“Before I knew it, the sun was setting. I returned to the nine-family house where by now my secret had surely been long exposed. I took a few deep breaths in front of the gate. I could only think about not wanting Mom to beat me with briquette tongs. But as I walked on the step-stone bridge across the ditch in front of the house, nobody paid any attention to me. When they should all have been surrounding me, consoling and pitying me, they acted instead as if nothing unusual had happened: strolling by with cooking pots, laughing with their hands over their mouths, talking congenially, and gathering by the common water faucet in the front yard to rinse rice. That included Mom, who was there cleaning up dried radish leaves. She saw me; but she didn’t even give me any grief along the lines of ‘Where have you been? You missed lunch!’ I was seriously baffled. They could have all been in on this together, to confuse me even more. I snuck a peek at the outhouse where I had oh-so-casually put up the snowman. There was nothing. The snowman had been completely wiped out. Of course, also nowhere to be seen was the pickle jar, whose hideous appearance should have been on full display. What on earth could have transpired?”