문학과 지성사

I held mom’s hand.
It was warm.
We took the bus home.
I watched the snowfall through the window.

Woken from her sleep, Mi-yeong’i waits for her mother, who is not coming back from the bathroom. Mi-yeong’i is thrown before the overwhelming challenge of surviving alone in this world. She is sent to a foster home where she watches her peers going to school and practices handwriting, ashamed that she doesn’t know how to spell. What really stings Mi-yeong’i, however, is neither that she cannot go to school nor that she’s jealous of the foster family, but the fact that she was abandoned by her own mother. As her pain grows, Mi-yeong’i unexpectedly makes a good friend, a stray puppy that followed her foster brother home. When they can’t find the puppy’s owner, the family assigns the tasks of walking, feeding, and taking care of the puppy to Mi-yeong’i, who pours her heart into the tasks. While Mi-yeong’i grows out of her old clothes and forms a close friendship with the puppy, there hasn’t been a peep from mom. Until one day, after enough days for Mi-yeong’i to accept her reality, she comes back. Mi-yeong’i follows mom with more indifference than relief, but upon holding mom’s hand, she feels how cold and coarse mom’s hand has become. Only then does Mi-yeong’i realize mom did not abandon her but was striving to get her back.