Content warning: descriptions of suicide, war, and violence.

Taeho Park was quite relieved about his imminent death. Blood warmed his head as he laid on the mildewy carpet, frigid air seeping into his body through his frayed clothing. It was all very sudden, he realized. One day he decided to buy a rope. The next day, it was tied to a pipe, and his head went inside the loop. Then the rust got the best of the metal. Now lying on the floor, he did the next logical thing for a person centimeters from death and reached for his splintered phone to dial three digits. He almost toppled over the chilled green glasses of convenience store soju as his fingertips dragged in the warm, goopy red.

His flesh and soul had been festering in that apartment for decades. But gone would be the days when he achingly sat up in his sagging mattress to stare at the wall—bare except for the certificate of his military service he longed to burn. Gone would be the days when he tore open unemployment checks like a feral animal, the measly sum to be blown on cheap alcohol and nights alone with the howling wind. Gone would be the days when his skin prickled with needles with the reminders of how the ocean spray pelted him on the cliffs of Saipan. Still, the scars from katanas held by his fellow soldiers burned deeper into his back. They vowed to follow him into the afterlife, the legacy of abuse following every Korean soldier in that army, the hell that was the army of their colonizers.

This was not the first time Taeho had truly resigned his splintered spirit to that stillness forever. Those fragments had held together somehow, perhaps through sheer force of will or spite, even as he clung to the cliffs of his last battlefield eternally.

Saipan would have been a pretty island, if not for the army-treaded land or his morbid memories. The flames roared with the strength of the one thousand trumpets, evoking the fanfare of American victory as they spat smoke and drowned out sons calling for their mothers. In the beginning of his deployment, the huts of natives lined the coast and dotted the view, but only planks remained. He bled through the holes in his uniform from shrubs grating away at his naked skin. At the cliffs below, the waves sprayed and crashed, each beat sending rocks and people over the edge like tin cans. 

Giving their lives to the ocean was preferable to conceding defeat to their enemies. Soldiers barricaded the escape to solid land, where pebbles didn’t tumble into the ocean with each step. Shakily holding their guns and bags outlining their eyes, they blinked in the face of the stretching salt sea.

“Next.” An officer saluted to the horizon shakily, dew-drop eyes blinking rapidly. “Glory to the emperor.” Ordinarily, one of the majors would have yelled at that soldier to show his respects properly, but only the crashing waves and encroaching U.S. Marines could be heard.

Feet shuffled forward in a leaden rhythm as the defeated kicked up pebbles and dust, suffering through their last lamentations until their own superiors pushed them off. Taeho joined the enervated march, every step he took becoming closer and closer to the edge.

Some men became maniacs, flying off the cliff with their minds ballooned in loyalty as water filled their lungs. Many men accepted their fates to the sea instead of the bullets that would thrust them into a dishonorable demise. Fervent imperialists and cowardly, spineless husks flung the few with desperate, clawing souls over the rocky edge. The sight of extinguished lights branded into his brain as he too tip-toed closer to the end. His mind felt as if he had been buried alive, suffocating dirt and sand filling every crevice.

“Next.”

The shriek of a child split Taeho’s stupor. An olive-skinned woman kneeled on the dirt, black hair curtaining her ash-stained face as she pleaded to a tall soldier to have mercy. He only met her agony with glaring eyes. She lunged for the boy, but was shoved back. Within milliseconds, her desperation transformed into vigor as she pumped all the power she could into grabbing the scared child and sprinting far, far away. But adrenaline could not beat guns.

“Next.”

Ahead were other Korean men he’d shared jokes with as he choked down barley for the thousandth time. Standing closer were steadfast friends he’d considered kin who flipped between a calm exterior and a panicked heart. But all he could think of was the cliff. All the mud-speckled faces passed in a blur of skin, plunging into the sea as a napkin would be tossed into the landfill. Each heart-pounding step glued him more to the ground, but he did not have the capacity to fight the push of the march as his heart and guts twisted up.

Taeho ground his teeth like a mortar to a pestle, for this invisible defiance was allowed; no one could see it, no one could condemn him for it. Yet he could not control the plodding of his feet toward the edge like an automaton, nor the masses of people unable to escape their lamenting daze who pushed him from behind. He had tried, and tried, and tried, but they marched on.

The next group dropped into the depths, the sharp echoes of screams sealed into the jagged, hungry rocks. Taeho refused to look down.

What was he even doing here? He had gone along with their scheme for long enough, disguising his cowardice as obedience. But the Japanese still treated him like he was a flotsam to be tossed back to the sea. He blinked rapidly as the last rush of vehemence slammed into him. The anger propelled him, the last push of his survival instincts as a living human. His hands went berserk, shoving the crowd out of his way into the bullets of the soldiers who tried to stop him. He didn’t think, just kept on running on, and on, and on. Thus, the cold sting of the sea did not trap him that day, unlike the thousands who died. 

Indeed, Taeho had survived the deadly march. But now he was back at the cusp of death, collapsed on his noxious apartment floor with rope burn blotting his neck. Still, death’s boot loomed over his fingertips that clung to the cliff of Saipan, waiting to hurl him into the deep. It shoved the images of those blank faces whooshing by again and again, his own becoming a blur. Each person turned to nothing, nothing at all as he, too, withered away.

So he was mostly glad for this demise, yes, although it was one in his own prison of regrets and memories. At least the weather was cold, unlike the raging fires of Saipan. But as the blood coated his face, lamentations lingered in his mind

“Next.”