Even before the long, tedious winter could completely end, the weather suddenly turned warm. Neighborhood children babbled as they rode their bicycles. Lying in bed, Cheong listened closely to the sounds of the children playing. When the dog across the street barked, the neighbor's dog whimpered along. Adults shouted at the kids not to go near the road.
Cheong remembered when her daughter first learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. Terrified that the child might fall and get hurt, she had run behind, holding onto the back of the bike, letting go for a brief second, and catching it again, over and over. The child learned to ride alone in no time.
"Mom, look at me! I’m good, right? I can ride all by myself now without you holding on!" the child had shouted with joy.
How wonderful those days had been! Cheong let out a long sigh.
The woman upstairs shouted out her window, joining the chorus of neighbor women outside. Suddenly, the music volume soared. The creaking of the old apartment’s wooden floors echoed through Cheong’s ceiling, as if someone were dancing upstairs. Soon after, a loud slam of a closing door shook the entire building. To Cheong, it all sounded like the warm, comforting noise of people living their lives.
Despite the commotion around her, she felt happy just lying under a roof that protected her. It was heartbreaking that she couldn’t live with her daughter, but at least her kind husband, Jo, was there to protect her. Listening to the clinking sounds of Jo preparing breakfast, she buried her face deep into her pillow, breathing in his scent. Jo tiptoed in quietly, placed a cup of coffee by her bedside, and slipped out, gently closing the door behind him.
‘This Christmas, will I be able to see my daughter’s bright face as she lights up the tree and unwraps her presents?’
Lin, who lived right above Cheong, placed perfectly crisped bacon on the table next to the oven. Waving her spatula out the window—the same spatula she had been using to flip hash browns made from grated potatoes—she screamed, "Shut up! Keep it down out there, or I'm calling the cops!"
The neighbor, a heavy woman sitting in the open front seat of a car that sagged to one side under her weight, threw her lit cigarette toward Lin’s window. She screamed back through a wide mouth missing most of its front teeth, looking like a dark cave. "You shut up! Call them if you want!"
Lin turned up Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal to full volume. Matching the gunshot sound effects in the song, she pointed her spatula at the woman, mimicking a machine gun: ta-ta-ta. She grabbed a hat hanging near the apartment entrance and plopped it on her head. Waving the spatula with her right hand to the beat and adjusting her hat with her left, she dragged her feet, trying to moonwalk. The scraping sound of her shoes against the vinyl floor was drowned out by the roaring music.
"Mom, turn off the music. Please, just be quiet," her child pleaded.
"Get up and eat breakfast. Mom made hash browns."
"Mom, I smell burning."
"Oh my goodness! The hash browns are burnt! We need to move out of here. Because of those people outside, I ruined three of them!"
"Why is it so noisy so early in the morning? Can’t you lower the volume?" her husband, Charlie, grumbled as he woke up and peered into the kitchen with an annoyed face.
"I mean, how do those people raise their kids? Adults and kids alike, babbling on the street all day long. I just wanted us to have a quiet, cozy breakfast for once."
Disgusted, Charlie slammed the door and went outside. Lin lowered the music, moonwalked backward toward the oven, and kept dancing, waving her spatula. "Michael Jackson is a genius. A total genius."
Friends who saw Lin always smiling would ask, "Why are you always grinning like that? Did you win the lottery or something?"
"Lottery, my foot. Would I be angry if I actually got money? What's the point of being stressed and angry? It's bad for your health. You’re supposed to enjoy life before you go. My dad was always grinning and happy too, like he won the lottery every day. It must be genetic."
On her way downstairs to go out, Lin ran into Cheong, who lived on the floor below. It felt like Cheong had moved in quite a while ago, but Lin had never actually seen her.
"Hello! My name is Lin. You must be new here?"
"Yes. I’m Cheong. Nice to meet you," Cheong replied shyly.
With her small, dark face and wide, melancholic eyes opened even wider in greeting, Cheong wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she carried a unique aura. Looking as if she had somewhere urgent to be, Cheong pushed open the heavy building door and quietly left.
There was never any sign of life coming from Cheong’s apartment. She would slip out of the building silently in the early morning and return around four in the afternoon like a cat, quietly walking up the stairs holding groceries.
One day, while Lin was on her way to buy groceries for dinner, she ran into Cheong coming home from work. Cheong approached her with a bright smile and wrapped Lin in a tight hug. Lin was deeply touched by this unexpected warmth.
‘Ah, this woman likes me too! Well, most people around me love me anyway, but to think such a sweet, quiet woman already recognized what a great person I am!’
Lin pictured Cheong’s gentle nature and grew curious to know more about her. However, running into her was a rare occurrence.
One day around the time Cheong usually came home, Lin went outside to gossip with the neighborhood women while keeping an eye out for her. Spotting Cheong in the distance, Lin held the door open for her, ready to launch into a long, friendly chat. But Cheong rushed up the stairs without even saying thank you.
‘Oh, why did she do that? Did I disappoint her by talking too much? Right, I do yell at the kids and the neighbors. I should be careful.’ Lin tried to live more quietly, catching herself whenever she was about to shout out of habit, but it wasn't easy.
On some days, Cheong would walk up with a warm, joyful greeting; on other days, she would suddenly pass by as if they were total strangers. Lin was thoroughly confused. Eventually, whenever she saw Cheong coming from afar, Lin had to quickly read her mood just to decide whether to say hello or not. Otherwise, it would ruin her entire day.
On a day when the first snow fell softly over the piled-up red leaves, a sound like a wailing horse shook the entire building. It was a woman’s hoarse, raspy voice. The scream was coming from Cheong’s apartment.
Lin stopped what she was doing. Thinking that Jo and Cheong were fighting and that Cheong was being beaten, she picked up the phone to call the police. She cracked her apartment door open and listened closely. Jo’s voice was completely absent.
Suddenly, the screaming stopped. The building fell dead silent, as if the screaming had never happened. Lin doubted her own ears. ‘Sweet, quiet Cheong couldn't have done that. Did I mishear it?’
“I have to be careful in this apartment. If I scream again, Jo might leave me too. I must go to therapy faithfully and never skip my medicine,” Cheong muttered to herself like a mantra.
Before moving here, she had screamed in her previous apartment. A neighbor, unable to take it anymore, had called the police, and Cheong had ended up in a psychiatric ward. Jo had been evicted, and he managed to find this current apartment while waiting for Cheong to be discharged. Of course, the same thing had happened in the apartment before that. She had drifted in and out of hospitals, and a court order ruled she was unfit to raise her daughter, who was then sent to live with Jo’s parents.
Just as the memory of her screaming began to fade, the wailing started again. Lin stopped what she was doing and stood frozen, listening. It was an unrecognizable howling that vibrated through the building, impossible to understand. The sound seemed to stop, then erupted again. Then, as if nothing had happened, it abruptly went silent.
It would happen again every month, or sometimes as early as every two weeks. Once the noise stopped, the building became so quiet that the only sound was the purring of the old heating pipes. Whenever Cheong started screaming, the people in the building held their breath and waited for it to end. Sometimes, they hoped someone else would call the police, but no one ever took action. ‘The time has come. It’s starting again,’ they thought, accepting it as part of the building’s routine.
‘I’ve controlled it so well, so why is it so agonizing and difficult lately?’
Cheong pulled out a blue soundproofing pad from deep inside her moving boxes—one she had used in her old apartment. She placed it in the gap between the inside and outside of her door. ‘Why did I scream!’ Cheong’s face burned with shame, and her chest tightened. She wanted to find a hole to crawl into and hide. She couldn’t lift her head to walk in and out of the building. How many times had she been evicted because tenants complained about her screaming? She wanted to live in this building for a long time. She had held it in for so long, but her pent-up rage had suddenly exploded... Would she be thrown out again?
"Why was I born like this?" she muttered, blaming her father.
Cheong’s father was a tall man with warm, gentle eyes. He had a good impression, and people who met him for the first time loved and followed him. In the spring and summer, her father would roam around without sleeping a wink. He bought clothes, met people, and started random businesses. But when winter came, he locked himself inside like a bear, doing nothing but eating. His body bloated, just like a hibernating bear.
He had met Cheong's mother on a beautiful day when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom—the peak of his energetic, manic phase. Her mother married him just five months later, already pregnant with Cheong, because this tall, handsome man had pursued her relentlessly.
Once Cheong was born, her father’s symptoms grew worse. He lost the job he had barely managed to keep. Her mother, who had been a girl full of dreams, began showing signs of depression from dealing with her husband’s bipolar disorder and their financial struggles. Unable to endure it, Cheong ran away from home the moment she graduated from high school.
Lin, who had grown up showered with love by a gentle father and had never seen her parents fight, would talk and laugh boisterously. Yet, whenever she closed her apartment door and walked past Cheong’s unit, she found herself unconsciously tiptoeing past as fast as she could.
Lin's eyes always drifted to the floor. The long blue pad sticking out from under the door looked like a slumped, lifeless body. It looked exactly like Cheong—shrunken, breathless, and hiding from the eyes of the neighbors after a screaming episode.
Every time she saw that pad, Cheong’s gloomy image flashed through her mind, making it uncomfortable to run into her. Even when Lin was about to head out, if she heard Cheong’s footsteps coming down the stairs, she would open her window and wait until Cheong vanished from sight before leaving.
Cheong’s once-thin body gradually bloated. Piling more and more clothes on top of her weight, she began to look like an angry bear. She walked with a yellow winter hat pulled down low over her head, wearing a black cap over it, a backpack slung on her back, muttering to the ground. With each passing day, she layered on more clothes, and the backpack on her spine grew more swollen.
On the rare occasions someone brushed past Cheong, they could hear her wheezing and feel a radiating heat. Her condition was clearly worsening. Running into Cheong’s husband, who always looked terribly apologetic, became equally uncomfortable.
Cheong quietly closed her door and hurried out into the early morning street. She didn't want to face anyone. Looking at Cheong, who had screamed again the night before, her husband had sat staring at the wall in total silence, like a man who had finally lost his grip on a balloon string he had fought so hard to hold.
‘I just want to go somewhere far away and die. Why am I so short of breath today, and why are my legs so heavy?’
She reached the shipping company where she worked, which occupied almost an entire block. She had arrived too early. She walked around the block and ended up back in front of the company door.
"It's still too early. I want to die," Cheong muttered. Deep in agony, her eyes glued to the ground, she took a step to circle the block one more time.
At that exact moment, a loud thud echoed. Cheong floated lightly into the air before crashing heavily back down. Then, like a discarded soundproofing pad, she lay sprawled out, completely silent.
When news reached Lin that Cheong had been struck and killed by a truck belonging to her own shipping company, Lin froze, staring down at her floorboards. She couldn't believe she would never hear any sound coming from that lower floor again.
Hearing the news, the people in the building fell silent, as if they simply thought Cheong had stopped screaming for a moment. The building remained hushed, as if waiting for her to cry out just one more time.
Not a single person opened their door to look outside.
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