Two fingers came to rest on my shoulder.

Light. Polite. The way you hold a page down against the wind.

"Found. You."

The lamplight around me went thin.

It didn't hurt. That was the worst part. It felt like being read.

Something started at the top of me and moved down, line by line. My scalp. My eyes. The breath I was halfway through taking. Everywhere it passed, I stopped being there.

Far away, at the end of a long hallway, a girl's voice was screaming my name.

No. Don't scream. Don't come back for me. You're clear, I got you clear, that was the whole point.

I tried to say run.

I didn't have a mouth anymore.

The last of me was one short line, and something's eyes went over it, slow, unhurried, interested,

and the line ended.

* * *

Cold.

Concrete under my cheek. The smell of wet dust. Cloth snapping somewhere above me in the wind.

I opened my eyes.

Gray light. A banner strung over open ground, one end loose, flapping. HAEDONG PLAZA SUMMER WATER FESTIVAL.

I was slumped sideways on the stone bench by the fountain. The fountain sat there, dark and quiet, minding its own business.

I sat up so fast my vision went white.

"Ha. Hah."

My hands. Both hands, in front of my face. Ten fingers. Solid.

I grabbed my own shoulder, where the fingers had landed. Nothing. No mark, no cold, no hole in the world. Just my jacket, damp with morning.

The kindergarten. The lamplight. The mask that curved inward onto nothing.

...I died.

I died. I felt it happen. You don't mistake that for anything else.

"Okay," I said out loud, because my voice was the only thing I had to hold on to. "Okay. Inventory. Do the inventory, Seojin."

Left jacket pocket. The hundred-won coin.

Warm. Still warm, like it had just left somebody's hand.

Zip pocket. The blank page from the first night. Still there, still smelling faintly of fresh ink.

Right pocket.

Empty.

The box cutter was gone.

I stood there with my hand in an empty pocket and my heart going like a drum. I took that box cutter from the store yesterday afternoon. I checked it at the kindergarten gate. I never took it out of this pocket.

Unless there was no yesterday afternoon.

My sleeve. I dragged it up my left forearm and read the fine script by gray light.

Your manuscript holds 7 days.

Seven.

It said seven the morning it first appeared. On this bench. In this plaza.

I got my phone out. 5:09 AM. I opened the LIBRARY app with a thumb that would not hold still.

[Catalogue empty. Please wait for tonight's acquisitions.]

[Readers: 1]

One. Back to one.

The sun came up over the buildings across the river, and at 5:11 exactly, the light caught on me and hung there for half a second, like a sleeve snagging a nail, and let go.

Same bench. Same script. Same snag.

Same morning.

* * *

I sat down before my legs did it for me, and I worked it through out loud, in order, the way I count a till that doesn't balance.

"I was tagged. In the kindergarten. At night."

The fingers. The hallway. The screaming. Real. All of it real, I refuse to argue with myself about that.

"Now it's dawn. This dawn. The one where the writing came."

The box cutter isn't in my pocket because I haven't taken it yet. There is no yesterday afternoon. There is no yet.

"So when I died, I didn't stop. I went back."

Back to when? Not the beginning. Not the Turning. Here. The bench. The last dawn I actually stood in and watched come up.

Like a reader losing his place in a book, going back to the last page he marked.

A bookmark.

I laughed. It came out wrong, high and thin, and I put my hand over my mouth and made myself stop.

And then the thought underneath all the other thoughts finally got its turn, and it went through me like heat.

Haru is alive.

She's somewhere in this city right now, nineteen years old and alive, and she has never heard a music box in that building, because tonight hasn't happened. Nobody has ever said welcome, twelve participants. No chalk has ever moved.

"Insik."

The section chief broke toward the kitchen and got two fingers on his neck and folded into a sheet of paper, and I watched the print fade out of him.

He's alive too. Asleep somewhere with his lists, alive.

My eyes burned. I pressed the heels of my hands into them and breathed.

Across the river, something white slid out of the pale sky and started falling. Slow. Side to side, side to side.

Four minutes. It takes four minutes. I know, I timed it the first time.

I didn't move. I let it come, all the way down through the morning, and it landed touching my leg, the same corner touching the same spot on my shin.

[The Story 'Tag' (Epic, Rank One) seeks participants. Venue: Haedong Sprout Kindergarten. The cover opens at sundown.]

Attendance is voluntary. Binding is not.

"Yeah," I told the page. "I remember you."

Sundown. I had until sundown.

And this time I'd already read tonight once.

* * *

I walked back to the Star Mart because my legs knew the way and I needed my hands busy.

The IOU was on the counter where I'd left it on the first night. Taken for emergency. Yun Seojin. Will pay. I added a pocket notebook and a pen to the tab. Spiral binding, orange cover, the kind kids buy for vocabulary words.

If mornings can repeat, then my head is the only shelf that doesn't get restocked. Fine. Take inventory of the shelf.

I sat on the floor behind the register, flipped to the first page, and wrote at the top: THINGS I KNOW.

Not about this city. About me. About before. The stuff no falling page ever printed.

1. Mom's shop had a yellow awning that leaked at the left corner.

2. She folded receipts corners first, one crease, thumbnail.

The pen moved and the list grew and every line landed solid, like cans set on a shelf. My father leaving when I was nine. The bus number to the hospital. The smell of the ward hallway, hand sanitizer and floor wax, the night I found a webnovel with a gray cover.

Eleven. Twelve.

13. She kept my acceptance letter in the drawer under the till, in a plastic sleeve, and showed it to customers until I begged her to stop.

Acceptance night. That night she closed the shop early. First time in years, closed early, for me. She cooked, and the little back room fogged up with steam, and we sat with our knees under the fold-out table, and she watched me eat and forgot to eat anything herself.

Doenjang jjigae. Her doenjang jjigae, which was the best thing I have eaten in my whole life, which tasted like

I stopped.

It tasted like.

I sat there with the pen down on the paper and reached for it, the taste, the actual taste, the thing my mouth knew before my head did.

Nothing came.

Not fuzzy. Not far away. Gone, with clean edges, like a word cut out of a sentence with a blade. I could see the steam. I could see the dented yellow pot and her wrist stirring and her face saying eat more, eat. I knew the stew was the best thing I ever ate. I knew it the way you know a fact printed in somebody else's book.

The taste itself would not come.

"No," I said. "Hang on. No, no."

I wrote it anyway. 14. The taste of

The ink spread.

Not a smear. The pen flooded, black welling out of the tip like the paper was drinking it, and the words drowned in front of me, and what dried on the page was a smooth black bar, edge to edge, neat as a censor's stamp.

I tried again on the next line. The taste of mom's

The bar swallowed that too.

I said it out loud to the empty store, "her doenjang jjigae tasted like," and my voice just stopped, not choked, not gagged, simply out of sentence, a road ending in grass.

I put the pen down and cried behind the register of a convenience store at six in the morning, in a dead city, over a bowl of stew that no longer exists anywhere in the universe except as a fact.

The coin sat warm in my pocket the whole time. Somewhere, somebody was probably finding this chapter of me very interesting.

* * *

Here's the part I couldn't cry about, because it scared me too much to cry about.

I did the math anyway. I couldn't help it. One death, one dawn, one memory. That looked like a price. That looked exactly like a price.

And Haru is alive.

If those are the terms, I would pay it again. Right now, tonight, without counting first. Her dropped bag and her five stars and her stupid perfect rock-paper-scissors, weighed against the taste of my mother's cooking, and I would hand the taste over again and say keep the change.

What kind of person does that math that fast?

I closed the notebook on the black bar and stood up.

* * *

Sundown came the way it does now, quiet, nobody turning on lights against it.

I stood at the kindergarten fence with a new box cutter in my right pocket and the notebook against my chest, and watched the windows fill up one by one with warm lamplight. Somewhere inside, a music box was playing, slow, patient, the same eight bars it played last night.

Except there was no last night. Nobody in there has heard the song yet.

I have.

First printing: eleven of us went in, and I died, and Insik died folded into paper, and a fox pocketed him like small change.

The gate stood open. The lamplight lay on the path like it was welcoming me personally.

"Okay," I said, and stepped through. "Second printing."

Twelve of us walk out this time.