The Cat hides its Claws

The cool breeze blew. The weather was still cold, but the sunlight was warm, so it didn’t feel bad overall. During such good days, the best thing to do was to have a leisurely nap on a seat near the windows, but…

“Myohan! Let’s play soccer!”

“Can’t you see I’m mopping?”

Myohan angrily rubbed the wet mop on the floor. He did it because he was mad, but it splattered dirty water all over and he soon had to stop. Myohan’s friend Byeon Sinsul, who was wearing a T-shirt and holding a soccer ball, tapped on Myohan’s head with it playfully.

“You shouldn’t have come late, you know.”

“Oh, go away, you bastard.”

Myohan angrily pushed the ball away and placed the mop right in front of Sinsul’s shoes. He thought it would make him at least flinch, but Sinsul loved soccer and his shoes were already dirty. He just smiled.

“Okay, I’m a bastard, so start coming early to school!”

“I wasn’t late because I wanted to.”

“Of course, you never oversleep because you want to.”

“Hey!”

Sinsul took a step back only when Myohan threateningly raised his mop. He put his ball on his head and shrugged with a smile. He looked so playful and good that it made Myohan’s anger fade. He just sadly put his face on the mop’s stick. Then he sighed deeply.

“I was late because some idiot was picking on me, and now I have to be punished for that…”

“Some idiot?”

Cats slept ten to sixteen hours every day. Although Myohan insisted he wasn’t a cat, he was a cat, and he slept a lot. He was often late to school because he tended to oversleep.

“You had a fight?”

Therefore, whenever Myohan said he had come late for a good reason, his homeroom teacher immediately dismissed it as bullshit and sentenced him to cleaning the hallway for a week. Well, it was wrong to come to school by lunchtime, but he hadn’t wanted to!

“No, not that. I was chased.”

“Tut tut, you should have been nice, or you should have run well.”

“I did run well, and it took that long.”

The chase he thought to have lasted for two hours turned out to be a four-hour one. It was already afternoon when Myohan arrived at school, and since the teacher had been sick of him being frequently late since the beginning of the semester, he showed no mercy.

Sinsul clucked his tongue at Myohan, then he took all the other boys to the schoolyard. Myohan kept looking at them as they went down, not because he wanted to play soccer but because he envied their freedom.

Sandy wind came in through open windows. Cleaning the hallway wasn’t hard. He didn’t have to clean the entire hallway; he just had to clean a few meters right in front of his homeroom. The problem was that the taps were at the end of the schoolyard, and he was on the sixth floor. To clean the hallway, he had to take the dry mop to the end of the schoolyard, soak it with water, go back to the sixth floor, clean, go down to the schoolyard again to wash the mop, and go back to his homeroom on the sixth floor to put it back. He was sure he was about to lose some weight.

“Oh Myohan, you came late again?”

“You’re just hopeless!”

“You all want to die? Come here!”

His classmates chuckled and passed by, patting his hair. The class president even gave him a can of soda. He looked down at citronade he would never buy with his own money, and then recalled the class president’s name was Yuja, which literally meant citron. Well, he certainly did live up to his name.

“Teacher, I’m done.”

After mopping the floor absent-mindedly, it was all clean and shiny. Now it was time to go to the taps to wash the mop.

“Oh, really.”

He really didn’t want to do it. He wondered if he couldn’t do it in the toilet and looked, but there were already some students who had carried out exactly the same idea being punished there. Now he had no choice but to utilize his useless cat abilities. He slowly walked to the end of the hallway. Then he looked around. Luckily, there wasn’t anyone nearby, and when he looked down, the ground was empty as well.

Now he didn’t have to hesitate. He opened a window wide and threw the mop to a tree. He could just jump, but the mop could be broken. The mop fell, bumping into branches, and safely landed. Myohan checked it and stood on the window sill.

It was most certainly faster than walking down. It was just a little, no, pretty dangerous, and he was going to be in big trouble if anyone caught him. Myohan looked down. It was dizzily high, but he wasn’t afraid. He narrowed his eyes to see there the mop was. Then he jumped, just like he had had when he jumped up to a wall to run away from the man earlier the day. He jumped lightly like a cat and easily landed on the ground. He patted his pants and shirt to check if there was any damage. He stood straight and tried jumping. He couldn’t feel any pain. His legs were fine. Feeling pretty good, he picked up the mop and looked up to the window he had just jumped from.

Then his eyes narrowed. Someone was looking down at him here. He tried to see who it was, but the shadow disappeared. It couldn’t be good, but Myohan just shook his head and moved. Maybe his eyes had been wrong. He just couldn’t wait to wash that mop and go home.

The man didn’t show up after school finished and he arrived home. He thought while he took a bath. Now to think about it, he had so many questions he hadn’t been able to ask. Like how he had found Myohan, how he had found out he was a cat, how did he know about the twelve zodiac animals, and why he was asking him instead of anyone else.

“What kind of idiot is he…” Myohan muttered as he dried his hair with a towel, of course not expecting an answer at all.

“First off, I’m not an idiot.”

Chills crept up on his back. He wanted to scream, but he was way too shocked that he couldn’t utter a word. Every streak of hair on his body rose in tension. He froze, right there, with his hands on his cheeks. The man appeared in front of him.

“I didn’t know you’d be so surprised.”

Shit. Myohan cursed silently. He could hear his own heart beating like crazy. He just blinked, completely frozen, and the man just shrugged to see him like that.

“So easily scared, just like a cat.”

“Shit.”

Eventually he said what he had in mind. Myohan was in his home’s living room. The door was locked. The only entrance was the huge window of the biggest bedroom, but there was no way anyone could enter a window on the 20th floor, unless they knew how to climb walls. What kind of lunatic would do such a dangerous thing just to break into someone’s home?

“It doesn’t matter how I came in here. Well, let us sit down and talk.”

The man sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs and looked at Mohan, as if it was his home. Yes, maybe he could do such crazy things.

“How do you know where I live?”

Myohan sat diagonally from the man with the towel still on his head. But the man just shrugged and didn’t answer his question. Myohan was grateful that at least he wasn’t rude enough to demand a cup of tea. It was so confusing that it felt so…unreal.

“Well, have you thought about it?”

“Whatever. How did you find me? No, more than that, how did you get in?”

“Cats are—”

“If you are about to say cats are so curious, just answer my questions. And how did you find out I’m a cat?”

The man looked so surprised that Myohan was saying what he wanted to say. Now he felt like answering. He leaned down to put an arm on the table. Then he stared hard at Myohan.

“You look like a cat.”

Myohan wanted to tell him to stop joking, but he looked too serious that he missed the chance to say so. Myohan reclined on the sofa and tilted his head backwards, letting out a heavy sigh. Of course, it wasn’t entirely wrong to say he looked like a cat. With his pale but stretched-up eyes and pale hair, Myohan looked quite sharp, and anyone would have said he looked like a cat. But in that sense, at least ten million out of fifty million Koreans had to be cats. The man read the mood and spoke a little warmer than before.

“Okay, I’ll give you a chance to ask questions. I promise to answer them seriously.”

“How do you know me?”

The man blinked as if he couldn’t understand the question.

“Oh Myohan. Cat. Eighteen years old. That’s all I know about you.”

“Then you know almost nothing about me. How do you know that I’m a cat?”

“I just know.”

Another game? Myohan glared at him, a lot irritated. Despite it, he seemed quite solemn.

“I just know. I know when I see you if you are a cat or any other animal.”

“Then you can recognize other animals when you see them?”

“Roughly.”

“Then you can find them alone. Why do you want my help?”

“Because you’re the cat.”

The conversation was going nowhere. The man was not giving any answers despite his promise to give serious answers.

Myohan was tired of dealing with him and pulled down the towel to cover his eyes. He couldn’t see, but he could feel the man’s gaze fixed on him.

“A long, long time ago, a god spoke.”

The man suddenly started telling a story. Myohan had heard it before.

“To announce he would give huge rewards to animals who came to meet him in the morning of the new year. The cow, who wasn’t good at running, left for the god’s place on the day before early in the morning, and the clever mouse climbed up on its back for a free ride. The cow arrived at the palace by dusk, but as soon as the gate opened, the mouse ran to enter the palace first. So the cow got second place, and the tiger, who could run hundreds of kilometers without resting, came in third. The rabbit who was good at running but took a nap during the journey got fourth place. The dragon, the only animal who could fly among them, came next. The snake was the sixth, horse the seventh, followed by the sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig.”

“But that’s a legend. A myth.”

“Yes, it’s a legend. Because in this story, the cat is hated by the god for being fooled by the mouse.”

“Whatever,” Myohan muttered, but the man went on calmly.

“There is a different version. Once upon a time, there lived a lonely god.”

He seemed to be joking, but Myohan didn’t have the energy to stop him. He just closed his mouth and let him continue.

“This god had twelve good subjects he liked. The god gave each of them the name of the animal he looked like as his last name. Then he divided the day into twenty-four hours and gave two hours to each of them. They all choose the hours they liked, but one man, who looked like a cat, couldn’t choose a time.”

Myohan pulled down the towel to meet eyes with the man. He was still staring at Myohan. His dry voice continued, “The god pitied him and gave him the power to control the other twelve.”

His black eyes swayed with emotions which were hard to name.

“That’s you, cat.”

The man’s lips curled up softly. Myohan narrowed his eyes to see him smile, and then he spoke in a trustworthy voice that wasn’t like him.

“That’s why I need you.”