The house was quiet when Varen opened the door. Caffrey had been in charge all day, and the furniture was still where Varen had left it. A little daylight still reached the room, enough to see without turning on the lights. The street noise fell away at the entrance.
He slipped off his shoes and stood there for a moment. He was home, but the voices from the café and his parents’ house still felt as though he had left them somewhere outside.
Thump thump thump thump.
Caffrey was already thumping her tail against the door.
“Been good?” Varen asked. Her thick Labrador tail was a surprisingly effective weapon. He bent toward her, ready to rub her ears, but Caffrey gave his knee one quick upward nudge with her head and turned away. Greeting complete. Varen was left with one hand still in the air. “That’s it?” he called after her. Caffrey didn’t look back. He lowered his hand and followed her inside. He wished he could make an exit look that effortless.
He dropped his bag and sank onto the sofa. The day’s tension settled on him in layers, heavy as wet cotton. Joon’s eyes at the café, the familiar arguments at his parents’ table—everything came back out of order, overlapping before he could make sense of it.
Caffrey had already stretched herself across the floor. She lay flat on her belly, legs stretched out in every direction. She looked perfectly comfortable. The position looked ridiculous. Varen watched her from the sofa. “That comfortable?” he asked, not expecting an answer. Caffrey opened one eye, then closed it again. He laughed. “That’s exactly how I feel today.” His eyes moved toward the desk.
“Oh, right. The book.”
He walked over to the desk, pulled out the chair, and turned on the computer. The monitor cast a pale light across the desk. He rested his hands on the keyboard without typing. The house was quiet enough to hear Caffrey moving on the floor.
The day’s scenes began coming back to him. Joon’s eyes kept moving across a page without taking anything in, the cold cup sitting untouched beside his book. At his parents’ table, the old argument had started up again between bites of rice and the turning of newspaper pages. They were different scenes, yet Varen sensed the same thread running through both.
Varen typed a line he had said to Joon at the café: That wasn’t your book. He stared at the words on the screen. They had sounded right across the café table, but now he had to figure out what he meant by them.
“But then… what was it?” he muttered.
He tried another sentence, read it once, and stopped. It was too smooth. Sentences that explained themselves too cleanly always felt strangely distant to him.
At that moment, Caffrey shifted positions again. She rolled slightly onto her side and stretched herself out once more, adjusting her body several times without doing anything else, simply searching for a more comfortable position.
“If you choose comfort…” The sentence stopped there.
He left the sentence unfinished. He was trying to write about choice, not hand out the right answer. Joon’s face came back to him. Perhaps the young man was caught between a future his parents understood and the uncertainty of choosing his own way. Maybe that was why he kept returning to the same page.
Caffrey got up without warning and walked toward the desk. Before Varen could move his feet, she settled her weight across them, making herself comfortable. The sudden pressure made his hands stop. He tried pulling one foot away, but Caffrey only shifted slightly, as if improving the spot for herself.
“Hey…” She didn’t move. “You don’t think this is right either?” In the end, Varen slid his foot sideways and began typing again.
‘Choice isn’t a calculation. It’s… something you have to take responsibility for.’
This time, he didn’t delete it.
He read the line again, his hand resting beside the keyboard. It was less polished than the others, but he didn’t reach for Backspace. Something was still missing. He typed another sentence beneath it.
‘Choice is not about selecting from what has already been given to you.’
That wasn’t wrong either. It made sense. It just didn’t feel like a story. The words on the screen still felt like dry formulas floating across the blackboard of an engineering lecture hall.
“This isn’t a novel,” Varen muttered with a bitter smile. “It sounds like my old lecture notes.” He pressed Backspace repeatedly, watching the sentence disappear one letter at a time. Behind him, Caffrey began scratching behind her ear with a hind leg. Varen watched her for a moment and laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know either. I think I get it, but…”
He looked at the screen again. He couldn’t quite move forward, but he couldn’t leave it alone either. Finally, he scratched his own head with both hands.
He looked at what remained on the screen. He could have kept rearranging the words, but he leaned back instead. For now, he left them alone.
Caffrey had stretched out on the floor again, even more relaxed than before. Varen looked at her and nodded. “Looks like you’ve adjusted.”
Varen looked at the unfinished sentences on the screen. A grin spread across his face. “Oh! You don’t have to choose only from what’s there. You can create another possibility.” He glanced at the screen again. “Still… it’s only a draft.”
He glanced toward Caffrey. She was still sprawled across the floor, lazily tapping her tail.
“Ohhh. So you approve.”
Caffrey got up and took her place by the front door. She waited until Varen pushed himself out of the chair. “Yeah. I should walk too.”
When he opened the door, cold air hit his face. Varen flinched, then opened it wider. Caffrey went out first, and he followed.
The alley had grown quiet. Most of the noise from the daytime had already drained away, leaving behind only occasional sounds—a passing car in the distance, footsteps, the faint clink of metal from somewhere unseen. Varen walked slowly. Joon’s book and his father’s newspaper crossed his mind once more, but he let them pass. Caffrey had stopped to investigate something beside the wall. He waited for her.
Varen followed Caffrey down the alley without trying to think of anything else.
Tonight, that suited him just fine.
— The Cult Leader —