The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance • Monsta X

iii.

"My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence."

― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

--

Hyunwoo walked along the neighborhood, hands in his pockets. A month had passed but he was finally back in quadrant four, which meant he'd probably get to say hi to his tiny friends today.

Only when he paused outside the fence of the Walour Motel, there was just one kid in the lot.

"Hey," Hyunwoo greeted, a little thrown off by the absence of the trio's other members.

Kihyun, who was sitting on the far curb and poking at the cracking blacktop with a stick, looked up, his frown never changing.

"Where are Hyungwon and Minhyuk?" Hyunwoo asked, unsure if Kihyun was angry or tired or hungry or just his normal self. He'd be happy to leave, if that was what Kihyun wanted, but the boy seemed sort of sad.

Kihyun just shrugged in answer to his question. "I dunno. Gone," he muttered, poking again with the stick. It made a light scraping sound as he dragged it over the rough surface, and it cut off abruptly when he looked back up at Hyunwoo.

"Gone where?"

"I dunno," he said again, dropping the stick. It clattered against the ground before stilling, and then his hands were empty. They fiddled anxiously with his pockets. "I haven't seen them in a while."

Hyunwoo opened his mouth before hesitating. He could just give Kihyun some space, but everything about today felt wrong. Maybe he'd bother Kihyun for a while longer. "How long?"

Kihyun's shoulders hunched up, fell back down. His head tipped forward, unruly hair hiding his eyes. "Two weeks, maybe."

Hyunwoo's pulse took off, but he tried to reason with himself. Maybe, in this sort of neighborhood, that sort of thing happened. Perhaps people moved around or disappeared for a while. But it wasn't normal to him. "Does that happen a lot?"

Kihyun looked back up, and his eyes were sort of watery, like he'd gotten dust in them, or maybe like he was on the verge of crying. "No," he said, his voice rough now, scraping against his throat like the stick against the blacktop. "It doesn't."

Hyunwoo opened his mouth to ask more questions when he heard one of the residents shouting down from a balcony. "Hey! Kihyun! Who're you talking to?" The voice, rough in a way that belied a lifetime of smoking, belonged to a middle-aged woman with wrinkles beyond her years and frizzy hair that hung around her pinched face like an electron cloud.

"Nobody, Ma," Kihyun yelled back up, kicking his foot against the ground.

"You's talking to someb'y," she said, lifting a cigarette up to her lips with shaky hands before speaking again. "Who's you talking to?"

"I told you, nobody," Kihyun repeated. "Just myself."

"Fine," she said, tapping the cigarette against the balcony railing. A few ashes fell off the end and were caught up by the breeze. "Betta not be lyin' to me."

"I wouldn't lie to you, Ma," Kihyun said again, and after a second, the woman disappeared inside the apartment and the balcony door shut behind her.

Hyunwoo, who had tucked himself behind a part of the fence that was draped over with ivy and weeds, peeked out, but Kihyun motioned for him to go away. "Later," he mouthed.

Hyunwoo nodded, not wanting to get Kihyun in trouble, but his mind was preoccupied as he continued on with his patrol. He'd put in a call to the station, see if Jooheon or any of the others on patrol had seen anything.