GHLL Ch 1

Everything was ash.

Under heavy clouds, gray ash fell endlessly. In a world where a moment’s distraction let ash cover everything, I was looking at my 20th birthday card.

I think my brother wrote it long ago. About three years back, we found new food. The food in palm-sized plastic was shriveled, its original color and taste gone. But the paper inside was relatively intact. It was printed with “Homemade Snacks.”

We found three homemade snacks, so there were three sheets of paper. They were thick and stiff, in green, blue, and red.

My brother used them as my birthday cards. Green for my 18th, blue for my 19th.

He said green and blue were summer’s colors. When everything was covered in green, it got so hot that people stopped working and went on something called a vacation. They’d fly across blue skies to faraway places, swim in the blue sea wearing colorful swimsuits. When tired, they’d fill up on cold, sweet ice cream, tangy cola, or greasy hamburgers.

It sounded like a fantastical story. I often begged him to tell it, sinking into endless daydreams.

Summer was my favorite season. It was also my brother’s name.

But my brother loved Gyeol best. He said when snow fell heavily at Christmas, a red-clad Santa came with gifts, flying on a reindeer-drawn sleigh, sneaking through chimneys to leave presents under a sparkling tree.

Red was Gyeol’s color, Christmas’s color. And the color of my 20th birthday card.

“Phew.”

I blew the ash off the card and read the words carefully.

“Happy 20th Birthday.”

When I was born, I was so small and frail that our parents thought I wouldn’t live long. Raising my brother was hard enough, so they considered selling me. But he stopped them. From then on, he must have decided to be my protector.

After Dad died early and Mom disappeared, my brother always took care of me. Without him, I wouldn’t have survived this long.

He said his wish was for me to reach 20, to become a proper adult so he wouldn’t need to look after me anymore.

Today, he fulfilled that wish.

…Is that why he died?

I stared at my brother, whom I’d barely found. Like everything else in this world, he was buried in ash. If not for the birthday card sticking out from his hand, I wouldn’t have found him. In a gray, ash-covered world, the red paper stood out like the only splash of color.