I’m not sure about where I was born, but as far back as I can remember, I’ve lived in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was a good parental figure, she taught me some basic etiquette, she read to me, she fed me. I have not a complaint in the world about my younger years as far back as my memory stretched. Though, by the time I turned eleven, my grandma had lost a significant portion of her mental faculties, along with the majority of her sight. 

It would be unfair to say my grandma needed to be taken care of, but she no longer had much to offer me in the way of consistent, attentive parenting. At times, my grandmother spoke to me, telling stories, trying to share a bit of her wisdom, asking me about my life… she seemed almost perfectly lucid. Though, most of the time, she was virtually absent, she didn’t seem to register my presence at all. She kept on with various simple, mundane tasks, like cleaning, mending clothes, cooking, even reading, with absolutely no regard for me at all. As time went on, I had become accustomed to these long episodes, where I’d all but disappear from existence, occupying a sort of purgatory, crammed between my version of reality and my grandmother’s. 

I didn’t have any friends, really. My grandmother lived in the country, the sort where you don’t have many neighbors, and the few visitors we did have, they didn’t have or they didn’t bring any children along with them. I’d never really been involved in any of my grandmother’s affairs with the townspeople, and I normally found something away from all the fuss to busy myself with. So, it’s almost like they had never met me, like I’d never met them. Between my grandmother’s episodes and the mutually nameless strangers, it seemed that sometimes I was suspended in a pseudo-reality. How long can one go without any acknowledgment until they cease to exist entirely? 

*  

When I asked her once, my grandma told me she had never known anything about a goblin, but I’d seen it many times. I don’t remember how old I was when I began to feel its presence, but for a time I felt that the goblin was always accessible if I were to venture into the garden and look for it. It was quite petite, and somewhat grotesque, having a crumbled up face and thick, stubby horns, but it was rather cute in the way that a toad could be considered cute. The goblin didn’t well occupy the binary of the sexes, it was as if it materialized from another realm, or from nothing at all. The goblin seemed to be very much alive and communicated as a human would. 

It appeared as if the goblin’s sole driving force was nothing more than to stir things up for me. In these days, I was quite alone, so in spite of all the inconveniences often caused by mingling with this goblin, it felt as if I had no other outlet for socialization. So, it became the norm, really it was all I knew for a time.

*  

It was a dewy morning. I chose a book from my grandmother’s library and flipped through the first few pages. Although I didn’t particularly love to read, it was one of a few pastimes that was always available to me. My grandmother had an extensive collection of books, but was seldom in the right mind to be asked for recommendations. So, I always just pulled a book off the shelf at random. It felt like I never chose the most exciting books, but I believed I must have chosen each one for a reason, so I tried my best to read at least a bit of every book I picked out to see if I could take something from it. 

This particular morning, I chose a book about Korean mythology. I’d skimmed a number of books on Greek and Roman mythology but naturally didn’t know much in the way of Asian, much less Korean mythology. The introduction told of written accounts in Korean mythology, stories of the foundings of the various regions in Korea. They were regarded as historical in nature, but contained elements of fantasy, the line seemed quite blurred. Often families had origin stories of a similar nature. Along with these long since documented tales, there was also the shamanic oral tradition of mythology, which included tales that varied by region but often shared central ideas and major details. The stories were presented as something like theatrical performances, to be watched and experienced in the moment, but as of recently, they could also be found in written form. After skimming the introduction, I picked a tale at random to read.

There once was a poor woodcutter in a small village in Korea. He would venture into the forest in search of wood most mornings. On this particular morning his search took him deep into the forest, where the sun barely filtered through the thick canopy. Here, the woodcutter encountered a dokkaebi, a trickster of sorts, who gifted him a wooden club and told him that the club would produce golden coins if he hit the ground with it. The woodcutter took the club and hit the ground with it. Sure enough, this produced golden coins. The woodcutter thanked the dokkaebi profusely and took the wooden club back with him. 

Excited by this new ability to use the club to produce gold coins, the woodcutter descended into a greed fueled chaos, hitting whatever he could find with the club. The dokkaebi returned to scold the woodcutter for his behavior and confiscated the club, effectively returning the woodcutter to poverty. 

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Filled with regret, the woodcutter sought out the dokkaebi and eventually found him in a sacred temple, where the woodcutter bowed at his feet and pleaded for forgiveness. Moved by this show of repentance, the dokkaebi offered the woodcutter the opportunity to win back the magical wooden club by undertaking a series of physical and moral tests. The woodcutter succeeded in completing these challenges and the dokkaebi, now satisfied by his efforts, returned the club to the woodcutter. Promising to use the wooden club for good, and to leave his greedy ways behind, the woodcutter returned to his village a changed man. From then on, the woodcutter used the wooden club to uplift his neighbors and contribute to the overall well-being of his village and its people, finding that true wealth lies within the goodness bestowed upon the world around him.

*  

The goblin didn’t have a name, or never spoke of one. So I just called it, Sir. I didn’t see the thing as gendered but I figured better sir to a ma’am than ma’am to a sir. In that way it became like a male, though I have no confidence that he was one. On this day I became curious to see him, for no particular reason, and I sought him out in the garden. It was something of an old fashioned garden. Roses, gardenias, an array of perennials and vining plants that had the tendency to become overgrown. Not much in the way of edible plants, save for a bushy rosemary plant that left a heavy scent in the air long after the bush was rustled by a mild breeze. It was here, near the rosemary, that I encountered the goblin on this day, and often. 

“Sir,” I greeted him politely.

“Hello, madam,” he shot back with a touch of mockery in his tone. “You know what they say about rosemary?” He added, more gently. 

“I’m not sure I do.” I answered. 

“They say it can benefit the memory. I doubt you have much trouble remembering things at your ripe young age, but perhaps one day you will remember the things I’ve shown you. You’ll remember for no reason other than that the scent of rosemary lingered nearby every time we met.”

I thought about this. 

“And what if I forget anyway?” I asked. 

“You’re in no position to be forgetting things.” 

I suppose that was right. I hadn’t accumulated enough memories by this time. My brain was like a multistory parking garage with only a couple of occupied spaces. 

*  

I never once spotted the goblin inside of my grandmother’s house, but he must have been inside on at least a number of occasions. On one occasion, I woke up and entered my grandmother’s library, only to find all the books had been rearranged. My grandmother had a convenient system for organizing her books, and having skimmed a number of books in her library, I had become familiar with it. So, it was easy to see that all the books were out of order. My grandmother was in the middle of a long novel, which I noted earlier, upon seeing a thick book, bookmarked less than halfway through, sitting on the coffee table near her reading chair. This meant I had some time to rectify the situation. 

I spent the whole morning and much of the afternoon attending to this task. My grandmother was in the midst of one of her episodes, wholly unaware of my presence, and was busying herself in some other wing of the house, after which she would likely return to her book. 

My grandmother’s house was no mansion, but it was fairly large. It had a wooden frame with large stones set in between, held together by something like concrete. The kitchen was expansive and open, and it shared its atmosphere with an equally substantial living room. The two rooms shared a border lined by a great, long kitchen island that ended just before a moderate sized dining room table, which was sort of tucked away near a large window. The living room contained a small, old tv that was seldom connected to programming, a lengthy couch, an oval shaped central coffee table, and another smaller round coffee table positioned next to my grandma’s worn, yet still very plush, easy chair. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one for my grandmother, one for me, and one for our nonexistent guests. Walking through the guest room led to a nondescript wooden door, and on the other side of it was the small, but adequate library. The library was composed of shelves lining three of the four walls, there was a narrow, manually moveable ladder, and a tiny sofa, which comfortably sat one and a half people. 

I worked as efficiently as I could, reorganizing the books, and was assisted immensely by my familiarity with my grandmother’s system. I was able to finish by the late afternoon, which was plenty early given that my grandma was none the wiser to the now resolved predicament. When I finally got downstairs, my grandmother was preparing dinner. She must have snapped out of her episode because she greeted me softly upon entering the living room. I noticed her bookmark had moved quite a bit, she had to have read something like fifty pages since I last checked.

After that, I began looking for ways to lighten my grandmother’s housework. She never sat down to read until all the chores for the day were finished. She never asked anything of me, and often she wasn’t lucid enough to realize I had helped her, but I noticed her bookmark made its way through her books with a newfound swiftness.