Written by Park Hyo-mi / illustrated by Choi Jung-in

Hangyul is punished for not having brought a hand mirror as assigned. He did bring his grandfather’s old mirror, but is too embarrassed to show it. Standing in the back of the classroom, he wants to play with the mirror in his pocket. He uses the mirror to reflect the light, and all of a sudden, the reflected light swells up over the teacher’s head, like a word balloon. Even more astonishingly, strange words appear in the balloon. The words are actually the teacher’s inner thoughts. With this, Hangyul’s class goes up in an uproar.

I dug into my pocket and fumbled with the hand mirror. The smooth handle and the bumpy carving of the dragon head had a nice feeling to them. The kids were making a fuss, holding their mirrors up to their notebooks, and the teacher was bent over her desk, looking for something. The sun shone brightly into the classroom.
Without thinking, I took out the mirror from my pocket and held it up to the sunlight. The mirror reflected the light and created a round, white beam. As I held up the mirror and turned it this way and that, the round beam of light floated up in the air. The white beam floated around over the wall above the teacher’s head for a while, and suddenly, it swelled up. The white beam, swelling up like a transparent balloon, was creating something else in the process. I stared at it till my eyes nearly popped out. What I saw were words in grey. My heart was thumping as though it would leap right
out, and my hand, holding the mirror, was quivering.
Where did it go? Where did I put it? Oh, why isn’t it here? Wait a minute who was in charge of cleaning my desk? Really, these kids! “Hey! Did you see that? There was something weird there” At this, the teacher looked up all of a sudden. Startled, I covered the mirror with one hand. The white beam, the grey words, all disappeared.