who ran the repair shop? He's still around here?"
Right then, a small group of customers came into the store, and Taehyung moved quickly toward the entrance.
"Come by again sometime."
Before I could answer, he was gone. I picked up my drink and headed out.
I checked my phone. Just past five. If I took too long, I'd be walking a dark country road. I picked up my pace toward the house where Grandpa and I used to live.
I turned off the main road onto a rural lane. It used to be unpaved — now it was asphalt. Streetlights appeared here and there, but there were fewer houses than I remembered. The ones I did see didn't look lived in.
The sun dropped behind the hills. The world was turning slowly red with the last of the light when I spotted the house in the distance. Our house. The place I'd lived in since before I even started elementary school.
Maybe because of the shock of losing them — I had almost no memories of my parents. I'd grown up in that small country house with Grandpa, the two of us living very quietly. He couldn't hear or speak.
Even so, I used to talk to him all the time. When he was looking at my face, he seemed to catch the general meaning of what I was saying.
In sixth grade, a volunteer came to the area and taught me sign language. It was clumsy at first, but it was enough to get by with Grandpa.
As I got older, I became his voice and his ears.
Lost in those old thoughts, I reached the front gate. It was slightly open.
I stepped into the yard. There was no sign that anyone had been here recently. It looked about the same as when I'd visited ten years ago — and the house itself had aged badly, like it might give out any day.
*Did I misread the text?*
I pulled out my phone and checked again. Sent yesterday. Could it be some carrier glitch — a ten-year-old message finally arriving?
I walked over to the wooden platform in the yard and ran my hand across it. The wood was rotting, and the grime that had built up over the years felt thick and sticky against my palm.
I tore off a piece of a cardboard box lying nearby, laid it on the ground, and sat down. My legs ached from the walk.
It was getting dark, and it was too late to head back to the town center. Even if I did, there was no evening bus home. The return bus didn't run until tomorrow morning.
I was stuck here for the night.
I checked the sliding front door. A combination lock — still locked. The same way I'd left it. It had been locked when I came ten years ago too. Only Grandpa and I knew the code.
I entered the combination and clicked the lock open. The door groaned and shrieked as it scraped open, sending up a cloud of dust and cobwebs.
I stepped into the dark interior. I flipped the light switch out of habit. Nothing, of course.
I turned on my phone's flashlight.
The living room was exactly as I remembered it, just buried under a layer of dust. Memories started to stir in the corners of that dim space, but I pushed them back.
Right now, there was only one thing on my mind.
Why had Grandpa texted me after ten years?
Why did he want me here today, specifically?
I looked into Grandpa's room and my old room. Nothing had changed. The house was empty. The only things in it were half-remembered fragments of the past and me, standing there completely confused.
There was no sign anywhere that Grandpa had been here recently.
I really couldn't figure it out.
It was too dark inside, so I went back out. Next to the house was a large workshop. Grandpa's workspace. The metal door was padlocked shut.
Grandpa had never liked me going in there. Honestly, I'd never been that curious. Inside was an old mid-size bus he'd been working on forever, plus every kind of repair tool imaginable. He was always tinkering with that bus, even though it hadn't moved in years. Parts were nearly impossible to find. It had always seemed like a lost cause.
Whether at the shop in town or at home, Grandpa always had something he was fixing. And since he couldn't talk, we never really had long conversations. Even living together, I'd often felt alone. We communicated only when we had to.
The day I left for the city, Grandpa just waved. I didn't feel much either. I'd figured I'd stop by on holidays, but honestly, I hadn't really wanted to come back even then.
I stood in front of the workshop. Locked from the outside — no one could be inside. I knocked anyway. Nothing.
"Hah…"
The thought of spending the night here was bleak. No water, no electricity, and the air had that early-autumn chill to it.
I shouldn't have come. I can barely afford bus fare right now.
A wave of irritation rose up in me.
Grandpa wasn't the type to play games. So why had he called me out to this empty house today?
Did he have money stashed somewhere? Was he trying to help me out? There wasn't exactly a lot of hiding space in this place.
On a whim, I tried the workshop padlock with the same combination I used for the house. I'd gotten curious about what was inside.
I'd never known the workshop combination — Grandpa had never told me. I figured it wouldn't open. I was just trying it without thinking.
Click.
The lock came open. It hadn't opened when I came ten years ago. Had Grandpa been here sometime in between and changed it?
A small knot of tension formed in my chest as I pulled the workshop door open.
The first thing I saw was the front of the bus. The one I remembered.
But the inside of the workshop looked nothing like I remembered. Especially the bus itself — it was completely different. Like the work was finished.
I thought back to the times I'd glanced inside while passing by as a kid. The workshop had always been a mess. Parts scattered across the floor, the side of the bus torn open mid-repair.
But the bus in front of me now — worn, yes, but clean. The workspace was cleared out. It looked like a used car waiting to be picked up.
And then it happened.
The darkness shattered.
The world outside turned blindingly bright.
I stumbled out of the workshop and looked up at the sky.
Hundreds of massive fireballs were falling from above.
It looked like the end of the world.
These weren't small meteors. Even the ones falling far in the distance looked enormous. So large that distance itself stopped making sense.
One of them was heading toward me. A terrifying roar began to build.
I couldn't move. What I was seeing didn't feel real.
*Is this a dream?*
I stood there, frozen, staring, while the sky grew brighter and brighter — almost like daylight. I couldn't think. I had no frame of reference for this. And I wasn't sure it mattered what I did. If something like that came down on you, where would you even run?
Then the bus horn blasted — loud, insistent, from inside the workshop.
I spun toward it. The headlights were flashing on and off, like someone inside was hitting the high beams over and over. Then the side door swung open.
Behind me, the roar was getting closer. The light was getting unbearable.
There was only one thing left to do.
I ran for the bus.