"Are you losing your mind, love?"
His words were an echo louder than the thunder, the wind, the drumming heart inside Inji's chest as she was hunched over the box. Her brown eyes were wide in terror and her lips trembled, her mind raced with thousand possible explanations but would any of them make her less guilty in his eyes?
A sigh escaped Mr. Gunn and he, still with his raincoat on, dropped the other raincoat into the muddy ground. His eyes were cold and his face was blank as he began to dig, with both of his hands plunged in and mud slithering into his nails and smeared over his sleeves. His breath began to slowly work up from the labor, and Inji's also began to slowly work up. From horror.
"What are you doing, love? Dig." He demanded.
It took her a moment to realize that this was actually happening. 'Why isn't he getting mad at me?' was the question on Inji's mind as she watched him, her eyes were warm with tears and body shuddered with dread.
The sounds that the earth made as Mr. Gunn dug away the mud was very familiar, and made her tears even warmer as they continued to stream down her red, muddy cheeks.
Very familiar from eight years ago. When the beggar witches used to bang on her mother's door, begging for food.
"If you want to see your friend so badly, then you should help me." Mr. Gunn added, his voice the dead calm suited for the graveyard that they had founded between those rustling trees and howling wind. Only the sky, the ravens, and the thunder knew of its whereabouts.
All of them were hell, inviting their souls. One, of the girl in the box, the other of Inji, and Mr. Gunn was the gatekeeper.
She fought back her tears, and hunched over the muddy mound, digging like her life depended on it. Mr. Gunn's cold, brown hues watched her finger dig into the guts of the earth in a frenzy.
'How ugly humanity was to nature. Always.' He thought, a snicker escaped him as he grabbed the shovel and began to dig away the heavy layer of the mud while Inji labored along.
A minute eternity later, the wooden box surfaced. Along with the dismembered roses, lost coffee beans and her knees gave in, tears were streams that glistened under the lightning like diamonds.
The coals of her humanity that had endured the pressure of resentment for the world, for the girl in the box and for herself, now shimmering in triumph that the nature admired.
So did Mr. Gunn as he reached forward and cupped her face in his muddy hands, smearing the ruined earth against her cheeks.
"My love, my love. Oh, my hurting love. What do I do with you? You are killing me with your tears." He said, a tone so wavering that one might mistake it to be guilt as well but the monstrosity that hid under skin was yet to slither out. Like a snake, rattling and shimmering.
"I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry."
"It's okay, my love-"
He thought the apology was for him because his love was remorseful over undoing all of his hard work but when his eyes lifted from the box towards Inji's face, he noticed her eyes were fixated onto the box.
"I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry." She continued to beg, like a prayer as if there was a god in the sky right now that would pay heed to her humanity and blow the breath back into the girl in the box.
'Can't you see? She is dead already…' He said in his head, but never to her and watched as she began to scratch and pull at the nails that kept the lid intact.
"You will hurt yourself like that, love." He said. But she didn't listen and cried like a lost child, her broken nail running into the rusted metal on the nails and the tetanus stung her like a bee stung, like a hell fire, like regret.
Mr. Gunn's gaze softened and he pulled out the hammer from Inji's rain coat that shouldn't be there but it was, like her humanity. So many things were where they didn't belong, like the dead ravens on the ground, the thunder flashing onto them when they liked dark and the lid coming off the wooden box.
Inji's breath hitched and her eyes widened, as Mr. Gunn began to pull out the nails from the wood. Minutes later, her heart was drumming even louder now that the wooden slab began to slowly dislocate.
The thunder struck the sky again, the lightning danced in a frenzy and Inji's eyes fell onto the girl in the box. She lost her hearing for a moment as a loud sound struck her, from the sky, perhaps there were gods in the sky that she had angered.
The sight before her was unfamiliar. The girl she had left in the box, breathing, scratching, wriggling like an insect was now still, motionless, pale as the sky within flash of lightning and a stranger. Inji's heart stopped beating for a moment, and she grabbed Mr. Gunn's sleeve.
"What… is this? Why isn't she moving?" She asked, but received nothing but silence in response.
That unbearable silence clenched her heart like the claws of the beggar witches and she leapt forward, hunched over the box and her fingers trembled as she reached for the girl's shoulders.
"Hey, wake up." She shook her slightly but her body felt heavy. More than she remembered. Her eyes began to blur, flooded by tears and every pore of her skin crawled and shifted like a snake. The temperature against her fingertips was too cold, straight out of the deep freezer.
Or the times when she'd entered the butcher's shop and he'd led her to the freezer to 'prove' to her that the meat they sold was actually of cows and goats, not dogs and donkeys.
Certainly, the animal he'd shown was fresh, warm and breathing. Wheezing lustfully, except it wasn't in a freezer but in her house, on her bed.
On top of her.
She had felt that cold flesh against her skin, of the chicken, the cows, even her dead pups. But this cold was like a frozen island in itself where the sun was made of ice and the sky melted every time it rained.
Like an irony in itself, that in the middle of the rain, the mud, and a grave, she was looking for warmth.
"Why isn't she moving?!" Inji yelled, as loud as she could but the thunder muffled her. Like an invisible hand on her mouth, forcing her into silence.
"Because she is dead. Dead don't move, love." came his response, calm as always.
'Dead don't move. But still, they haunt us.'
He watched the dead body of the girl in the box haunt the daylights out of Inji, part of him found her shock funny and most of him found it offensive. His eyes watched her eyes shut, and he knees hit the ground as she covered her face with her muddy hands.
"But… she was alive… when I watched… when we buried her. We buried her alive. How is this possible? How could she die in just minutes?" She cried out, like a wounded tiger cub and began to claw at her face.
Her broken, muddy nails scratched her cheeks, her nose, her forehead and even her chin and her eyes were the only thing white around those pained brown hues.
"How…?" She asked.
'I won the world but lost to you, Inji… and you are making me taste that defeat every single day.' He thought.
He wrapped his arms around her trembling frame and pressed her head against his chest, his eyes drifted towards the sky and he watched the gods from her metaphor rage the sky and ruin the earth.
"We have been killing her since last night, my love. Only her soul left her body in just minutes." He confessed, pouring the venom into her ears and hoping she would not die.
Inji's eyes closed, tighter than she held onto him and pressed her face into his chest. Their muddy frames were in an embrace that they hoped would save them from the monstrosity that clawed away at their chests.
"You killed her in your heart when you started hating her, you killed her in your head when you wished for her death and I killed her in the afternoon when I poured that coffee into her cup. The coffee I learned to make in twenty years and poisoned yesterday..."
Inji's body began to shake, her face paled as her resolve left her and her fingernails dug into her own sleeves, broken, bleeding, muddy. The disgust she felt, the guilt that she felt was nothing less than a layer of earth itself and it began to bury her.
"She had just been embraced by her final death. The literal death. Don't feel too bad, love." He said, kissing her forehead and caressed her back as she trembled and began to weep. Her tears dissolved into whimpers and her whimper flared up into screams that he muffled with his heart so well.
He filled his heart with her sorrow, poured into himself everything she let out. Everything she let out was precious to him. Her tears were diamonds, her blood was gold, her whimpers were music and her hatred was his heaven. He was the devil she manifested.
"Shhh… You're my precious mirror that I see myself in to remember who I am. There's no way I'd let anything taint you. Her blood isn't on your hands but mine." He continued to recite her morbid poetry to her in hopes to comfort her but she couldn't fight back the panic.
Her hands trembled as they pushed against his chest, and his lips frowned. She pushed against him, her eyes hidden by her wet brown locks and her lips muttered a forgotten apology. After grief, came anger and she made the mistake of displaying it against him.
"I had never… killed her if you had not filled my head with bloody fantasies? You…made me believe that I would feel better if she didn't exist. Look at me now!" Inji screamed, pushing him back and she lost her balance.
The earth rejected her for a moment, her eyes widened in fear as tears swam into the air and she found herself falling backwards. Fear taking over her as the paled, motionless, and dead face of the girl in the box flashed before her eyes with her colorful, breathing and live corpse right next to it.
"Careful, love." Mr. Gunn said, grabbing both of her arms and pulled her back against himself.
His eyes stared into hers as she slowly opened them, finding herself back into his embrace and she sniffed. The sky stopped crying as she continued and the trees continued to rustle restlessly, like her heart.
"With your feet and your words also." He said, his tone threatening and the manic grin crept up to his lips.
He loosened her grasp on Inji's hand and let her body fall back for a moment, grabbing her once again. The mud began to slither down from under her feet and slowly pulled her into the grave they had dug together.
"You always tell me stories, love. Let me tell you one tonight." He said, and yanked her body back against himself.
His arms snaked around her shoulders, one hand held the back of her head against his shoulder while the other held her waist. He stood in front of her like a wall and pressed her trembling frame to himself like a vine, his eyes glistening as he watched the girl in the box lying lifelessly in that box in front of him.
"Once upon a time, there was a Deenbo and a Deenbi. They were a couple, they were creatures that walked on two feet, had a head as bulbous as a bowl and their whole bodies were covered with long, black hair. They were madly in love with each other, and got married. When Deenbi got pregnant, Deenbo asked her: "Deenbi, Deenbi! How many kids will you give me?"
Mr. Gunn's voice was the sweetest whisper, and Inji's eyes began to water more. She unwillingly held onto his shirt and sniffed. He smelled like mud, coffee and death yet she felt her heart breathing in its most life every time he held her. She hoped to be comforted, even if she resented herself. She wanted to be loved by him.
"Deenbi replied: "As many pearls from the water as you can get me!" Since they were big, ugly and hairy, they liked everything that was perfect shape and white. Deenbo was so happy that he started off on a trip to the sea. He waited for days by the shore, but couldn't find any clams. He returned home and told Deenbi that he couldn't find any pearls. She screamed at him, called him useless, and stopped talking to him." He continued.
Inji felt like she was resonating with the story, Deenbo was Mr. Gunn and she was Deenbi. She was asking him for pearls, but he couldn't give her anything white and perfect. Like humanity.
His voice took an eerily calm tone and his eyes narrowed. His grasp around her tightened so much, that she felt his shoulder bone digging into her neck and slowly began to choke her.
"Deenbo was very heartbroken. He also feared she wouldn't give him the kids so he went back to the sea. That day, humans were hunting for fish around the island. Deenbi was ugly, hairy and desperate as he began to swim into the deep water. He didn't know where to find clams. As he surfaced, the humans yelled "MONSTER" and stabbed him with their harps."
'As Mr. Gunn continued to tell me the story… I could feel the stinging sensation in my eyes as he choked me.'
Inji could picture Deenbo struggling, getting choked by ropes and harps ripping him apart. She felt terrified of the conclusion of the story more than her own nearing end.
"Deenbo cried, but his eyes caught the sight of glimmering, white, perfect pearls in the human boat and reached for it. Humans took advantage and cornered him. They ripped his body in parts, and the water turned black with his blood. In his last moment, he managed to grab a pearl in his hand and smiled. "I will have… one kid!" were his last words." Mr. Gunn added, and heard her muscles tense and loosen against his skin and his eyes filled with tears. Her hands began to struggle against him but he needed to finish the story.
"Deenbi gave birth to twins and came to look for Deenbo on the shore. She found his hand waving on the water and ran towards it. She grabbed it, in horror as she opened up his fist and found the pearl. She looked up at the sky and cried out. "One pearl? You were supposed to bring two"…"
Then a long silence followed, his gaze drifted from the girl in the box towards the sky that was his sea. The stars began to twinkle like the pearls as clouds began to leave, like the human hunters and he reached towards the sky with his arms.
"How many pearls do you want, love?" He asked. Her eyes rolled back and the world began to spin for a moment. The sky began to swallow the earth and she felt her weight get sucked in by the gravity, Mr. Gunn's face was the last thing she saw and everything went black.