Cursed Bunny

Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive.

For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts.

Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.

Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession.

When he reached his house, the villager saw that the part of his trousers that the young man had grasped was glinting with gold. With some other people from the village, he went out after sunrise to the place where he had seen the boy, but the mountain trail was only muddy from the melting snow, and of the golden boy and the man with his belly split open, there was not a trace.

The crouching boy had looked up at the villager who approached him. The boy’s eyes held no emotion. Without a word or change in expression, he took out another cold-hardened lump of gold from his father’s belly and put it in his mouth. When the boy opened his mouth, the villager spotted sharp fangs like that of a fox or wolf.

It was the body of a young man. The boy had ripped open the man’s stomach, dipped his hands into him, and taken out a golden lump, which he was ravenously eating.

The son did not even appear at his twin sister’s funeral.

It was a sound almost loud enough to bring the roof of the house down.

Seeing his pale and passive daughter together with his son, who now stood between them, sparked a suspicion in his mind that he immediately refused to acknowledge consciously. Instead, he stormed out of his daughter’s room.