I grew up without a name.

I was slow to speak compared to other children, so instead of a name, they called me “mute.”

My sister never worried about it. Worry? Not a chance. She never even thought to teach me how to read or count.

We had drifted in from somewhere else, and to the people on the island, we were strange. Especially my sister—if you were being generous, you’d call her eccentric. In truth, she was just mad. She drank soju all day, and when she ran out, she took it out on me.

One dawn, after beating me until I blacked out, she dragged me along the ground and shoved me off the breakwater into the sea.

Saltwater rushed into my throat in choking waves.
I couldn’t breathe.
I was too afraid to even scream.

As the rough waves tossed me around, I heard the crashing in my ears—that sharp, slapping sound.

The same sound my sister made when she struck my face.

I hated the sea for echoing it.

Everything around me was pitch black. I didn’t even know how far I had drifted from land. By the time the sound of the waves began to fade, the strength drained from my body, and I started to sink beneath the surface. I couldn’t even open my eyes.

It felt just like when she beat me.

When she hit me with her hands and stomped on me with her feet—if I cried, she hit me for crying; if I didn’t, she hit me for not crying. She would beat me senseless until I collapsed onto the stone pile in the yard, or slammed into the filthy wall of the outhouse.

By then, I wouldn’t even be able to open my eyes.

I was stupid.
I didn’t know how to avoid it.
I didn’t know how not to get hit.
I didn’t even know I could push her away and run.

I didn’t know anything.

But I knew one thing.

I didn’t know what it meant to die—but I knew I had to live.

I pushed against the sea with both arms and kicked against it with my legs. When my face broke through the surface, the breath I had been holding burst out of me.

I crawled back onto the breakwater and lay there.

Dawn was mercilessly blue, and soon the red sun began to rise.

My hands and feet trembled. I still couldn’t properly open my eyes—they had been torn when I struck something on the way down.

I went back home.

My sister was asleep, drunk.

That day, I learned two things.

How to swim. And that this woman could not possibly be my sister.

After that, I went out to the sea every day. It was the only thing I could do.

I still couldn’t even write my own name.

Not just that—I didn’t know my name, how old I was, or even the name of the island I lived on.

But before I came close to dying, I learned something else—what I was good at.

My body floated naturally in the water. Swimming felt easier than walking or running on land.

Whether I paddled forward or floated on my back and kicked, I always moved ahead.

The moment I woke up, I would run to the sea and dive in. Whether it was hot or cold, I swam. Even on days of heavy rain or strong winds, the waves never carried me away—I always made it back to shore.

My skin didn’t burn much under the sun, either. And as I spent less time on land, I grew taller—until there was no one on the island taller than me.

As time passed, I started looking for ways to earn money. I gathered whatever I could from the sea and sold it.

It was enough to live on. So my sister stopped scolding me for going to the sea instead of school.

Even at fifteen, I was slow to speak, and she would still slap and hit me whenever she felt like it. But if I brought back abalone from the sea, she wouldn’t hit me that day—even if I answered slowly.

Because of abalone, life felt… bearable.

If it weren’t for that, I probably would’ve been beaten to death long ago.

My sister always came along when I took the abalone to the market. She came to collect the money.

“His father told me he was just a mute child I’d picked up from a basket—nothing more than a helpless lump of flesh back then.”

“Ah, like he wouldn’t already know that?”

My sister hated gossip, so she spoke more bluntly instead.

“Can’t you tell just by looking? We don’t resemble each other at all. He knows I’m not his real sister.”

The people at the market looked startled, glancing at me with cautious eyes. I said nothing and simply held out the abalone.

“That mute fool should be grateful I kept him alive this long—so now he dives for abalone for me. You women can’t even catch them yourselves. So if you know their worth, hurry up and pay.”

“She’s really gone mad, that one. How does that poor boy even live?”

I didn’t need their pity. Not a single one of them had helped me when I was being beaten.

“You really didn’t know? If you were my real brother, I wouldn’t have thrown you into the sea. What kind of crazy woman does that? And if you’re curious about your father, don’t ask me. It raises my blood pressure.”

I wasn’t curious.

The only thing I cared about was what the sea would look like when I opened my eyes in the morning. Nothing mattered more than that.

When she was drunk, this was how she spoke—rambling endlessly, her words slurred but sharp enough to cut.

“Even a b*stard like your father married a madwoman and ended up with something like you. And when you turned out useless, your father threw you away. Hah… a worthless mute. And you think I have any reason to raise you properly? Be grateful I didn’t abandon you. No matter what I do, don’t you dare resent me.”

As I grew older—big enough that she could no longer control me with force—she turned to something else. Words. Cruel, relentless words. Most of them were curses, flung at me like poison, along with bitter resentment toward the man and woman who had abandoned us both.

My father had fallen for a café waitress. When he learned she already had a daughter, he claimed he had a child too and suggested they combine their lives. In time, he convinced her to leave everything to his grown daughter.

In the end, my father and that woman ran away together.

What they left behind was debt—and me.

Debt and children… both only grow heavier with time.

If anything, she must have come to hate me even more. Debt could be ignored, pushed aside—but I stood right in front of her, growing bigger with each passing day. I must have been unbearable to look at.

Between the two of us, it was hard to say who was more pitiful.

“If you had just died, things would have been easier for both of us. But you’re stubborn enough to keep living, so I have no choice but to raise you. Don’t you think you should at least understand my situation?’”

“Then why didn’t you kill me?”

There was something else I really wanted to ask.

“They say I picked up some mute lump of flesh from a basket.”

How did everyone in the village know that she had tried to kill me?

I had clearly crawled back up onto the breakwater on my own.

“I did try to kill you! I threw you into the sea! But you got caught in a cabbage net and came back up—and even when I threw you against the rocks, you still wouldn’t die! Disgusting b*stard.”

I was too young to remember; I was still nothing more than a newborn when she threw me into the sea.

Washed back to shore, I was soaked in saltwater.

I couldn’t swim at all, but I didn’t drown because a cabbage net caught me.

The islanders used to lower nets full of cabbages into the sea to soak them in saltwater for making kimchi. I became tangled in one of these nets and it was this that prevented me from drifting away.

Everyone in the village knew at a glance who had abandoned the child.

And that wasn’t the only time my sister threw me into the ocean.

“She’s my brother. He’s all I’ve got—so do whatever you want with him. K*ll him or let him live.”

She only ever called me her brother the day I was dragged away by thugs and forced to leave the island for the first time.

I didn’t understand why until I boarded the boat to the mainland.

“Unbelievable… You threw that poor child into the sea, made him dive for abalone to earn you money—and now you’re using him to pay off your debt? Are you even human? You wretched woman! You deserve to be struck by lightning!”

I was taken in her place for the crime of not dying.

I worked as if I were destined to die, surviving on scraps and eating whatever garbage I could find.

I never returned to the sea.

I never touched the waves again.

Instead, I lived wishing that every ocean in the world would dry up and disappear.

The nauseating, salty smell never left me.