Today I want to share something I heard from around Daegu's Jungangno Station.
It's a rumor that's been quietly making its rounds among people who pass through that area late at night, going back a few years now. I can't say for certain it's true. I'm only passing along what I was told.
You know that stretch leading down to the station. Apparently, tucked inside one of the narrow alleyways there, a blue Porter truck is sometimes parked in the same spot. Someone — a man in his thirties, I was told, heading home late after work — passed by that spot around one in the morning in the dead of winter and saw something that didn't sit right with him.
A child was sitting in the truck bed.
Seven, maybe eight years old. A little girl. She was sitting alone directly beneath a pool of streetlight, both legs stretched straight out in front of her.
He said he almost kept walking. But his steps slowed on their own. Something felt wrong. One in the morning. Why would a child be out there alone.
He stopped and looked, and the girl didn't move at all. No sound. She didn't turn her head toward him. Whether she was staring at something or staring at nothing, he couldn't tell. He cleared his throat once — no reaction. And even as the wrongness of it settled over him, he found he couldn't make himself leave. As though something had taken hold of him.
About ten seconds passed like that.
Then the girl fell backward.
But here's the thing. The way she fell — it was wrong.
When a person loses their balance, they reach out. It's instinct. Children especially. But this girl didn't reach out at all. Her whole body stayed rigid, locked into a single piece, as if something behind her had seized her by the ankles — and then she was simply gone, toppling silently over the edge of the truck bed without a sound.
He ran. He came around to the back of the truck and looked.
There was nothing. No girl, no cargo, not a trace of anything on the asphalt.
He stood there for a long time. Couldn't run, couldn't call out. Just stood there gripping the cold metal edge of the truck bed with both hands. The smell of winter iron, something like machine oil, seeping into his nose — and his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't let go.
It was only later, back home, turning the memory over again, that he realized something he hadn't noticed in the moment.
The girl's feet had been bare.
In the dead of winter. On a night the temperature had dropped below freezing. Sitting in the bed of a cold iron truck parked on asphalt, with her bare feet stretched straight out in front of her.
He said he couldn't understand why he hadn't noticed it right away. But thinking back on it — those feet had been too still. When bare skin touches cold metal, a person shifts, even slightly. Toes curl, at least a little. It's just what the body does. But that girl's feet were simply resting there. As if they were the same temperature as the metal beneath them.
Perhaps she hadn't felt the cold.
Or perhaps — from the very beginning — she had been beyond feeling anything at all.
