The Lost Crimson Heart

The concrete steps leading up from the riverbank are always grey and cold, but that day they felt more like ice. Little Geum’s father had gone inside the Town Hall to sort out the taxes, and he had told her to wait on the lower landing, away from the riverside wind.

But the wind, a particularly spiteful kind that rolled off the water’s edge, had other plans. It still found the girl, biting at her ears and bringing the sharp scent of wet earth and winter frost. It snatched the red balloon from her small, tightening fingers. A perfectly inflated crimson heart, the kind she’d begged for because it was her favourite colour and shape. One second, it was anchored by a fine black thread wrapped twice around her wrist, and the next, it was adrift, caught in an updraft and carried along the rough concrete wall. Geum reached, a reflex of hope and panic, but her fingertips only brushed the tail of the string. She didn’t cry immediately, just watched it rise as a solitary spot of red against the grey sky, until it cleared the parapet and was lost forever.

When her father returned, Geum was a statue, her small hand still raised to point at the void. A street artist had been watching, and by nightfall, the child’s silhouette with her lost heart appeared on the very wall where the balloon had vanished. He called it a reminder of a moment that could never be reclaimed and, as the paint dried, the image seemed to ask if the child was reaching for the balloon or if she was letting it go.

The wall became a place of pilgrimage for others to mourn their own private losses, and the concrete remained grey and cold.