Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

Eyes wide open yet seeming not to see the waking world

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything.

She’d thought she’d come to terms with the idea of dying, yet something about death itself, the various forms it might take, still disturbed her.

But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years—that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.

But after that summer when she was eighteen, the summer of the fountain, no one said such things to her anymore. Now she was twenty-three, and loveliness was what was expected. Loveliness in the form of apple-red cheeks, of comely dimples expressing delight in life’s brilliance. Yet Eun-sook herself wanted nothing more than to speed up the aging process. She wanted this damned, dreary life not to drag on too long.

But after that summer when she was eighteen, the summer of the fountain, no one said such things to her anymore. Now she was twenty-three, and loveliness was what was expected. Loveliness in the form of apple-red cheeks, of comely dimples expressing delight in life’s brilliance. Yet Eun-sook herself wanted nothing more than to speed up the aging process. She wanted this damned, dreary life not to drag on too long.