Episode 1. Winter in a Glass Jar

The Season Archive was on the second basement level beneath a closed botanical garden. No one could find the door during the day. The glasshouse had been demolished ten years earlier, and the place where the revolving entrance had stood was now occupied by a municipal notice board and a rack of bicycles. But near midnight, a hairline crack appeared in the concrete wall behind the rack. If you slipped a finger into the crack and knocked three times, the wall opened inward.

Haejin was the person who opened it. Her official title was season archivist. When people brought in seasons they could no longer bear to keep, she sealed them inside drawers and glass jars set to the correct temperature. An early summer returned after a breakup smelled of wet grass inside a plastic pouch. An autumn deposited after a funeral crumbled in a thin envelope like old chrysanthemums. One person wanted to forget the first snowfall forever. Another said a spring in which nobody had waited for them made the house impossible to breathe in.

The archive had three rules. First, seasons could not be sold. Second, only the depositor could reclaim them. Third, a dead person’s season could not be opened without the family’s consent. Haejin kept the rules pinned above her desk and doubted them a little every day. If a season had been surrendered in order to be forgotten, was reclaiming it a rescue or a punishment?

There were no more visitors that night. Haejin had just lowered the temperature in the vault and closed the ledger when the old delivery chute in the wall gave a low ring. No one used the brass passage anymore. When she shone her flashlight into it, a small wooden box slid out. It was tied with an old white cord, and the label carried handwriting she knew.

To Haejin.

Below it, in smaller letters, was one more line.

My last winter.

For a long while, Haejin could not move. Her mother had died four years ago. While alive, she had never liked the archive. "Once people start storing even their seasons," she used to say, "there will be nowhere left to put a heart." Yet the handwriting on the box was undeniably hers, down to the hurried pressure of certain strokes and the slight rightward lean at the ends.

Inside the box was a glass jar small enough to fit in one palm. Snow was falling inside it. Each flake disappeared just before touching the bottom, then appeared again near the top, and a thin frost silvered the inner wall of the glass. The moment Haejin lifted it, pain flashed across her palm as if the skin had frozen. At the same time, an old smell rose from it. Cold medicine, a damp scarf, pear syrup boiled through the night.

It was the winter when Haejin had been ten and bedridden with fever. The season in which her mother stayed awake for three days wiping her forehead. Haejin had believed she remembered it. But when the jar touched her hand, she understood. She remembered only the outline of events. The room’s temperature, the tremor in her mother’s fingers, the frost flowers that formed on the window before dawn had been quietly removed.

A scrap of paper was pasted to the bottom of the jar.

The city’s spring has not yet been returned.

Haejin opened the ledger again. Her mother’s name was not on the deceased archive list. Instead, one special loan record from ten years earlier remained in red ink.

Borrower: Yoon Seorim.
Item: 17 unclassified seasons.
Return date: none.

Haejin heard every refrigerated drawer in the archive begin to tremble. It sounded as if the sealed seasons had recognized the winter that had just come home and were all drawing breath at once.