Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  The woman’s voice trailed off as she gazed into the distance.

  Screech. The bus came to a stop. The older woman quickly came to her senses. “Oh, my goodness, where am I?” She quickly pressed the stop buzzer and frantically looked out the window. “Look, you’ve got to make it through this! And I’m sure the child’s father will come back someday.” The older woman got off at the next stop.

  She, too, eventually got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home lost in thought. Calling up the newspaper, she demanded they stop running the ad. Then, she turned off her phone and tossed it into a drawer.

  The fetus in her womb, despite having reached peak weight, would occasionally tremble or squirm, but it never kicked or gave her the impression of really being alive. Her anemia worsened. She could see the fetus’ movement on the ultrasound but not feel it herself. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with her otherwise. Aside from telling her to hurry up with finding a father, the obstetrician had nothing much to report. She became so large that even other pregnant woman felt uncomfortable in her presence. But what did it mean for the baby to not grow “properly”? She thought of the hostile glare of the obstetrician with the thick makeup. If she needed a father for the baby for its proper growth, what could explain the size of her stomach now? Hadn’t she simply been scared by a few words of a doctor—some young woman with a nasty personality? Had she been so focused on finding a father for the baby that she hadn’t thought enough about what the baby really needed? Regardless of its growth, whether it had a father or not, the baby was hers and hers alone, in the truest sense. “Live only for the child.” Those words didn’t completely cleanse her of her worries and anxiety, but she could at long last feel herself calming down as she repeated them.

  For the first time in what felt like forever, she felt ravenous. She wanted to eat something delicious for the baby. She jumped up from her seat.

  When she opened her eyes again, she was lying on the floor.

  Why am I lying here?

  She managed to sit up. It took some time for her to gather her wits.

  The anemia. I must’ve fainted when I got up.

  She felt around the back of her head. There was a large bump. It began to scare her.

  She felt a warmth between her legs.

  Did I wet myself when I fainted? This is so embarrassing. I better clean up before my family gets home.

  This time, carefully, she got up from the floor. She carefully crossed the apartment to the kitchen, picked up a rag, and slowly wiped the floor with it. The warm water continued to gush as she wiped the floor. A bit of red came up with the rag.

  She went to the bathroom. Her underwear was soaked in red. Judging by the smell, the warm liquid was not urine.

  It can’t be …

  She opened the pregnancy guidebook the obstetrician had given her. “Call the hospital if any of the symptoms below occur.” One of the items was “If a clear liquid keeps coming out (if your water broke).”

  Her stomach suddenly hurt. The pain ebbed and flowed over her like a rapid tide.

  With shaking hands, she called the obstetrician. The back of her head began to throb.

  A young nurse picked up the phone, who upon the mention of fainting and anemia and water breaking began to panic. There was now hemorrhaging, and her stomach hurt.

  “Look, I’m all alone at home, what do I do? My head keeps hurting from when I bumped it—”

  “We’re sending an ambulance! It’ll be there soon! Don’t move, stay on the floor!” The nurse quickly confirmed her name, address, and phone number. “Don’t leave your house! The ambulance will be there in a flash!”

  The ambulance was indeed there in a flash. The doorbell rang and she opened the door to a group of tall men who rushed in, put her on a gurney, and loaded her onto the ambulance. Another man was standing by outside to help bring the gurney in.

  She immediately recognized him. “Um … hey …”

  The man’s eyes also widened in recognition. He started to say something, but the other men shoved her in before she could hear him. The man quickly shut the door and ran to the driver’s seat. He started the engine.

  The journey to the hospital was a nightmare. The vehicle shook, the siren was loud, and the paramedics constantly measured, prodded, and questioned her. She had an IV stabbed into her vein, a blood pressure cuff on her arm, and a cold stethoscope traveling across her belly. The back of her head felt like it would split in half from the pain, and she felt a strong urge to throw up. But her labor pains did not return.

  Despite the lack of pain, the fetus in her belly was becoming more and more active. As if making up for months of inactivity, it now seemed as if it was about to somersault out of her womb; she could imagine the baby knocking against the walls of her uterus screaming, “I want to be born, I want to live, find me a father!” The paramedics kept asking if she could feel the contractions and at what intervals. She kept answering that she had no contractions and began to fear that there was something wrong with the baby, a fear that became a dark cloud that grew larger and larger and soon enveloped her whole. She grabbed a nearby paramedic and begged him to be the baby’s father. Just then, waves of pain overtook her as she moaned and hugged her stomach.

  The ambulance suddenly stopped. The driver urgently pressed down on the klaxon.

  She shouted the driver’s name. She got up from the gurney and crawled toward the driver’s seat.

  “Please be my baby’s father!” she begged her first seon date. “It’s not too late! The baby is about to be born! Please help me! It’s not too late …”

  The ambulance driver stuck his head out of the driver’s seat window and shouted, “Hey, asshole! Get out of the way! This is an ambulance! We’ve got a pregnant lady with a concussion!”

  The paramedics dragged her back onto the gurney and laid her down. The ambulance started moving again. It ran red lights, jumped lanes, and sped past countless cars, zipping by at manic speed. They finally arrived at the hospital, where she was carried out of the ambulance. The man who had been her first seon date restarted the engine and gave her a reluctant last look through the rear-view mirror as she was rolled into the emergency room. The ER confirmed the concussion was fairly light and sent her on to the delivery room.

  The delivery waiting room was full of other women with bellies as big as Namsan Mountain, some clinging to their husbands’ arms and screaming that they were going to die while others were nonchalantly walking about, quietly sobbing, or conversing with nurses. As for her, the fetus was threatening to burst out at any moment and her body was slowly cracking open with each kick. Pain engulfed her. As it subsided, she was left with a pounding headache that felt like her heart was in her skull. The nurses urged her to walk if she wanted the baby to come out quicker, but her headache was so intense that she couldn’t even sit up. She lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling until her eyes became sore from the white fluorescent lights. Her head pounded to the beating of her heart. She felt her head inch away from her body with every beat and slowly float up toward the white ceiling. But it was then yanked back whenever she felt another wave of pain that twisted her like a wet rag. The alternating contractions and headaches lulled her into an eerie sense of calm as her vision was flooded with white light.

  The intervals between contractions became shorter and the pain unbearably long and violent. The nurse examined her and said she was ready for the delivery room. Still rising up like a balloon and being jerked back with each wave of pain, she clung to her belly as she walked into the delivery room and hoisted herself upon the delivery table. She could vaguely hear the surreal counting of the doctor as she pushed on cue.

  Again. And again. And—

  A lump slipped out between her legs, or rather, flowed out. She felt a wonderful relief in her belly.

  She lay there quietly, waiting to hear the baby’s cries.

  Everything was silent.

  Neither the doctor nor the nurse moved. No
one spoke.

  She barely managed to whisper, “What is it? Is it … dead?”

  There was no answer.

  “Is the baby dead?”

  Terror and despair pierced through her blinding-white senselessness and throttled her. She looked about the room and struggled to sit up. A nurse gently took the baby from the doctor and handed it to her.

  The “baby” was a black and red, slightly iron-smelling, enormous blood clot.

  “What is this?” she asked as she looked around at the doctor and nurses, propping herself up with one arm and holding the baby with the other. The blood clot against her breast was warm.

  “I said, what is this?”

  “It’s a baby,” snapped the obstetrician. Her face was half-covered with a surgical mask, but her bright blue eyeshadow and pitch-black eyeliner were unmistakable.

  “This … this is a baby?”

  “I told you to find the baby a father. You were the one who left it to grow without one. This is what you end up with!”

  The doctor’s voice was cold, and her eyes seemed to say, This is all your fault.

  The blood clot squirmed.

  She flinched.

  “The baby is looking for its mother,” said the nurse softly, the one who had handed her the “baby.” “Now it’s looking at the mother. Look back into its eyes.”

  She could feel the blood clot looking at her as well. But she couldn’t tell where exactly the eyes were, or quite frankly, where its head ended and its body began. Confused, she turned the blood clot about, examining it.

  The “baby” kept squirming and suddenly began to shudder. The black-red clot very briefly shone transparent and crystalline, like a blood-colored jewel.

  The next moment, the “baby” disintegrated into a pool of liquid blood.

  Her hand and chest soaked in blood and her arm still curved from when she had held the baby, she stared down mutely at the ruined front of her gown and the puddle of blood in the middle of the delivery table.

  The delivery room door slowly opened. Her first seon date, the ambulance driver, hesitatingly entered the chamber.

  “You can’t be in here,” said one of the nurses.

  “Oh, I’m … I’m her guardian. Well. Not yet her guardian, but …” He turned to her and stammered, “C-could it be possible if I were your guardian now? I-I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too late …” His words trailed off as he finally read the room and realized she was covered in blood. “Uh … that isn’t …?”

  She slowly, mechanically turned her head and stared blankly at the man’s confused face. Then she turned, again slowly, with difficulty, to the dripping puddle of blood on the bed that had once been her baby.

  She covered her face with her bloody hands and began to cry. Sobs at first, soon escalating into full-on wails. Whether they were tears of relief, sadness from losing the baby, or of something else entirely, she herself couldn’t tell.

  Cursed Bunny

  Grandfather used to say, “When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.”

  And the lamp, shaped like a bunny rabbit sitting beneath a tree, is truly pretty. The tree part looks a bit fake, but the bunny was clearly made with love and care. The tips of the bunny’s ears and tail are black, as are its eyes, and the body a snowy white. Its material is hard, but its body and pink lips are crafted to look soft to the touch. When the lamp is switched on and the light shines upon it, the bunny looks like it’s about to flick its ears or wriggle its nose.

  Every object has a story. This object is no exception, especially as it’s a cursed fetish. Sitting in an armchair next to the bunny lamp, Grandfather tells me the same story he’s already told me time and time again.

  The lamp was made for a friend of his.

  It is forbidden to make a cursed fetish for personal use. Also according to family tradition, it is forbidden to curse any handmade item. These unwritten rules have been passed down for generations in our family’s line of work: the creation of cursed fetishes.

  This bunny, however, is the only exception.

  “My friend’s family were alcoholic spirit artisans,” says Grandfather. He always adds, “Do you know what spirit artisans are?”

  I know, of course. I’ve heard this story many times, but Grandfather never gives me a chance to say so.

  “You might call his family business a distillery now. Back then, it was the biggest distillery in the region. You can’t find a family business that makes such spirits these days, but my friend’s family once had a great big factory that employed most of the people in my neighborhood. In those parts, everyone in our community looked up to that spirit artisan family.”

  Grandfather doesn’t remember how the son of such a respected family and himself, whose house made cursed fetishes, became friends. “I don’t really recall,” he has said to me several times. Grandfather’s family, my family in other words, are officially “ironsmiths.” We do in fact make or fix farming implements and all sorts of metal things when tasked, but everyone in our neighborhood, down to the little children, knows what our real work is.

  Every profession referred to by the polite, contemporary term “occultist”—shamans, fortune-tellers, and morticians— was treated like dirt back then. Such discrimination was far from fair, but that’s the way it was. Grandfather’s family, or I should say my family, were barely afforded the most basic gestures of courtesy. People had no idea what to make of us. We weren’t shamans, we didn’t offer exorcism rituals for a price, we couldn’t tell people’s fortunes, and we were completely unrelated to the business of preparing corpses or the funeral trade. We had something to do with the occult, but no one dared to say out loud what it was, and our ironsmith trade did solid business on the surface. On top of everything else, there was a rumor that we would put a curse on anyone who crossed us. My family would never use a cursed fetish on someone we knew personally, but our neighbors wouldn’t have known that, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have bothered us, anyways. In any event, we were given a wide berth.

  “But my friend did not care about that sort of thing,” Grandfather repeatedly insisted. This friend didn’t care about the rumors about town, the whispers of the others, the terrified yet curious glances of the neighbors. To the spirit artisan’s son, all of the neighborhood children were his friends by default, and he found no reason to not play with someone simply because of their parents’ occupation. And because the son of the rich, landed distillery family considered Grandfather a friend, the other children came to accept Grandfather as well.

  “His parents were good and wise,” Grandfather emphasizes yet again. “They never used their money or power as an excuse to treat others harshly—they bowed as low as anyone else when they greeted their neighbors, and they were always the first to help out with weddings and funerals and such.”

  This family also happened to be, in today’s parlance, innovative entrepreneurs. They had humble beginnings, distilling a batch of spirits whenever they felt like it for their neighbors, and moved on to standardizing and modernizing their production, expanding their sales network nationally. Then, the Korean War. They fled southward like everyone else and returned after the war to find the distillery and neighborhood in ruins. But the family was not disheartened. If anything, they were more determined than ever to use this as an opportunity to start afresh with truly modernized, standardized production.

  My grandfather’s friend understood his parents’ ambitions and inherited them himself.

  “We thought he would study business in college because he was going to be the owner, but he specialized in engineering instead. He said he would figure out how to mass produce the taste of wine that was distilled by hand from hardsteamed rice. A nineteen-year-old, fresh out of high school, saying he would conquer the world with his family’s spirits! He was all fired up back then.”

  What threw a wrench into his plans was a new national food policy. At its core was the government’s insistence that
Korea secure its rice supply, and the use of rice in the fermenting of spirits was subsequently forbidden. The traditional method—of pouring water into a mixture of hard-steamed and malted rice and letting it ferment—was replaced by ethanol, an industrial alcohol, which flooded the market. To make this revolting solution palatable, beverage companies mixed the ethanol with water and artificial flavoring.

  My grandfather’s friend was devastated. But he didn’t give up. He was the last of several generations of skilled distillers, armed with specialized knowledge in this particular area. He accepted the government’s stance that rice was precious, that eating it was more important than drinking it. He researched production methods that could restore the old taste by imitating the traditional by-hand methods—the proportion of ingredients, alcohol level, fermentation temperature, and distillation methods—as much as possible within compliance of national policy.

  Grandfather always pauses dramatically at this point in the story. “So, what do you think happened after that? Can you guess if he succeeded or failed?”

  Again, I’ve heard the story many times. I already know the answer. But as always, I smile and shake my head.

  “He succeeded. He was a smart and steadfast kid.” Then, Grandfather smiles sadly. “But then he lost everything.”

  Grandfather’s friend cared only about developing delicious, healthy spirits; he had no idea that in the new, post-war age, connections with government higher-ups, networking, entertaining, and the occasional bribe and backdoor dealing were more important than product quality or technology.

  And there was a much larger company that had the transitioning liquor market in their sights, a company that had strong political connections and was skilled in said business-related entertaining. This company had the gall to advertise their mixture of alcohol and artificial flavoring as “a drink for the people” and “the taste of tradition.” They ran legitimate ads in newspapers and television while organizing a parallel slander campaign, spreading the lie that the company of my grandfather’s friend mixed “industrial-use alcohol” into their beverages. They claimed that anyone who drank it would become blind, lame, or even fatally poisoned.