MY01cm | 두뇌훈련 워크북

The moment the front door opened, the familiar scent of home brushed against the tip of my nose. Yet, even that familiarity felt strangely distant. The living room, which had been empty for three months, was unnervingly clean, without a single speck of dust. Dad wordlessly guided Grandma to her bed and went to the kitchen to drink water in silence. I took Grandma’s damp coat and headed toward the laundry room.

Just as I was about to push the coat into the dryer, a sharp metallic sound echoed off the hard floor. I froze and looked down. Shimmering on the laundry room tiles was a silver anti-lost bracelet—the very one Grandma had cried over losing 15 years ago in our old house in Cheongun-dong.
The bracelet was clearly engraved with Grandma’s name and Dad’s old phone number. Goosebumps erupted across my skin. This bracelet had vanished forever when the Cheongun-dong house was demolished 15 years ago. So why, and how, did it appear now, in the pocket of a coat worn by a woman who had been missing for three months, looking as polished and new as if it had just been scrubbed?

I gripped the bracelet and headed to Grandma’s room. She was lying perfectly still on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were not the cloudy, vacant eyes typical of a dementia patient. They were sharp, focused, and gazing intensely at something invisible.

“Grandma, this… where did you get this? Did you bring it from Cheongun-dong?”
At my question, Grandma’s head turned slowly—excruciatingly slowly—toward me.

“That house… it hasn’t been torn down yet,” she said. Her voice was as dry as a cracked riverbed, yet it carried an eerie weight. “Cheongun-dong 12-4. If you go there, your mother is still cooking dinner.”

My heart dropped. My mother had passed away 15 years ago in a gas explosion at that very house. After the accident, our family fled that neighborhood as if escaping a curse. The site was now supposed to be a completely erased redevelopment zone. Yet Grandma spoke as if she had just stepped out of its front door.

With trembling hands, I turned on Grandma’s phone again. I tapped the most recent entry in the photo gallery. As I scrolled through the photos, a cold sweat ran down my spine.

The first photo: A forest of high-rise buildings from the present day, 2026.
The second photo: The landscape began to shift; the signs on the buildings started to look dated.
The third photo: The entrance to the Cheongun-dong alleyway, a place that should have been long gone.
And the final photo.

In that picture stood a weathered single-story house with a nameplate by the gate: ‘Cheongun-dong 12-4.’ Laundry hung on a line in the yard, and beyond it, the silhouette of a woman’s back was visible. It was my mother, who died 15 years ago. I checked the metadata of the photo. [Date Taken: January 18, 2026]. It was today.
“Dad! Look at this, quickly!”
I ran into the living room and thrust the phone toward him. But Dad’s face, upon seeing the photo, went beyond mere shock—it turned to a mask of pure, visceral terror.

“This is impossible… I signed the demolition papers for this house with my own hands. And your mother…”

Dad’s hands shook uncontrollably. It was then that a bizarre sound drifted from Grandma’s room—a static, scratching noise, like an old radio struggling to find a frequency. When we rushed into the room, Grandma was sitting up in bed, her mouth slightly agape, muttering something under her breath.

“The time has pooled. At the end of that alley, time has gathered like stagnant water. I wasn’t lost. I simply went back.”

I looked at Grandma’s wrist. The silver bracelet I had picked up from the floor and left on the desk was now fastened around her arm. No, it wasn’t just fastened—it looked as though it were fusing with her skin, wrapping around her in an unnatural way.

I looked out the window. The night view of the apartment complex was peaceful, but the house at Cheongun-dong 12-4 on the phone screen seemed to be pulsating in the dark like a living creature.

“Dad, we have to go.”
“Where?”
“Cheongun-dong. We have to find out where Grandma was for three months, and how this photo was taken.”

Dad tried to protest, but he seemed to know it too. Grandma hadn’t just brought back a bracelet and a photo. She had dragged a ‘fragment of the past’ into the present. If we didn’t seek out the source of this stagnant time, I felt as though our entire apartment would soon become as cold and damp as Grandma’s coat.

We grabbed our jackets and got into the car. As I started the engine, I entered the address into the navigation: [12-4 Cheongun-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul].

I expected a message saying ‘Address does not exist.’ Instead, the navigation replied in a mechanical, hollow voice:
“Starting guidance to the destination. Estimated time of arrival is… 15 years ago.”
Was it a glitch in the system, or were we truly headed to a realm not permitted by any map? Dad pressed the accelerator. The car left the apartment complex and began to drive toward the outskirts of the old city center, where the darkness settled thick and heavy.

In the rearview mirror, I saw Grandma in the backseat. She was looking out the window with a faint, ghostly smile. And the silver bracelet wrapped around her wrist began to flicker with a dull, red light. It was rhythmic, like a heartbeat.

When we arrived at the old site of Cheongun-dong, it should have been a vacant lot according to the map. But at the end of the alley, where not a single streetlight worked, we saw it. A warm, yellow light glowing in front of our old gate—the one that had burned down 15 years ago.
And then, the shadow of someone opening that gate and stepping out.

[Next Episode Teaser]

Episode 3: The Stagnant Table
The woman who opened the gate was my mother, looking exactly as she did 15 years ago. She spoke nonchalantly, as if we had just returned from a brief outing. “Why are you so late? The stew is going to get cold.” We are invited to a dinner table from 15 years ago, in the year 2026. What does that food taste like? And why are all the clocks in this neighborhood stopped at 7:15?