A small mouse appeared in the middle of a pedestrian crosswalk at an eight-lane intersection. It wasn’t very young, but its fur was sparse and its color pale, so it seemed like it had just started venturing out on its own.
People waiting for the crosswalk signal discovered the mouse one by one and exclaimed. The women repeatedly said, “Oh my, what to do?” The mouse, standing near the center line, had not yet been hit by passing cars, but it looked precarious.
“Stay still,” someone shouted, but the mouse took small steps. Perhaps the mouse, with its tiny body and low field of vision, could not see the cars rushing menacingly from afar. When the mouse hesitantly moved toward the center of the intersection, the pedestrian light turned green.
People began to cross, and at the same time, the cars that had stopped at the intersection began to move as they received straight signals in both directions. The exclamations of the women crossing the crosswalk, their anxious eyes fixed on the mouse, intensified.
The mouse stood still, as if nailed to the spot, just short of the center of the intersection, looking around. As if it had sensed that people were saying something to it.
At that moment, a white SUV, the first to start after receiving the signal, passed right over where the mouse was standing. The women screamed, and the men sighed softly.
Where the white SUV had passed, there was the mouse’s corpse, mangled beyond recognition. As a black sedan following behind was about to pass over it, people, as if by agreement, turned their gaze away. As if they absolutely could not bear to watch any longer.
People saw each other’s faces, their hearts aching at the life of a single mouse. With a sense of poignant emotion, they silently hurried on their way, each pondering a question. They could not understand why the death of a mere mouse, an animal that they would even trap and kill as a pest, weighed so heavily on everyone’s hearts. They could only think that the Creator had designed them to feel that way in advance.
Suddenly, a certain National Assembly member who commented on their younger sibling’s death with an indifferent face on a YouTube broadcast came to mind. The death of a deputy chief of a certain politician’s secretariat, and the suicide by hanging with a showerhead in the bathroom of a long-time aide of a National Assembly member who was a former leader of the comfort women movement, also came to mind. Posts from someone who said that the left should all die and from someone who said that the right should all die flashed through my head. I also thought of someone who said that a certain percentage of the population should be reduced for everyone to live prosperously.
If they had seen the mouse at the intersection together, they would have also felt anxious. Being born with such hearts, what on earth steals their souls and allows them to push other people into the middle of the intersection?
Was it the desire to be better than others? Was it the desire to be the only one to survive? Was it the desire to have more good things? Whatever it was, after concluding that they were undoubtedly things no different from devils, I recalled the mouse at the intersection and sighed. What kind of world are we living in?
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