The Author of Apologies

The Author of Apologies

They send me the ones who still bite.

By the time a returnee reaches my office, the sharpness is usually gone, sanded by cold rooms and fluorescent hours until even grief is obedient. The biters hide their teeth—behind the molars, under the tongue—like a seed that might sprout if it ever finds sun. Those are assigned to me. I am Mina, whose signature appears below the brave new words prisoners speak into microphones. I don’t lie for them. I arrange.

My office is a cube with a sealed window looking into the corridor, where men with notebooks drift by to be seen and to write that they have seen. A kettle hums on my desk. It glows red when it believes in itself and clicks itself off like a cheap machine proud of its discipline. The barley tea sachets were slipped to me by a woman in Procurement with a wink: flavor as contraband, friendship as a form that passes inspection.

Today’s folder reads SEO/LA in careful script. Female, late teens. Border apprehension near Hyesan. Parents deceased. Two siblings: unaccounted for. Caught within meters of foreign soil. The photograph is a passport rectangle: a face that hasn’t learned yet how to wear safety.

The guard knocks and enters before I answer. Respect is a performance; timing is part of the costume.

“Comrade Instructor,” he says. Two men seat the girl in the chair with the wide arms and leave the door open as if air were evidence.

“Hello, Seola,” I say. “I’m Mina. We’re going to write your Statement of Return.”

She stares as if I invented winter.

I pour two cups. Steam threads the air, thin as handwriting.

“Tea?” I offer.

Her hand rises and stops, the gesture arrested mid-confession. I slide the cup anyway. Heat opens the small gates in the shoulders; I watch for the drop.

“We’re on a schedule,” I say. “There’s a ceremony this week. You’ll stand on a stage and explain what led you astray and how you returned to the correct path. It’s collective healing.”

“Together?” Her voice is raw.

“I’ll help you find the words.”

“Will you help me find my brother?”

I stir my cup. “When you read your Statement, people will see your sincerity. It will be a first step toward trust.”

She mouths the word as if it were foreign currency: “Trust.”

“Our sentences carry weight for a reason,” I say. “We begin with gratitude. You admit confusion. You explain hardship. You blame yourself, not the state.”

“Lie,” she says.

“Calibrate,” I answer. “There’s a way to speak that keeps you alive.”

Her gaze sharpens. There it is—the tooth.

“Alive for what?” she asks.

“For later,” I say before I can stop myself. “Later is a place the clever keep in a pocket.”

“Where is your later?”

“I’m here,” I say with the smile they train for such moments. “You’re here. Let’s survive together.”

I set a fresh page on the desk and print at the top: STATEMENT OF RETURN — SEO/LA.

“Tell me about the river,” I say.

“Why?” Her fingers cup the heat as if guilt could be warmed away.

“Because we must mark where you lost your way and the moment you turned. Audiences respect crossings.”

“You mean you need something true to nail the lies to.”

“I mean truth is a lake,” I say. “You can’t carry it. You drink.”

Contempt moves across her face like a shadow of a bird. Or hunger. I prefer hunger; it asks to be fed.

“The water sounded brown,” she says. “The guide told us one at a time. A man ahead rushed and went to his thigh. He swallowed his cry. My brother looked back. I told him not to. I said, don’t look at anyone, look only at—”

She stops. I can see her questioning her next move.

“You’re making it easier for yourself,” I say. “We’ll borrow your words. We’ll build a story that isn’t a lie but an arrangement. Your scaffolding; my planks. When you stand, you won’t fall.”

She studies me as the poor inventory rooms: kettle, pen, watch, woman. Then, with the smallest tilt, she asks, “What did you look at when you crossed?”

The pen kicks in my hand. I don’t lose my smile. “Careful,” I murmur. “Someone may bring you back without those teeth.”

“What did you look at?” she repeats. Her voice is a hand on a door.

I take a sip to occupy my mouth while memory crosses the room without permission. “The pitch,” I say. “There’s a line where the current sounds like air. I looked at that.”

We sit inside the silence as if it were a tent we both know has a leak.

“They want me to accuse the river,” she says. “They want me to say it betrayed me. If I say that, I become someone who abandons people and blames water.”

“You are that person for twenty minutes,” I say, sharper than I mean to. My tongue remembers concrete, bamboo, a cup rattling like a bell in a hand. “Then you are fed. The trade is ugly, but it is a trade.”

She holds my eyes, then looks down at the page.

“Try this,” I say, writing slowly so the words carry their own gravity: I WAS FOOLED BY THE IDEA THAT THE RIVER COULD TAKE ME SOMEWHERE I DESERVED TO BE. “No accusation—only confession. It has the rhythm of humility.”

She murmurs it. Again. Again. The tremor arrives; she catches it and smooths it flat. I nod.

“Give them the shake and its suppression,” I tell her. “They love to see control restored.”

She looks at me as if I’ve confessed something indecent. “How do you say things like this,” she asks, “and still—”

“And still be a person?” I supply. “Begin again.”

We work the bones of the Statement. Gratitude first, then hunger, then the tidy transfer of blame from the world to the self. I teach her to breathe on commas, to pause on we, to look up on together. Language as choreography; survival as timing.

Between pages she asks, “What is arrangement?”

“A way to place weight where it won’t break the bone,” I say.

“And truth?”

“A lake,” I say again, because some sentences are both doctrine and wound. “Drink what you can. Leave the rest.”

She repeats the gratitude paragraph. Her voice is learning to wear sincerity like a dress that fits only when you stand very still.

The hours wear thin. The kettle keeps its own rhythm—clicking on, clicking off—as if the room itself is rehearsing obedience.

Seola finishes another page and lays the pencil down with too much care, as though paper could bruise. She looks at the margin, where I’ve scribbled fix cadence.

“You forgot gratitude,” she says.

“It comes after hunger.”

“You still forgot.” Her finger taps the letter t. “You cross them low. Like someone in a hurry to finish their work before the teacher sees.”

The remark is a knife slid under the skin. My breath stalls. I glance down: she’s right. The cross sits halfway up, a habit from before—before correction, before the mat and the cup, before they taught me my hand was not my own.

Heat pricks the hollow of my throat.

“You’re observant,” I say. My voice is mild.

She leans back, studying me not like a student watching a teacher but like a thief mapping a room. “You don’t sound like the others,” she says. “When they speak, it’s as if they’ve swallowed stones. You sound… like you’re remembering.”

“Remembering is dangerous.”

“So is forgetting.”

For a moment, silence thickens. The kettle hums again, red light blooming. I force myself to break the weight of her gaze.

Then the guard’s shadow passes the window. A few moments later, he opens the door without knocking. “Break,” he says, his voice flat. He takes Seola with him, no explanation. The kettle ticks itself off, leaving me in a silence that tastes of metal.

When she returns, she doesn’t look at me. Her face is blank in a practiced way, as if someone has reminded her how to wear silence. She sits, folds her hands on the table, and waits for me to speak.

“Read the river line,” I order.

She obeys: “I was fooled by the idea that the river could take me somewhere I deserved to be.” Her voice catches, then steadies. Perfect.

“Again,” I say. “Until it feels less like drowning.”

She repeats it. The tremor arrives, then flattens. She’s learning to smooth her voice into the shape of survival.

“You see?” I tell her. “The trick is not to erase yourself, but to fold. You fold until no edge shows.”

She sets the paper aside. “And when the folding is finished?”

“Then you survive,” I say.

She studies me for a long time. “Or you disappear.”

The words hang in the air, and I can’t tell if they’re accusation or prophecy. Maybe both.

I busy my hands with aligning pages, my old reflex. But my eyes betray me, flicking again to the low cross of the t. It’s a scar I never corrected, a fragment of handwriting that belonged to a younger body that once thought escape was possible.

Her mouth tilts—half recognition, half warning.

The knock is precise, a punctuation mark closing the sentence we’ve been writing.

“Comrade Instructor,” the guard says, stepping aside for a man whose jacket gleams with newness. He smells of paper and polish, as if he’s walked out of a freshly printed page.

“How did it go?” he asks, his smile already rehearsed.

“She’s ready.”

He turns to Seola. “Comrade Seola, stand.”

She rises, not stiff with fear but careful, like someone remembering choreography.

“Tell the Instructor what you told me earlier,” he says.

So there it is — the silence she wore when she came back from her sudden “break.”

Seola keeps her eyes forward. “She forgot gratitude in the third paragraph,” she says, her voice a polished surface.

He beams. “Perfect. The reflection is consistent.”

Turning back to me, he adds, “You have a gift.”

The compliment strikes like glass. What he values is not my writing, but how well others see themselves in the mirror I hold for them.

The kettle clicks alive, red eye glowing in the glass of the window.

“Drink your tea,” I tell her.

---

Evening air presses damp against the small auditorium. The red banner above the stage shouts what banners always shout. Uniforms fill the rows, shoulders squared, notebooks open. Cameras blink like patient eyes.

She stands on the stage, a slip of a figure dwarfed by the microphone. Her new shoes squeak on the boards, each sound sharp in the empty room. I sit in the aisle, the echo of her voice arriving to me like something carried over water.

I sit five rows back, center aisle, where I can see both the stage and the exit. My hands rest still on my knees. They must look ordinary.

The presider, a man with a practiced voice, delivers remarks about vigilance, healing, gratitude. The audience nods in rhythm. Pens scratch as if already writing the outcome.

Then: “Comrade Seola will now share her Statement of Return.”

She steps forward, small in her borrowed clothes, dwarfed by the microphone. Her shoes no longer squeak. She inhales and finds her mark.

“I was fooled by the idea that the river could take me somewhere I deserved to be,” she says.

The tremor arrives, precise as we rehearsed. Then she steadies it. The room approves.

Hunger. Gratitude. Contrition. She speaks the paragraphs like a series of doors opening, each one admitting her further back inside. Tears gather obediently, brim but do not fall. The wipe of her hand signals recovery, control restored. The audience exhales.

But then, a pause. She looks past the presider, past the notebooks, straight toward the aisle where the man in the new jacket stands half in shadow. Her chin lifts a fraction higher than rehearsed. To the audience, it looks like dignity. To me, it’s defiance hiding inside posture.

“For what happened to my brother,” she begins, “I blame—”

Time cracks open. A world where she names the river, or the border, or the men with their pens. But the crack closes, swift as a hand.

“—myself,” she says. The pause gives the word weight. The notebooks approve.

The presider smiles. “A model confession. Proof of our people’s strength.” Applause follows, warm but rationed. Generosity is never encouraged.

Seola bows, lower than we practiced. Not collapse. Not quite decision. Something that unsettles me because it looks like both.

She leaves the stage flanked by guards, her eyes searching the rows until they catch mine. The contact is brief, but in it I feel the line of water, the place where the current shifts pitch. Then she is gone.

The presider closes the ceremony with more gratitude, more vigilance. Cameras blink. Pens finish their notes. Chairs scrape, boots scuff. The audience disperses, leaving the red banner alone to keep watch.

I remain seated a moment longer, my palms flat on my knees, waiting for the air to settle.

That’s when the hand falls lightly on my shoulder.

“Comrade Instructor,” says the man in the new jacket, his voice smooth as silk. “A word.”

He leads me not back to my office, but to a smaller room behind the auditorium. The smell of dust and paper hangs heavy, as though the walls themselves have been written on too many times. A single table waits, two chairs, a folder already placed at the center.

The guard shuts the door. Silence seals.

The man gestures. “Please.”

I sit. My body obeys faster than my mind.

He opens the folder, spreading the pages with care, and turns them so they face me.

My name is printed at the top. STATEMENT OF RETURN — KIM/MI/NA.

For a moment I don’t breathe. It is my handwriting on the notes, my cadence in the sentences, but polished, copied clean. Gratitude. Hunger. Contrition. And the river, always the river. It looks like me, but only the part of me they trained to reflect.

“We’ve admired your skill,” he says softly. “Now we’ll admire your sincerity.”

The pen gleams as he sets it on the page. “Begin with the river.”

My throat closes, then opens. The words come unbidden, the same I pressed into Seola’s mouth:

“I was fooled by the idea that the river could take me somewhere I deserved to be.”

The tremor arrives. I hear her voice steadying mine the way I steadied hers. For a moment I don’t know if I am teaching or being taught — only that both of us are folded.

“Excellent,” he murmurs. “Continue.”

I move through hunger, gratitude, contrition. Each word a stone placed carefully into its slot. Each pause a survival rehearsed. Seola’s gaze lingers in my memory, watching me now as I watched her. The knowledge curdles in my chest: she was only rehearsal. I am the performance.

When I finish, he nods. “Your signature, please.”

I lift the pen. The metal is cool, like touching a mirror. I sign. My hand betrays me: the cross of the t sits low, halfway up. A mark from another life.

He notices. His smile sharpens but does not fade. “Charming,” he says. “Consistency is important.”

The folder closes with a hush, as though sealing a coffin. “Thank you, Comrade Instructor. We knew you would serve as an example.”

The guard opens the door. The corridor waits. Notebooks drift by like fish behind glass.

Back in my office, the kettle wakes again, red eye glowing, obedient to its circuit. I pour water over the last sachet, hold the cup in both hands.

The tea tastes of barley and dust and patience. Not confession. Not gratitude.

Only the river.

Only the fold.

The only truth left to drink.