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The sky yawns, blue between the cracks, and coats every headstone in the cemetery with evening sun. Six feet under, the dead linger, ashen, or symbolic, or embodied in any form. They are there in their own right, and this is something that Hyun “Hyunhee” Seunghee refuses to forget.
She creaks forwards and back in the home’s rocking chair, the natural rhythm of a slow moment on the porch. She is alive. She is employed. She is adored by all who’ve ever known her, and there is beauty everywhere she looks.
And yet—there’s that awful curse that hits her when the sun sets. Hyunhee rocks in her chair, and rocks, and rocks, and there, with nowhere better to be when the evening turns, and the junebugs get so bold as to start crawling right across her bare feet, Hyunhee writhes inside the feeling that she never should have been born.
In fairness, she can’t say a summer working onsite is really so bad. She’s saving on rent, and she’s distinguishing her resume. A real chance to stand apart from your peers, the old groundskeeper insisted. That’s before the mental health crisis that sent him laying down in cornfields in the dead of the winter. And opened up the position in time so that Hyunhee could apply.
Per her perfect polished optimism, nothing ever sounds so bad until she’s already there, with boots on the ground, making the most of things all over again.
Energy vitamin, Happy pill… this is who she was before the diner went under, back when she was every regular’s favorite waitress, every coworker’s favorite person to call on for a favor. Hyunhee has always been a friend who shows up, a nonjudgmental ear, a real pleasure to work with…
…so now, all the way out here, languishing at night and tending to a country cemetery by day, none of Hyunhee’s skills can help her now.
At the very least, her daily tasks don’t bother her. Weeding with both hands keeps her busy. Taking her brushes and solutions to the headstones only feels blasphemous the first few times until her fingers gain the memory. The first time she pulls the process off unsupervised, she feels good about herself in a way that’s new to her, a warm glow of accomplishment and a rawness in her fingertips from more than just the chemicals.
Someone owes it to the dead. Hyunhee really believes that. And with a home to herself, acres and acres of tawny prairie and a sky so swollen and vast that it chokes her, she finds enough meaning in her work to keep at it, one tomorrow at a time.
And then… there’s the mourners. Usually well-meaning. But so wide-open in grief some days, that Hyunhee, who already barely knows what to do with herself without a hand to hold or a voice other than her own to vent to, nearly sinks into the mud to hold it together after each encounter.
(At the grave of Sumitta Duangkaew, 1996 - 2023: a woman with hair like a burning sky. Her hands roll over and over themselves, and only stop when she reaches into her purse for a handkerchief to dab her eyes. “No one ever knows when it’s their last chance to say, ‘I love you.’”)
(At the grave of Kim Doyeon, 1999 - 2024: a woman(?) with green sideburns, fresh-dipped in their intensity. “I wasn’t brave enough when she was here,” she(?)/they(?) searches the clouds for any resolution. “I can only hope she’d be proud of me now.”)
(…You get the picture.)
The heat is damning, but Hyunhee refuses to go home until she’s finished.
It’d been a long day, having to throw some Tiktok kid out for pouring bleach on a headstone, then a woman of truly terrifying conviction hoping to find spare bones washed up at the edge of the cemetery.
They’ve set her back from her usual schedule. She’s trimmed the bushes at the edge of the gate. She’s fought tooth and nail against the honeysuckle invasion creeping in from the edge of the treeline.
But the far corner still needs her attention. What’s the point of picking up where the old groundskeeper claims he left off when, clearly, no one’s cleaned these out-of-the-way sections of the cemetery in years?
She’s nearly done, leaning in to really flex her toothbrush into the inscription of the headstone, when she moves her foot without thinking.
For the first time in all her careful days, Hyunhee’s boot catches, and she trips over a grave.
She hisses, but does not gasp. She catches herself with both hands, one hand sinking into marshy earth, the other clapping against smooth, sunbaked stone. Then once the adrenaline of falling shifts, she realizes where she is and what she’s done.
She lets out a squeak. Level with the inscription in front of her, her attention beams instantly to the name she’s just wronged.
And there, Hyun “Hyunhee” Seunghee’s heart nearly stops.
With the morning sun proving its grooves, an inscription she’s never visited before sizzles before her eyes: Oh Seunghee, 1995 - 2022.
It’s silly that she’s still thinking about this, but you can’t really blame her. She’s no John Jones, is all she’s saying. Not while stumbling over the headstone of the only other Seunghee she’s ever met in her life.
It’s on her mind the whole way up to the house. It plays tricks on her, until Hyunhee is whipping her head to check the rocking chair, sure that if she stares for long enough, she’ll see it move any way but from the wind.
Don’t be silly, she tells herself.
Then Hyunhee cracks the front door, and there is a woman at her kitchen table, dust motes swirling in her body, spotlighted from above by the skylight.
Hyunhee slams the door. She does not shriek, and her hands don’t shake. She sighs so deeply, she feels it in her fingers. Then she turns the knob and opens back up.
“I’m sorry,” Hyunhee apologizes to every corner of the house. “That was rude of me.”
But the ghost-woman is gone, and so Hyunhee’s dust motes are only dust motes: skin in a season of shedding, and a sign she needs to clean.
Before Hyunhee took this job, she used to be her own favorite person. Now she’ll settle for anyone. If a ghost can be good company, she’s simply taking the ghost.
She does everything she can to invite her back without looking like she’s trying too hard to invite her back. She handles the old stopwatch her grandmother left her for the first time in years. She picks a little mint from the edge of the property and fashions a wannabe bundle of incense. She’s sure she isn’t lighting it right, but she hopes it’ll be the thought that counts to return the ghost of Oh Seunghee to her table.
It isn’t.
Not that first night, anyway. So Hyunhee switches tack. The next day, at the end of her rounds, she visits Seunghee’s grave again. She can’t get much character out of a headstone. Born in 1995, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment apart from Hyunhee’s 1996. Maybe that’s the tragedy, that this, in theory, is all the average bystander has to remember her by.
The one time a week Hyunhee is guaranteed to see any human faces is when she’s driving the twenty-six gritty miles all the way to town for groceries, and only when she absolutely has to. Except today, when Hyunhee gets home, she twists her key into the ignition with purpose.
Black Cat Coffee boasts a whole two monitors for guest use, which is apparently enough to have it listed as a “PC Cafe” on the internet. The bell dings above the door as Hyunhee slides in.
The place smells like old books that are just slightly past the point of sour, and the only worker, hi-my-name-is-Yubin, moves like such a new hire, Hyunhee plans on being here an hour while waiting in line. But the music is good, and the computers are vacant, so Hyunhee sets down her beverage and gets cracking.
Easy: Hyunhee knows how to couch a name in quotation marks. According to the few obituaries she’s able to find, Oh Seunghee lived her chunk of time on this Earth as a student at the local medical college. Then quit to marry, divorced once, and then married again.
Not survived by any children. Died young enough that some people cared but not too many. Hyunhee rolls her thumb over the mouse’s sticky wheel until there is nowhere to go to keep scrolling.
“I shouldn’t have slammed the door,” Hyunhee says again, aloud, when she gets home. “I get the feeling you probably wouldn’t have liked that.”
At first there’s nothing. Outside, the wind scatters leaves through what little light the kitchen window touches.
And then: a certain yawning fierceness. Hyunhee is aware of Seunghee’s presence at the table before she even materializes.
“Says who?” The ghost of Oh Seunghee asks, arms crossed.
“Fuck,” Hyunhee swears. “Shit, sorry—language.”
“Please,” Seunghee sniffs, haughty with intrigue. “Don’t hold yourself back for my sake.”
Her figure ripples. Now after dark, a mothy bulb in the kitchen sends light through her like sunbeams through the bottom of a creek. No obituary website could cut it. She’s striking, with a leonine sureness in every way she looks. And right now, she is staring straight at Hyunhee.
“You’re—” she stammers. “You died.”
Hyunhee claps a hand over her mouth a moment later, realizing it might be a bit of a faux pas to risk breaking it to a ghost who doesn’t already know.
But Seunghee just rolls her eyes. “I’m aware,” she snorts. “I was there.”
The dryness of the delivery makes her laugh. It’s not that funny, probably. Hyunhee busting up to a joke that only she can hear. But her mouth is open wide, her head thrown back. Until there are tears in her eyes, burning hot and pure, and even she she can’t be sure who put them there.
Seunghee doesn’t leave after that, and what’s crazier is, Hyunhee finds she doesn’t mind.
As someone who prides herself on being a good host, Hyunhee lights the stove and cooks for two on principle. It doesn’t occur to her that Seunghee’s incorporeal body probably can’t handle food. Not until she’s four eggs, a few stalks of green onion, and a whole tupperware of rice deep on the stove, too polite to stop, and so totally out of counter space to even consider it.
“Smells good,” Seunghee offers. Her voice is soft like she’s trying to console her.
“You can smell?” Hyunhee blurts out in disbelief. “I mean—”
“I can take a guess,” Seunghee hums. “They say our sense of smell is strongest in our memories. That’s what I’ve been told, anyways. From a lover.”
“Ha,” is all Hyunhee manages.
Admittedly, Hyunhee is scared to look right at her. If she glances up and there is no one there, just a disembodied voice and these philosophies sent to challenge her… well, there’s really no coming back from that.
But when she turns her head, Seunghee, in her inexplicable kindness, appears before her. She taps Hyunhee’s cheek dimple. Hyunhee feels herself tremble.
“Besides,” Seunghee smirks. “You put in this much work. Of course it smells good.”
She is dangerous, Hyunhee thinks. A sounding board for her loneliness.
And yet, when Hyunhee sets out two plates on her one small table, Seunghee laughs with a sound like a bell, and it is sweeter nearly than Hyunhee can stand.
“Is it weird that I…?” Hyunhee swallows and gestures to the second plate. “Is there anything I can do to…?”
“Oh, no,” Seunghee insists, at first. “I couldn’t possibly. Literally, I couldn’t possibly.”
Hyunhee fights against the lump in her throat. It pains her, eating first as a host, but she takes a bite and swallows even harder. Seunghee stares. Content to watch, but curious.
“Unless,” Seunghee shrugs, “I do have something I could try, if you’re up for it.”
Hyunhee is bashful. Only a month deep into this job, taking offers from a ghost feels damning. “Go ahead,” she says anyway, and means it.
Seunghee eases closer. She neither floats nor walks, she appears just whenever Hyunhee thinks she’s forgotten her. Until her hand is laced with Hyunhee’s, and the chill is so overpowering that Hyunhee has no cause to fight it when Seunghee slips into her skin.
Possession. The word touches Hyunhee’s mind a moment late. Seunghee’s control is not absolute, but Hyunhee feels her body move on autopilot.
And as she lifts her fork to her mouth, these paltry scraps become the best meal she has ever tasted, and Hyun Seunghee knows that Oh Seunghee will be a welcome guest.