Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  “Uh, Teacher …” The thin voice sounds uncertain. “Then you … you don’t remember who I am, do you?”

  She hesitates. She wants to cry. “I don’t.”

  “Oh my, what are we to do …” The thin voice becomes even thinner, as if sapped of strength. “I’m Teacher Kim … in the class next to yours, Grade 6 Class 2 … You don’t remember?”

  “I’m not sure.” So “Teacher” meant elementary school teacher, she thinks to herself.

  The thin voice becomes urgent. “Teacher Choi, she taught Grade 5 with us, and then quit after getting married … She followed her husband out of Seoul. You were invited to their housewarming, so you came along… You really don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This really is serious.” The fingers touch her left hand again. Like before, their grip is firm. “We should get up.”

  “What?” She is up on her feet before she knows it.

  The thin voice is adamant. “Teacher Lee, I think your injuries are more serious than we realize. We shouldn’t waste any more time—we should get up and find a hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you very tired?”

  “What? Oh, no, not—”

  “Then let’s go.” The fingers gently tug at her left hand.

  She begins to follow.

  As she walks, she asks, “So, how did we get into this accident?”

  The thin voice sighs. “I don’t know either … I drank too much, which is why you were driving.”

  “Oh.” Her guilt blocks her words for a while. After a pause, she asks again. “Then that … that car. Is it yours, Teacher Kim?”

  The voice doesn’t answer.

  Feeling rebuffed, she stops asking questions.

  But after walking in silence for a moment, she can’t help asking again. “Where … where can we be, do you think?”

  “Well …” The voice seems reluctant to answer.

  She persists. “Teacher Choi’s house, where is it exactly? Is it close to here?”

  “Well, the thing is, I don’t know either … I fell asleep as soon as we left …” The voice’s answer trails off.

  She thinks a bit more.

  She asks, “Do you happen to have a phone?”

  The voice does not answer for a moment. Then, “A phone? No. Do you have one, Teacher Lee?”

  “I don’t either.”

  The voice asks, “Did you not look for it when you were searching for your ring?”

  Sensing a shade of reproach, she answers, “There was nothing in the front seats … What about the back?”

  “It was too dark to look. It could’ve flown out the window.” But the voice seems uncertain.

  The conversation stops again.

  She has no idea how long they’ve been walking since leaving the car behind. All around them, it is still complete darkness. No risen moon, no stars. How long do we have to wait until daybreak, she wonders.

  “Where … where exactly are we going?” she tentatively asks.

  The voice doesn’t answer.

  She asks again. “Do you… do you even know where we’re headed?”

  For a moment, the voice doesn’t speak. Then, instead of answering her question: “Teacher Choi, I feel sorry for her.”

  “Excuse me?” She’s taken aback.

  The thin voice mumbles as if it isn’t meant for her to hear. “So happy when she got married, like the whole world belonged to her, but then divorced within a year, quitting her job at the school …”

  She waits. But the voice does not continue.

  So she asks again. “Um … what are you talking about?”

  The thin voice mumbles again. “It’s not her fault that her husband had an affair … Don’t you think it’s unfair? They say a teacher must always set an example, but she’s a woman, after all. A divorced woman, at that …”

  “What are you talking about … Didn’t you just say Teacher Choi was a newlywed?”

  The thin voice laughed a thin laugh. “I suppose she is, if it was only a year ago she got married—”

  “But, just now, you said Teacher Choi just got married, we were at their housewarming party …”

  “Oh Teacher Lee, you must’ve hit your head rather hard.” Patiently, the thin voice explains. “Teacher Choi got divorced, went alone down to the countryside, and we were visiting her in her new room, as both a housewarming and consolation…”

  After a moment of silence, the thin voice starts mumbling again. “Living alone turned her into such a lush, all that drinking she did …”

  She is flummoxed. “But, but—”

  “You really don’t remember anything?” says the thin voice. Then, muttering, “Oh my goodness, we really ought to take you to the hospital, quick.”

  The words make her shut her mouth.

  There are no more words as they keep on walking.

  She stares at the sky as she walks. It is so dark that she has no idea whether what she is looking at is, indeed, the sky. She thinks of how she has never known such a darkness before in her life. If she has indeed been in a car crash, that would mean she’d been on a road, but how can there not be a single streetlamp?

  Where is she? And where is she walking to?

  “Teacher Choi, such a shame …” The thin voice, walking in front of her, is speaking again.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Her mother, she kept crying … She was so young, and to die so horrifically—”

  Interrupting sharply, “What are you talking about?”

  The thin voice sighs. “You saw it, too, Teacher Lee, at the funeral … Oh, right, you said you don’t remember.”

  Hearing a mocking tone at the trailing end of the voice’s reply, she fiercely counters with, “Why are you talking about a funeral? You said it was a housewarming, earlier—”

  “You really must have hit your head hard.” The thin voice tsk-tsked. “I understand if you like someone for a long time, but to kill yourself over a crush … So young at that, the poor family—”

  “Didn’t you… didn’t you say Teacher Choi was married?” she says, forcing her trembling voice to sound firm. “That her husband had an affair, that she got divorced … Isn’t that what you said?”

  The thin voice lets out a thin breath.

  “Whew … What on earth are you going on about … You should know better by now.”

  “But you said so earlier. You said it was Teacher Choi’s housewarming as a newlywed, then it was her room … You said she was married, then she was divorced …”

  “Teacher Lee, you’re talking in circles. Does your head hurt a lot?”

  She shuts her mouth.

  “Teacher Choi … such a pathetic tale, don’t you think?” mumbles the thin voice after a pause. “Even with those rose-colored glasses of hers, you would think she’d seen how blatantly her man was getting it on with the teacher in the next class. The whole school knew about it, but she was really stubborn in her denial … Then when that other woman stole her man, she quit teaching and kicked up that whole fuss about killing herself …” The thin voice briefly pauses.

  She waits.

  “Then she really killed herself …”

  She can’t tell whether the thin voice is suppressing a sob or a laugh.

  She feels a sharp pain as the brief but intense trust she felt for the thin voice is torn in two. Fear digs into her heart. Carefully, she steps aside a little to the right. The thin voice from her left keeps mumbling as if she isn’t there.

  “Life, really, is so unfair. Everyone is born the same way, but some steal husbands, others are sucked dry and spat out like used chewing gum …”

  She doesn’t answer.

  The thin voice keeps talking. “Isn’t it funny? Two people are in the same car accident, but one lives to tell the tale, the other dies on the spot—”

  “You. Who are you?” She cannot suppress the shaking in her voice anymore.

  The thin voice casually goes on
. “Don’t you think it’s so unfair? Alone when alive, and still alone when dead.”

  “Where is this place?” she shrieks. “What’s happened to me?!”

  The thin voice on her left gives a thin cackle. “People, you know, they’re so funny. Don’t you think? Just because they’re afraid, they go about trusting in any old voice they hear around them, even when they can’t see for the life of them.”

  “What are you?” She is shouting now. “Wh-where is this? Where are you taking me?”

  The thin voice continues to cackle. “Following a strange voice around in a strange place, just because it pretends to be kind …”

  She cannot stand it anymore. She begins to run.

  The voice keeps cackling behind her and mumbling. “She doesn’t even know who she is, or where she’s going …”

  She runs. She doesn’t know where she’s going but feels some relief at how the voice seems to be getting farther away, and so she keeps blindly running.

  The ground beneath her feet suddenly caves in. She stumbles momentarily. After a bit of flailing she rights herself, and a bright light suddenly fills her vision. Her eyes, so used to the dark, lose all their function in the sudden glare. She freezes in the flood of light.

  For a brief second, she sees clearly straight ahead—her own self sitting in a car that’s lost control, barreling toward her, her expression frozen in fear, her hands ineffectually grasping the steering wheel where a third set of five fingers, mockingly casual, are holding the wheel between her two hands.

  Then, darkness again.

  “—eacher.”

  A woman’s voice, thin and frail. She opens her eyes. The voice calls for her again.

  “Teacher.”

  It’s the voice again. She tries to turn her head to the direction the voice is coming from. Her neck, however, doesn’t move.

  “Teacher Lee.”

  Before she can speak, a familiar voice answers.

  “Yes?”

  Hearing her own voice answer the thin voice, she feels like her whole body is convulsing underneath the car. But her body doesn’t move. A slimy mud, or something that is like mud but nothing she can ever know for sure, is making its sticky, stubborn, and ominous way over her ankles to her knees, thighs, stomach, slowly but ceaselessly crawling up the rest of her body.

  She can hear conversation from afar.

  “Are you there? Who are you? I’m over here!”

  “Teacher Lee, are you all right?”

  She tries with all of her might. Her right arm is pinned down beneath a wheel. She just about manages to free her left hand. It grips the bumper. Trying to pull herself from underneath the car, she puts all her strength into her left arm.

  Suddenly, cold fingers touch her left hand. She makes a fist. But it’s too late. The cold fingers have wrested the round, hard, and smooth ring from her hand.

  “No …” She tries to shout it. But her voice has crawled down her throat.

  The thin voice whispers into her ear, “You’ve been hurt badly, you really shouldn’t move. Tea. Cher. Lee.” It cackles softly as it moves away from her ear.

  She feels slight vibrations from the car that covers her.

  “Be careful. One step at a time, slowly.”

  It’s the thin voice, from a distance.

  She opens her mouth. With all her strength, with all the fear and rage and despair pooled in her heart, she screams.

  “What’s wrong?” she can hear the voice ask.

  “Did you … hear something?”

  “Hear what?” the voice asks again.

  “Someone … I thought there was someone there …”

  She can just about hear heavy footsteps coming down on soft ground. The conversation becomes more and more distant.

  The car sinks. She hears the sound of bones breaking somewhere in her body. Strangely enough, the sound makes her realize she no longer feels pain.

  All she can feel is the enormous weight of the car as it drags her down into the unknown abyss.

  Snare

  This is a story I once read long ago.

  Once upon a time, a man walking through snow-covered mountain forests came across a fox struggling in a snare. The fox’s fur meant money, and the man, thinking he would kill the fox for her fur, approached the animal with a knife in hand.

  The fox then lifted her head and spoke in a human voice, “Please let me go.”

  The man was taken aback. At the same time, he noticed that from the fox’s ankle where the snare dug in, a shining liquid flowed. The fox bled not blood but something that resembled gold. The surrounding snow had made it hard to notice at first, but now he saw the area around the snare was splattered with the glittering substance, some of it hardened in the cold snow.

  The man picked up one of the hardened lumps and peered at it closely. He bit down on it.

  Gold. It was unmistakable.

  Taking great care, the man assiduously scraped up every bit that was around the fox. Then, with even more care, he packed the fox inside his bag, someone else’s snare and all, and took her home.

  Once home, the man hid away the fox deep in his shed. He gave the fox water and food, keeping it alive. The snare was never taken off. Rather, the man would occasionally shake the snare or wound the fox again with a sharp weapon so that her injuries never healed. Whenever he did so, the fox barked or whined in resentment. But the only time she spoke like a human was when the man had first discovered her.

  The man let the liquid that flowed from her wounds set before selling it little by little. Cunning as he was, he knew very well what would happen if a peasant like him suddenly showed up with fistfuls of gold in his pockets. He deliberately carried small dribbles of it instead of big ones, going from town to town, selling so little as to never attract much attention. With the money from the gold he sold, he bought grains, salt, leather, and timber—ordinary goods that he could sell in his own village’s market.

  There were days when business was good and days when it was bad. The price of goods went down sometimes, up in others. But the man didn’t care. In his shed at home was a hidden treasure that nobody knew about; never again would he have to start over from nothing. Whether he made a good profit or a small one, he always had a leisurely smile on his face, successfully selling all manner of things at the market.

  The people around him considered the man an easy-going and hardworking fellow. His reputation grew among both his customers and the people who provided him with his wares. Like everyone else, he seemed to have ups and downs with his business, but the thing about this man’s work in particular was that he always managed to turn a profit in the end. He became known as an old hand in the art of market-selling. His credit grew as did his fortune, and the man eventually built a large house and married a beautiful woman.

  When he built the house, the man knocked down his shed and erected a sturdy warehouse instead, keeping the fox chained to a corner of it. Her constantly open wound and her blood being drawn at regular intervals made her listless, but she was still alive. The skin around the wound, having been ground down and cut again and again, had peeled back to reveal the bone, and was now so calloused that no amount of cutting and piercing drew blood. Now skin and bone, the fox would snarl at the man whenever he came toward her, but that was all she could do. She had long lost the energy to bark or bite.

  In the third year of the man’s marriage, the fox finally died. The man regretted it deeply, but because he had extracted so much gold from her and business was going well, he thought he would be able to get by. He skinned the dead fox and had her fur made into a scarf. The fox had lost much of its hair during her imprisonment and her fur was not much to look at anymore, but the man’s ignorant wife was happy to receive the fox-fur scarf as a gift.

  Not long after that, the man’s wife became pregnant. As they had been childless for the three years since their wedding, both man and wife were overjoyed at the prospect of a child. Ten months later, the man’s wife gave bir
th to twins: a son and a daughter. The boy came out first, the girl second. Gazing at the faces of their new-born children, the man and his wife felt they had reached the pinnacle of all happiness under heaven.

  Aside from the fact that they were fraternal twins, the two children were not that different from most siblings. But one day, around the time they were learning how to walk, the man’s wife suddenly heard one of them scream in the other room. When she ran in, she saw that the boy was attacking the girl, biting her. Thinking it was a common fight between siblings, the man’s wife separated the two and scolded the boy while consoling the girl. She was too concerned with the wound on the girl’s neck to notice that the boy was busily licking away at the blood underneath his fingernails and around his mouth, as if trying to lap up every drop of it.

  In the evening, the wife fed her children and put them to bed before letting the man know about the children’s fight when he came home. As she was telling the man, they heard another bloodcurdling scream. The couple rushed into the children’s room. As the little girl shook in fear and struggled to get free with all her might, the boy bit into the wound scratched onto his sister’s neck earlier that day, clawing at it with his little fingernails and rapidly licking away at the blood that flowed from her neck.

  The man’s wife got in between them and held her daughter away from the son. Jumping at her, the boy bit down on his mother’s arm. She was taken by surprise, but despite her pain she kept her daughter aloft and reflexively shoved the boy away. Her fingernail grazed his forehead.

  As the man tried to keep his son from his wife, he noticed something glistening on his son’s forehead.

  Oozing out of the long wound was a familiar glob of gold-colored liquid.

  His wife tried to console their bleeding daughter as the man held onto his son and probed his son’s wound with his fingers. The wound wasn’t deep; the gold liquid slightly seeped out before stopping altogether.

  Until he stopped bleeding gold from his forehead, his son continued to messily slurp away at his sister’s blood on his fingers and around his mouth.

  The man realized what this meant.

  After that happened, the man would often take his son outside. The wife, thinking that the boy was an overly active child and had attacked his sister out of pent-up energy, welcomed her husband taking him out to play.