Chapter Text
PROLOGUE: LOVE, BABIES AND OTHER LITTLE THINGS
LIVING CRABS DEBATE in vain in a pot of boiling water.
These were ten words that the Seodaemun-gu elementary school history teacher remembered very well. Crabs and boiling water are not a good combination - and yet they can struggle and bubble away to their degeneration. One supposes, then, that they should be like this. United and notoriously alive, but burning when they touch each other, leading to their extinction. Until there is no water left. Or that crabs survive.
Truth stood between the threshold of hope and despair, joined by a tightrope. Kang EunJi could only cling to an oath that helped her stay calm:
"Crabs."
Her fingers trembled as she propped the very thermometer-like device on the edge of the sink. She didn't dare look in the mirror, she knew what she would see. A disheveled, pale, almost cadaverous woman; funereal. Wrinkles contouring her tired eyes, stiffness in the flesh of her mouth. Fear translucent and almost palpable. At this point, even imagining a vast expanse of happy crabs, she couldn't be calm enough.
"Crabs, crabs, crabs," she repeated, trying to make her hand stop shaking. Unsuccessfully, the test dances between her fingers. A bead of sweat tripped over the tip of the test and slid all the way into the sink drain. "Beautiful, perfect, healthy crabs."
How many minutes had passed? Five? Eight? Eleven?
"Damn, two?" She rubbed the palm of her other sweaty hand over her face, wrinkling her nose and massaging her temples fleetingly. Why did it feel like she had spent an hour inside her own bathroom? "I'd better sit down. Imagining crabs. Several of them."
Crab one, crab two, crab three.
Crab fifty was a clear enough mediator for her to be sure she had already given the time. EunJi sucked in a breath and held it inside her sternum, between her ribs. She would need that, that hit of breath to keep her standing there. Sitting. Whatever, she had this impression that her legs were numb enough not to support her weight for the next few minutes.
She plucked up as much courage as she could, then turned the test over in her hands.
The crabs came running out in a burst, a nonsense that erupted the small bathroom window, causing the glass to shake. None of them wanted to be there to see the two little stripes on the test. One by one, they were all engulfed by the pot of boiling water. Her breath, to no avail, escaped between her teeth, escaping from the stem of her throat.
Kang Eunji slid to the floor and whimpered:
"Positive!?"