by Michael Moon for the Autumn 2025 issue
That’s what people are calling them now, Ledgers, those lost souls seeking transformation in the simple act of standing alone on the ledge of a tall building, bringing their thoughts to the very brink of willing their legs into taking that last leap into the void and letting gravity take its course; just standing there though, not actually jumping, maybe feeling out the empty space with an outstretched leg like dipping a toe to test the water’s temperature, and relying on your sense of balance, thoughts similarly poised, contemplating the fall without safety nets and nothing to hold onto, but finally without falling, though the possibility of falling all along was integral. There have been unfortunate reports of sudden gusts of wind turning Ledgers into unintentional Jumpers, but that’s the risk any Ledger must be willing to take when confronting their reason for being.
Luckily for Jacob, it was a warm, windless night. The pink moon rose over Manhattan and broke into a million shards against the Hudson River’s endless, unquestioning rush to the sea. He gave the moon one last, almost loving look before climbing down off the ledge. He slid open the heavy balcony door just wide enough for his trim figure to slip through and closed it behind him when the fluorescent overhead light flickered on, replacing the moon with a reflection of his room.
“What were you doing out on the balcony, honey?”
“Oh you’re up. I thought you were asleep.”
“So?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Oh yeah? So tell me what I’m thinking.”
His mother, standing five feet tall in slippers, was studying him from the doorway over her reading glasses. She adjusted her bathrobe waiting for him to respond, not taking that last step before she’d technically be in his room.
“You’re thinking I was out there smoking cigarettes,” he ventured, substituting what he worried was really on her mind with a lesser misdemeanor.
“And were you?”
“No, Mom. I was just getting some fresh air. The moon’s out. Come look, it’s really big.”
She leaned her head to look past him out the window and acknowledged the pink moon with an appreciative grunt. “Go to bed. It’s late, and we have church in the morning.”
“You might even say that it’s your particular collection of flaws that make you uniquely qualified to accomplish what God has put you on this good earth to do.”
Jacob covered his mouth as if to stroke the beard that his face was still too young to grow, failing to suppress a long and drawn out yawn that his mother noted with a stern look of reproach. Indicating the reverend with a characteristically subtle tilt of her head and bulging of her eyes, she mouthed a command for him to pay attention.
“…so that when you find yourself standing before our heavenly Father, giving an account of your life, weighing your good deeds against your sins, you may stand tall with dignity over a life well spent in pursuit of the good rather than cowering in the corner with shame. Let us pray.”
After mass, he made his way down to the basement cafeteria where volunteers like his mother were laying out a simple lunch of bulgogi, assorted jeon, spicy tofu stew, kimchi, and white rice. Chelsea’s older sister was back home for spring break ladling out the stew, and Jacob smiled shyly as he asked for another scoop he didn’t really want, just to say something to her. He spotted the group of church friends he’d known since middle school assembled around their usual table in the far corner of the room. They made space for him without interrupting their discussion of a ledgers incident at Chelsea’s school.
“Off the school roof?” Michelle asked incredulously.
Chelsea nodded.
“Were you two close?” Ted wanted to know.
“No, not that close, but we shared some of the same friends and sat next to each other in AP Physics.”
“Are they sure it wasn’t suicide?” Julia wondered, looking around the table.
Chelsea shrugged, “There wasn’t a note.”
“I’ve tried it.”
All eyes turned to Jacob. They stared in disbelief as he skewered a fish jeon with his chopsticks, dipped it in soy sauce seasoned with sesame seeds and chopped scallions, and popped it into his mouth whole, adding a spoonful of rice when the fish was half masticated, then a spoonful of tofu stew when the rice was. He’d hardly finished chewing before they began peppering him with questions.
“Just last night. It was my first time, kind of a spur of the moment thing really. I thought my Mom was asleep, but she almost caught me…. Once you pry open the possibility of falling, you enter into this heightened state of receptivity, like you become so open to anything you have no choice but to be very honest with yourself if that makes any sense…. No, I didn’t think about how it might affect anyone else. It didn’t even occur to me until after I’d climbed off the ledge how selfish it’d be. When the future’s foreclosed, only the past is real and the present becomes like a dream…. I thought about my Dad, about his body wasting away in a hospital bed, how I should spend more time with my Mom, and be a better son. It couldn’t have been easy for her raising me alone.”
Just then he turned to see his mother stand and bow to the other parishioners at her table. She caught his eye and indicated the door with her chin. He flashed her an okay sign.
“That’s my cue,” he announced to his table, noticing for the first time how quiet Chelsea had gotten.
He quickly polished off the remaining protein on his plate, gulped down an entire glass of cold barley tea, and stood to return his tray, raising an elbow by way of farewell. His generation of Korean-Americans didn’t bow to each other.
His mother was silent on the car ride home. Sensing something on her mind, Jacob ignored his church friends’ texts about ledging to ask for her thoughts on the reverend’s sermon. She continued staring out the windshield as if she hadn’t heard him.
“Mom?”
She sighed and turned off the radio.
“I have stomach cancer,” she confessed without preamble, staring down the road in front of them as he looked up at her uncomprehendingly. She had on a new, lime green floral print dress and was wearing the white leather driving gloves he’d always for some reason associated with nice southern white ladies, and for a moment, he didn’t seem to recognize her. “It’s early, so there’s nothing to worry about. The only reason I’m even telling you is because you’ll have to start driving me to chemotherapy after school on Wednesdays for the next six months.”
“Wait, so what are you saying? That when you were in the hospital last month, it wasn’t to remove your appendix?”
“What appendix?” she smiled weakly, taking her eyes off the road momentarily to look at her son. “Now don’t start crying. I just told you there isn’t anything to worry about. The doctors are optimistic about my case. They removed part of my stomach and a few nearby lymph nodes is all. Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m ready to fight this.”
…
His mother retired to her bedroom for an afternoon nap as he stepped out onto the balcony, remembering with shame his climb out onto the ledge the night before motivated by dumb curiosity. Personal transformation, yeah, right. It made his knees weak just imagining climbing back over the guardrails, standing with the toes of his slippers a couple inches past the edge, and staring down at the blue bottom of the drained pool forty-seven stories down on the seventh floor, the question flickering briefly in his brain whether his body would crash right through to the parking garage on six. He resolved that if his mother was willing to fight, then he would too.
He responded to the church friends group chat full of remorse, forcefully arguing against ledging, but as he would discover the following Sunday, not forcefully enough. Chelsea wasn’t at church, but her parents, older sister, and younger brother were all seated on the chancel.
“It is with a heavy heart that I share with you a great tragedy that has befallen our congregation.”
Jacob listened to the sermon without hearing a word, lost in the morning light filtered through stained glass, which taking on an almost liquid quality, suspended his thought motes like the densely dusty mixture of dead skin cells, hair, and clothing fibers from every member of the congregation. Instead of heading down to the cafeteria after service, he approached the pulpit hoping for a private conversation. He wanted to unburden himself of the guilt he felt over Chelsea’s fatal ledging, but the reverend was fully occupied with the family in mourning.
He wasn’t hungry and, not wanting to face his church friends, went out to wait for his mother in the parking lot instead where he sat on the hood of their beige and beat up oldsmobile. He shimmied up the hood and leaned back against the warm windshield. Overcome by a sudden fatigue, he felt too tired to keep his eyes open. He closed them and, crossing his arms, imagined the conversation with the reverend that he’d wanted to have.
He wanted to hear the reverend remind him of how his namesake had wrestled an angel and won, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he too had merely fallen victim to a pernicious and dangerous social media challenge, but couldn’t make it sound convincing on his own. He must’ve fallen asleep at some point because the next thing he knew, his mother was back in the driver’s seat, beeping the horn.
“Let’s go, sleepyhead.”
He didn’t tell anybody anything. He only told his coach that he’d have to start skipping practices on Wednesdays, and when asked why, lied about a part-time job, remorse over which made him consider looking for an actual part-time job after discussing the pros and cons with his mother. He avoided mentioning how uneasy he’d come to feel asking her for money and hadn’t inquired into how they were still paying for things, but promised to keep up his grades even though she hadn’t spoken a single word in protest. He quit the track team and found work at the mall selling t-shirts that infringed on various corporate copyrights. The coach had handed him a new pair of sneakers out of the trunk of her car calling it a parting gift from the public schools department of athletics.
His mother came home one summery day later that spring wearing a pixie cut wig, explaining that the chemo was causing her hair to fall out, even though he hadn’t asked. He’d already researched what to expect, which tempered his alarm when he’d begun noticing her hair thinning out several weeks ago. He told her the wig looked good, using words like stylish and natural even.
“It’ll grow back once treatments stop,” she seemed to reassure herself.
A feeling of pity swelled in his stomach as her life’s story suddenly unfolded from a single look: she married young, birthed two daughters, moved to New Jersey as a nurse, had a son, then lost her husband, then her daughter, then her other daughter, which led to nightly glasses of whiskey and muffled sobs behind locked doors, and finally to stomach cancer at which point her immigrant’s tale had caught up with her life here and now, turning on the kitchen stove to cook dinner. It was the first time he’d admitted to himself that this could be how her story ended, and the admission afforded his first insight into the nature of time, that what made time seem so precious was precisely its lack.
He looked up from his homework out the window to see not one, but two Ledgers standing statuesque on the roof of the building directly across the street.
Fucking gargoyles, he thought and half considered shouting it from his window, but seized by a sudden concern, he got up to check on his mother instead and found her asleep in front of the TV again, wig comically askew. He returned with the blanket from her bed and draped it over her.
“Move,” she mumbled in her sleep as he adjusted the blanket, then commanded more forcibly, “Get out of the way!”
He couldn’t be sure if she was having a nightmare and remained frozen in place, weighing whether he should nudge her awake, but she just rolled over onto her side and buried her face in the back of the sofa. When she didn’t say anything else after a few moments, he reached for the remote to turn off the TV. She’d been rewatching Ghost, a movie that happened to come out the year his father died about a murdered banker whose ghost returns to save his girlfriend from his murderer through the help of a psychic. He never watched the movie all the way through, but had caught enough of it here and there whenever his mother had it on to remember the sadness he’d felt when she once confessed it was her favorite movie.
He looked out the window, but the Ledgers were no longer there, which only added to the dark cloud of free floating anxiety that had been following him around for weeks. He returned to his room, thinking of what he’d pray for if he’d still believed in prayer. He’d pray for his mother’s cancer to go into remission, obviously; he’d pray for Chelsea’s family to find strength in one another to go on living; he’d pray for peace on earth and prosperity for all. But to whom, or what? The prayers he said for his father and older sisters went unanswered, but then again, he’d never expected them to be. He’d never really understood religion, and if it hadn’t been for his mother’s insistence, he’d have stopped attending church years ago. Where people went when they died interested him far less than where the living went when someone close to them died.
He couldn’t go live with his grandmother. She was in a nursing home, which he hadn’t visited nearly often enough. There were the families of his two aunts and an uncle on his father’s side, but he’d lost touch with them not long after his father died. Some falling out with his mother remained a mystery to him, but he could never really relax around them anyway. The relatives they had back in Korea were even more distant. The last time he’d visited with his mother was the summer after eighth grade shortly after the funeral. He couldn’t even imagine asking any of his friends to stay with them. It was too much. As was turning to ask his mother sleeping in the next room what would happen to him. In less than two years, he’d be off to college and living in the dorms. He felt miserable with himself for negotiating a more modest prayer pleading for just two more years of life for his mother.
And then he heard the sirens.
…
Both Ledgers he’d seen the night before had become Jumpers, whether they’d intended to or not. His high school principal gathered everyone in the auditorium and spoke for over two hours on the deleterious effects of ledging, calling it a sad flirtation with death that eroded our communities. News reports started calling it a global pandemic, citing grim statistics taken from major metropolises around the world.
He returns home after school to find his mother sliding the balcony door shut behind her.
“You’re home early,” she says a little too loudly, smiling to conceal her surprise while casually tucking her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants. “I thought you had work today.”
“No, someone asked to switch shifts so I’m going in tomorrow instead. What were you doing just now out on the balcony?”
“Just getting some air. How was your day? Are you hungry? I’m thinking a spicy broccoli and chicken casserole.”
“Sounds great, Mom.” As she walks past him to the kitchen, he thinks he catches a whiff of cannabis and follows her in. “We had an impromptu school assembly today. The principal talked about ledging.”
“Ledging, what’s that?” she asks innocently and starts humming Unchained Melody softly to herself, as if having immediately forgotten her own question, and he listens to her for a while, gazing at his mother like he did that pink moon and noting both were equally high. But if she wants to hide it from him, he’ll let her think she was doing a good job.
“Just some dumb social media challenge. Kids stand on the ledge of a tall building for ten minutes then post about how it changed their life or whatever. Like I said, pretty dumb.”
“Oh, right.” They both fall silent at the same time, each recollecting Chelsea in their own way, though he hasn’t really stopped thinking about her ever since her fatal ledging. Now she rotates through his day to day thoughts more frequently than ever before, even more than the older sister he’d always liked more had when his attraction felt most acute. “What do they think about standing there?” she wonders almost to herself.
“I don’t know, all sorts of things I suppose. Things they wished they’d done or not done. A lot of people post about how transformative it is having your life flash before your eyes, and what it might mean for your story to end right then and there. They might wonder, did the story reach its natural conclusion or was it cut short before the climax? It’s supposed to induce this kind of out of body sensation where you’re able to see your life from both within and without.”
“Have you tried it?” she asks carefully, but his silence gives him away. “When?”
“Before.”
“Before I told you about my cancer?”
“Yes.”
“Oh baby, no.” She said, sounding sober now. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“I just wanted to see for myself,” he shrugs, turning to look away from the pained expression contorting her face.
“What did you think about standing there?”
He honestly can’t remember. He can picture himself standing on the ledge that night, from the perspective of his mother had she been standing in the doorway behind him, but what exactly he was thinking at the time is completely inaccessible, swirling through an orbit just beyond reach of what he is able to pin down in words. All that remains is a feeling that his fragile world is unraveling.
“Life’s just hard sometimes. With Dad, Kate, and Juliet all gone, and now you sick, what am I supposed to do? Just keep going to school?”
“Yes, exactly, just keep going to school. Read your books. Meet a girl you like. Laugh at the TV or feel sad when something sad happens. Whatever you want; just keep living your life.”
“Where?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where am I going to live?” he clarifies, leaving the dependent clause when you’re gone to trail off into his thoughts.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we get there.”
That bridge would be crossed the following spring. Her cancer had worsened, spread to other vital organs, and she had to be hospitalized for inpatient care. He visited her every day after school and stayed until visiting hours were over even if she’d fallen asleep. They’d talk about their days for a bit, but mostly watched TV together, providing commentary on the action like amateur sportscasters or taking the tangent whenever something onscreen triggered a memory. On her second to last day, she kept repeating through a haze of morphine how sorry she was to him, but never answered why. Of course, he couldn’t have known and returned home to an empty apartment to catch the ending of Ghost on TV.
He didn’t climb back out onto the ledge ever again. He didn’t have to. He could bring himself to that point in his mind without the danger of actually falling. He remembered thinking that balance was the highest value in life. He’d had to firmly establish the will to remain balanced in his body so as not to plunge fifty stories to his death. He’d needed to be certain that his body had gotten the message because he would be leaving it for ten minutes to enter his memories, all of them, reimagined for greater appeal on a sensory level than reality itself, the equivalent of a self-induced trance on command.
The next afternoon, when he arrived at the hospital after school, the nurse had told him his mother was still napping so he went in quietly and settled into an armchair by the window. He began reading from the book of Korean poems he’d found lying on his mother’s bedside table back at home, which he was using to improve his Korean, which seemed to please her. As he slowly turned the pages, they seemed to whisper promises that couldn’t be kept. The room suddenly felt emptier somehow, and looking up from the poem he was reading mid-metaphor, he realized that it had in fact felt that way from the moment he’d entered, though he was only now acknowledging it. The stillness of the room was absolute. He got up to kneel at her bedside and started to pray as the stillness reclosed around him. The only thing moving in the sepulchral panorama he finds himself a part of are his lips which at last reach their Amen, and he crosses himself, then starts to get up slowly, massaging the hard ache from his knees. He stands, tears now falling from his full height, and quietly considers how to inform the nurse that his mother has just died. 🏁
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