Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  It gave out a shriek that shook Heaven and Earth as it banked to one side. In its sudden, blind pain, It darted toward a cliff on the mountain where the cave was and crashed.

  XXI

  He couldn’t understand how he was still alive. But buried as he was in broken branches, scattered leaves, grasses, and brambles, his breath still hadn’t left his body.

  As he tried to get up, he felt a jolt through the right side of his body. He couldn’t move his right leg. Grabbing one of the thicker branches around him, he used it as a crutch to slowly and carefully stand up.

  The behemoth had crashed against the cliff and broken its neck.

  Its eyes were devoid of life; its giant beak still gleamed silver in the light. A wingspan wide enough to wrap over the ridge of the mountain, but the stiff feathers were so clumped and crushed that they looked like rough cloth.

  He stood still and stared at the dead bird.

  The bird was dead, and it would never steal again, nor would anything be stolen from it. The only evidence the bird ever existed would be the scars on the youth’s body from when he had been its prey.

  A realization that somehow saddened the youth.

  Without knowing why, he found himself wishing the bird would revive, that it hadn’t died so easily, as he stood there and gazed into its blue eye.

  Then, he began to limp back toward the village where the woman was waiting.

  XXII

  Dusk was settling by the time he arrived at the village. The red sun had fragmented and its pieces were dissolving into the spaces between the iridescent clouds, a sight that he would never tire of.

  He took the path through the village and began walking up to the forest in the mountains beyond. There were no lights seen from the road. The woman’s brother had gone out to the forest and hadn’t returned, and the woman was blind so she didn’t need the light. That was what he told himself as he hurried his pace.

  At the threshold of the hut, before he opened the door, he called out the woman’s name. He didn’t want to barge in and surprise her.

  No sounds came from within. He pushed open the hut door.

  The woman had been sitting at the table, and she stood up as she heard the door open. Approaching him, she held out her hand. In his gladness to see her, he also reached out for her hand.

  The moment his fingertips brushed hers, the woman transformed into thousands of water droplets and scattered into thin air.

  XXIII

  Overwhelmed by what had just happened, he stood frozen by the door, his hand still stretched out for hers.

  Behind him, a cry as if from a beast. He turned.

  The woman’s brother charged at him with a hunting knife.

  The youth sidestepped just in time.

  He tried to explain, but the brother did not want to listen. In truth, the youth did not understand what had happened, either.

  The brother’s momentum carried him past the youth. He turned and rushed at the youth again while uttering his cry.

  The youth grabbed the man’s arm and gripped his wrist, trying to make him drop the knife, but it was impossible to overpower the man, who was filled with mad strength. No matter how much the youth resisted, the man’s blade inched toward his neck.

  Its tip touched him. The youth felt it pierce his skin, and blood beginning to flow.

  And in that moment, the youth saw his hand that was gripping the man’s wrist was turning into a steely gray.

  The man’s wrist began bending back in an impossible angle. White bone popped out from his skin. The man screamed and fell to the floor, clutching his broken arm.

  The youth stared down at the man. Incandescent rage had vanished from the man’s eyes. They were soon flooded with fear.

  That was the last thing the youth remembered.

  XXIV

  When he came to again, it was morning.

  The woman and her brother’s hut had vanished without a trace. Where the shed had once stood were what looked like the man’s scattered remains, along with oceans of blood. Finding it unbearable to look at, he turned his head and quickly left the scene.

  When he came down the mountain to the village, he saw that it was in ruins.

  Where yesterday there had been houses and people passing by, now stood an old tree, hundreds of years old, standing there as it had since time immemorial. Where there had once been a fence thick with vines and a blacksmith’s, was now just a field of dried grass. The inhabitants were almost all gone. Two or three stragglers, wandering the scene with dazed expressions, took one look at him, turned white with fear, and disappeared from his sight.

  He despaired.

  He hadn’t wanted revenge. At least, not this kind of revenge. He simply had not known that the village’s survival had hinged solely on the existence of It.

  The absurdity of the conclusion made him feel helpless. The strangers who stole his childhood with their sorcerer and beliefs, the despondent life he had lived on the brink of death, it had all been meaningless in the end. Mourning his years of suffering and despair, he stood there in the ruins of the village and wept.

  And once his tears had finally ceased, he began to walk toward the rising sun, in search for that place in this world where his life was waiting for him.

  Home Sweet Home

  “Surely you must know that it’s only good manners to compensate me thirty million won in this situation, if you know what I mean, dear.” The owner of the blood-sausage stew restaurant spoke to the young woman and the young woman’s husband in an oddly unsettling confusion of polite and informal speech.

  The restaurant owner’s husband chimed in, “You young people don’t seem to know the ways of the world very well. But if you can’t do this little thing, it can become a miserable life for all of us.” He glared at them meaningfully as he said this.

  The man in black, standing next to the restaurant owner and her husband, nodded. Then, wordlessly, he smiled.

  “Excuse me,” said the young woman’s husband to the three of them, “but the exchange of a ‘premium’ is only a traditional practice between renters, is it not? It has nothing to do with the landlord in official legal terms. And thirty million won is not a small sum of money. Would you be so willing to part with it?”

  Even as the young woman was half-listening to her husband’s trembling voice as he used the proper honorifics and formal speech while trying to reason with the extortionists and their black-clad “assistant” (or, rather, their hired thug), she was watching the child. The child was in the corner of the store, sweeping her fingers along the wall, then fiddling with the pot of fake flowers by the door, but she did not venture outside. When their eyes met, the child smiled. The young woman returned the smile.

  On the seventh year of her marriage, she managed to repay all her loans. Her in-laws had helped out a little (or a lot, really), but in the end, she had paid them off. Hearing that the best way to raise your children in one place was to have a larger home to begin with, she may have gone in over her head when she bought their first apartment, and she had to quickly adjust to the bitter feeling of going to the banks and giving them almost every cent they earned for seven long years. But it was money well spent in the end. After those seven years, the apartment finally belonged in its entirety to herself and her husband, and she decided they should sell it and move to a neighborhood which was cheaper and quieter. And so, on the eighth year of their marriage, she bought a mixed-use building in a cheap part of town.

  She hadn’t been entirely happy with it. “Pleased” would’ve been an overstatement. The times she and her husband had made surveying expeditions into various parts of the city had been fun. The neighborhood they had settled on was quiet, not too expensive, and most of the people who lived there had the aura of calm that came from having been there for decades. As most of the inhabitants were rather elderly, the real estate agent (whose sign still used the old-fashioned term bokdeokbang, or “fortune-gainer”) seemed somewhat perplexed that such a you
ng couple would come in itching to buy an entire building with cash.

  But the woman was finally happy. How thrilling it was to buy one’s own place with one’s own money for the first time! Not to mention the fact that she wanted to leave their apartment as soon as possible. There, from the parking lot to the elevators, every time she ran into a neighbor there was tedious talk of land prices, house prices, petitions from the wives’ association, and exhortations to attend meetings of said association, exhortations that bordered on harassment.

  She knew she was not “being clever.” Where these people learned such tricks to being clever, she didn’t know, nor did she want to know. Making as much money as quickly as possible, buying a larger house and more expensive car, sending your children to expensive English-language kindergartens and competitive private schools, and going on expensive family vacations abroad every season may seem like a prosperous life to some. But it wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted a quiet and peaceful life and sought a modest yet warm community where she could live out her days in harmony with her neighbors. She thought she had finally found such a place.

  Except she did not like the building from the start.

  It’s an old building in an old neighborhood, she thought as she kept trying to convince herself. It was the price of an apartment, and if she wanted to buy a whole building, small as it was, there was no choice but to go with a more dilapidated one, no matter how uninspired the location. The building was much cheaper than most other places, was situated at the entrance to an alley that led to a main road, and wasn’t so far from the subway or bus stops—so perhaps it wasn’t that uninspired a location, either. After briefly consulting with her husband, and a short moment of hesitation, she made her decision to buy.

  The real problems began after the woman and her husband bought the building.

  It had four floors aboveground and a larger-than-expected basement. There was a café on the first floor and a small rented-out office on the second. The third floor had just lost its tenant and was empty, and the fourth floor had been where the owner had lived according to the “fortune-gainer.” Saying it would be improper to barge into an apartment where someone was still living, the fortune-gainer showed them the empty third floor instead. To not ask questions or demand answers and simply look at what was being shown before signing on the dotted line was a fatal mistake that even rookies like them could’ve avoided.

  After the former owner moved out, they finally entered the fourth floor to see not only piles upon piles of trash but piles upon piles of rat droppings as well, and a few meagre pieces of furniture rotting where they stood. Everything about the place screamed abandonment. It was unbelievable to the woman that this had been “where someone was still living” until recently. The second she began to pick up the trash, cockroaches came pouring out underfoot. The deluge was more than she could stomp with her foot, and her initial attempts to whack them brought out a bevy of surprised rats. She screamed and declared a retreat.

  The problem was not solved by fumigation sessions with exterminators. They had already come in four times to fight against the horde of roaches and rats while she had been practically breaking her back cleaning up. Fed up, she called the former building owner.

  The owner did not pick up. She dialed again, but after a few rings, the line cut off by itself. She called several more times out of spite, but just as she was about to give up, there was a voice on the other end of the line. “Hello?” Glad to finally get through, the woman explained who she was and tried to summarize the situation, but the moment she mentioned the word “building,” the old woman at the other end suddenly screamed obscenities so loudly that the younger woman thought her eardrum would burst and abruptly hung up before the young woman had a chance to speak again.

  That was enough to quash any desire to call again. Instead, the woman called the fortune-gainer.

  What an odd day the woman was having vis-à-vis phone calls. The fortune-gainer was out showing a home to a client, said the auntie who had only picked up after the phone had rung for a long time. The woman figured she was the wife of the fortune-gainer. They had met only once before.

  “Don’t be like that,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife when she heard the woman’s story. “You’re younger, you must be the one to be patient. That old woman is a pitiful person herself. Her husband died early and her only child, a son, went out on a delivery helping his mother’s business and hurt his head in a motorcycle accident … So young, such a waste, he wasn’t even married, poor thing …”

  The fortune-gainer’s wife sighed. “After that happened, the old woman went a little strange … She closed the restaurant she’d run nearly all her life and left with her son. To some Christian retreat. The building was all she owned at the time but she got rid of even that at a pittance …”

  This surprised the woman. “She went on a retreat? So … she didn’t live in the fourth-floor apartment?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time. She did seem to come back every once in a while to fetch clothes and such—”

  “How long has it been since she left?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife calmly. “Three or four years?”

  After she hung up, the woman found it hard to sort out her feelings. Now she understood why the building had been so much cheaper than others in the same neighborhood. And perhaps a little of why her neighbors would give her and her husband anxious glances. All she had thought at the time was that the old people were simply resentful that young people had bought an entire building and were moving in.

  Now there was nothing more she could gain by chasing this up with the former owner. After about ten bouts with the exterminator in the first month alone, the rat and roach problem was finally under control. There had been an incident where the rats, pushed out of their refuge, had swarmed through the café on the first floor. This had upset the café owner who declared he was moving out. The woman was worried that she would have no renters left and the building would end up empty, but a new renter appeared quite swiftly. A blood-sausage stew shop stank a lot more than a café, but the woman was relieved. Finally, she and her husband could retrieve the boxes stored at her mother’s and move into the fourth floor of this building of their own.

  The child liked the basement. The woman thought this was because there were many things to look at and play with. She had been told it was all stuff that had been left behind by the former third-floor renter. Whatever this mysterious person did, the basement was filled with costumes, shoes, and props one might see in a play. When she switched on the light and entered the space for the first time, the sight of the child jumping out of the ranks of lined-up mannequins in freakish gowns made her jump back in surprise. But once she had the exterminators confirm that no rats or roaches were hiding in the basement and she changed the lightbulbs, the basement didn’t seem so scary anymore. She actually began to enjoy walking through the rows of mannequins and their unbelievably ostentatious clothing and shoes and mysterious props, the likes of which modern city-dwellers rarely got to see, brightly illuminated by fluorescent lights.

  “Weird,” said the exterminator after his inspection. “Normally you’d have rats come up from the basement to the upper floors. But this building has it upside-down.” He tilted his head. “The rats and insects are mostly on the top floor and the basement is as clean as a whistle. I’ve never seen a basement crammed with so many things and yet not have a single bug.”

  The exterminator’s words were reassuring. She allowed the child to drag her down to the basement where she would be shown yet another fascinating new costume or prop—although the woman had been sure that she had examined everything in the basement by then—and make the appropriate exclamations, sharing in the child’s fun.

  The older the neighborhood, the harder it is to stake your own territory. The woman experienced “turf” politics for the first time.

  Someone in the night kept leaving scratch
marks on their old car, a hand-me-down from her husband’s oldest brother. At first it had been a couple of marks on the driver-side door. The next night, the entire driver-side door was scratched up. A scratch so long that it wrapped around the vehicle appeared the next morning, and on the fourth night, both side mirrors were smashed. A week later, someone had slashed the rear tires.

  She and her husband could guess at the perpetrator and his motive. After moving in, they parked their car on the street in front of their building as they were entitled to, but a man insisting that the space was rightfully his began to menace them. He was a young man in his early thirties who lived in an old house at the end of the alley. The third generation to live there, he bragged that his family had once owned the entire neighborhood and thus, the street-parking space at the entrance of the alley actually belonged to him—“facts” arrogantly conveyed to them in a commanding voice.

  Whether the land had once been the man’s family’s or not, the situation was completely different now. The space in front of the building was prioritized for its inhabitants by law, a space the woman and her husband paid parking and zoning permission fees for. Of course, such reasonable explanations had no effect on the man who lived down the alley.

  “If you’ve moved into someone else’s neighborhood, you should follow their rules!” he shouted as he jabbed a finger at them. “You can’t come in here and mess up the order of our neighborhood!”

  Neither the woman nor her husband could understand how parking in the spot that was designated for them and they were paying for was “messing up the order of the neighborhood.” Her husband suggested they simply ignore him, and she agreed. And it was around three days after this confrontation when someone began to damage their car at night.

  The woman had felt anxious when the very first scratches appeared on the door. Her husband had simply laughed it off, but after the side mirrors were smashed and the tires were slashed, her husband’s expression also darkened. The woman and her husband installed CCTV cameras on their building wall, right next to a streetlamp. They would need proof if they were to ever seek legal recourse.