Won-pyung Sohn

Mom raised her voice for me, turning the police station into a madhouse, with the clamoring of a parent who’d lost his child and a parent who’d found hers.

“Granny, why do people call me weird?”

Her lips loosened.

“Maybe it’s because you’re special. People just can’t stand it when something is different, eigoo, my adorable little monster.”

That was because I was always different from other kids—different from birth even, because:

I never smiled.

At first, Mom had thought I was just slow to develop. But parenting books told her that a baby starts smiling three days after being born. She counted the days—it had been nearly a hundred.

My eyes were too deep and calm to be those of a child’s.

He’s just more fearless than other kids.

Mom held my hand and took me to a bigger hospital. That day is the first memory carved into my brain.

“The kid in this photo is crying because his mommy is gone. How would he feel?”

Not knowing the answer, I look up to Mom sitting next to me. She smiles at me and strokes my hair, then subtly bites her lower lip.

The oldest among them hands me a blurry black-and-white photograph, saying that it’s the inside of my head.

Mom thought that if I ate a lot of almonds, the almonds inside my head would get bigger. It was one of the very few hopes she clung to.