“Your brother lost his eye in an accident.”
My mother’s voice clung to the summer air like damp silk. Under the table I pressed my knuckles into my knee. An accident. What surfaced was the darkness pooled inside a soup bowl, the last black wave that leapt up—yet sharper still was the feel of my brother’s hand. I was nine that summer; he lifted the robot I had been fondling all day, set it on a chair, and slowly snapped it in half. It wasn’t glass, but it shattered with a glass-like sound. A shard rolled over and tickled the top of my foot. In the instant it broke, the back of his hand brushed mine. When his hot breath grazed my skin, a shiver slid down my spine—the kind that tells you never to open your eyes. He laughed under his breath.
“You’ll spend your whole life staring at what I throw away.”
The words hardened on the tablecloth. From that day on we erased one side of each other forever.
The single mouthful we held between us
The spoon was only a tool for lifting burdock soup. Across the brimming bowl my brother’s hand shot out. For a moment I saw a warped face reflected at the bottom. Who moved first no longer mattered. All that remained was the fact that a sliver of darkness had fallen onto the table. Blood traced the line of his jaw. Mixed with the broth, it lingered on the tongue like the bitterness left after chrysanthemums fade. My brother fell backward and swallowed a single breath. Inside that breath our future was compressed.
That night, for the first time, we fell asleep picturing one another’s lips sealed.
The word Mother taught us: “accident”
We placed the missing part of my brother in the very back of the freezer. A glass jar, a darkness settled inside. Mother closed the lid and spoke once more.
“Accident.”
The word melted like a snowflake on the tongue. After that day Father gave my brother a toy robot. Instead of broken parts, a black eye-patch was tucked inside. No one asked what had actually broken. We all shut the refrigerator door firmly.
Each time the jar was taken out, someone’s breath fogged the glass.
First day with a new eye
At his college entrance interview my brother joked that the eye-patch was because the room was “too dazzling.” The examiners laughed. Inside their laughter our secret grew another layer. I sat in the back seat and kept my mouth shut. Now we walk carrying the same weight.
On graduation day Sugyeong pressed a small box into my hand. A single glass marble. When it caught the light it glittered like my brother’s right eye once did. I slipped it deep into my pocket. If I take it out, it might become real. Sugyeong brushed the back of my hand.
“You cover what you don’t wish to see. That’s how thick the world is.”
The photograph on the living-room wall
In our living room my brother’s ID photo still hangs—an image in which only the right eye is alive. Mother never replaces it, as though she means to preserve not an absence but a chosen form. Each morning I drink my coffee beneath it. As the hot liquid slides down my throat, I feel the texture of that day again.
My brother is now an executive at a mid-size firm. His colleagues joke that “one is plenty.” No one ever takes the joke seriously.
Mother’s will—or a splinter of truth
Early this year I found a single sheet of paper hidden deep in a drawer. The first line began I know you… I tore the paper up. The pieces swirled away in the toilet. As the water whirled I wondered—had Mother seen that day too?
My brother has never once said he’s sorry. Instead, last week, he handed me a new white eye-patch. Embroidered on the cloth was a single sentence.
“Cover what you do not wish to see.” That single line was the contract for our lifetime.
When I tie it on, I’m afraid that even with eyes closed my mouth will fall open.
How heavy is your secret?
Tonight I stand in front of a mirror. I roll my tongue to check—does the taste of that day still linger? Or has only empty space remained? Outside, the city glitters like snow petals. In those lights someone swallows a truth and falls asleep.
Since that day we have never once opened our mouths. We couldn’t. The place where my brother’s eye vanished became the only room in which our family held one another—and that room had no key.
So I ask: what are you hiding now? And can you keep it in your mouth and live to the end—like us, forever?