The Jumping Festival

Tae-woo stood on the ledge behind the Dora Observatory's row of binoculars. No one paid him any mind since he was long dead. Tae-woo looked more like an outline, his body becoming opaque, waning like his spirit. Had he not found a living relative, Tae-woo could only get this far. A European tourist standing right under him, using the pair of binoculars between his legs, yelped when he found the propaganda village. Tae-woo swung his foot through the tourist's head. He bent over and farted in his face. The tourist crinkled his nose and waved his hand, probably wondering where the odd smell came from, perhaps it was the wind coming from the landscape ahead. Tae-woo hated the people who visited the DMZ. Folks from all around the world who got a cheap thrill from the proximity of being so close to North Korea. Tae-woo was close too. He couldn't fall forward. He could never breach the DMZ no matter how many occasions he tried.

When he died, Tae-woo woke up outside of his body, panting and clutching his heart after having fallen through the chair in his booth. In the final years of his life, he worked as a parking attendant in a lot for a nearby megachurch where people paid weekly for their tickets into heaven, a fare to get out of the garage. Tae-woo's body slumped over the controls for the gate arm. A driver nearest the booth screamed at Tae-woo, believing he had fallen asleep while drivers in the far back honked at the hold up. Dying was painful, if only for that moment. He tried to slip back into his body by molding his new form into its former. He swatted at his head—his hand passed through. He would have preferred nothing to this.

Tae-woo exited the booth and walked through the gate arm, figuring this meant he could walk back home to the north which, upon first arriving to the DMZ, proved false. At the border, his face smacked right into an invisible wall.

In a second attempt, he generated some momentum from a far enough distance, believing he could run right through.

A magnetic force repelled him upon impact, in a burst that sent him flying further back each time he tried to run faster.

He pounded on the wall and sobbed. The wall only invisible until he came into contact with it, vibrating with an electric ripple from each impact that seemed to sting the wall and Tae-woo both. Tae-woo wondered if the family he left behind all that time ago had ever tried to do the same: if they ever went down, near where he stood then, to find him. Tae-woo knew he had been long forgotten, and rightly so.

This didn't deter him from trying. After all, he believed they were all dead at this point, and if not, he could at least spend his time searching for an indication of how they had lived.

His first wife. His son.

But he was weak. Most ghosts from South Korea, their spirits fed, could interact with the physical world if strong enough. Tae-woo spent months walking along the DMZ to get acquainted with the wall. When light hit the wall from a certain angle, it shimmered the faintest blue. On the day Tae-woo could've sworn he saw a bird fly right over what looked like a line at the top of the wall, he asked a new friend, Young-sik, to join him on an excursion. Young-sik was from South Korea. Moved by Tae-woo's determination, he entertained Tae-woo's theory that the wall had its limit.

Young-sik picked up a rock, Tae-woo's eyes widening as it lifted off the ground. Young-sik braced himself to throw it like a shot put as high as he could.

The rock barely made it above their heads and landed with a thump, dropping like Tae-woo's heart.

After years of trying to find an entry...