Molka

Chapter 28

Junyoung woke up in the hospital and found his mother sitting anxiously by his side. When she saw his eyes open, she began to fuss over him, her hands pressing against his cheeks.

“Oh, Junyoung! My sweet son.”

Annoyed, he sat up, pushing her away. “How long have I been here?”

“A day,” she said. “How are you feeling? Look.” She picked up the newspaper that was folded up on the chair next to her and held it out to him. The front page featured an image of him in his hospital bed, his eyes closed.

“What?” He laughed disbelievingly and reached out to grab it. “That’s crazy!”

His mother smiled faintly. “They’re calling you a hero,” she said quietly.

“They’re saying the president might award you with a medal.

And …” She pointed to his bedside table.

Junyoung sat up, surprised. It was overflowing with gifts.

Boxes of juicy grapes, bags of cherries, sliced watermelon.

There was even a collection of cards and a flower bouquet. “That’s from your coworkers,” she said.

Junyoung picked up the card closest to him and read the lines scrawled inside.

Dear Junyoung, it read. We were so sorry to hear about the traumatic experience you endured and are so thankful that you are okay.

Please take all the time you need. Your job will be waiting for you whenever you’re ready to come back.

You are our hero. We’re all rooting for your full recovery here at the office.

Junyoung grinned.

Once the news got out that he was awake, reporters swarmed his hospital room.

The crowd in the hallway outside of his room grew so large that the hospital security team was notified and asked to stand guard.

Journalists were allowed in one by one to talk to Junyoung as his mother sat and watched from the sidelines.

“She was sick in the head,” Junyoung said to one reporter.

“Did you hear? She had Jang Hyukjoon’s penis in her refrigerator.

I saw it.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, and the man leaned in with wide eyes.

“She told me she was going to cook it up into a stew and eat it. She said she was going to chop mine off and eat it, too.”

Before he left, the man shook Junyoung’s hand warmly and said with sincerity, “You’re a hero to us all. Truly. Thank you. Chopping off dicks and eating them?” With an expression of disgust, he shook his head. “Only a woman could come up with something that twisted.”

The door shut behind him, and Junyoung’s mother cleared her throat. “That’s not what you said to the other one,” she said.

“Shut up,” Junyoung snapped. “You don’t get to talk to me like that. I’m a national hero.”

+

A few hours before he was to be discharged, Officers Lim and Han came to see Junyoung at the hospital. His mother had left to get groceries, and he was alone in the room.

“It’s good to see you,” Officer Lim said.

“Likewise,” Junyoung responded, reaching out to shake their hands.

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Officer Han sighed. “I keep hearing her laughter.” He shivered, and Junyoung nodded.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“She was … unhinged. It’s sad, but we had to do it. There was no other choice. Women like that, there’s no hope for them, you know.”

“That’s true.”

“We did her a favor, putting her out of her misery.”

Junyoung nodded, and they fell into an uncomfortable silence.

Officer Lim cleared his throat. “Anyway, we wanted to stop by and check in on you. We also wanted to bring this back.” He handed Junyoung his cellphone.

Amid the chaos, Junyoung hadn’t even noticed that it was missing.

He blushed, remembering the videos of Dahye he had saved.

“Thanks,” he stammered. “By any chance, you didn’t go through—”

“We did,” Officer Han interrupted him. “Sorry, we had to. Protocol.”

“Oh.” Junyoung stared at his hands for a moment before looking up at them. “Are you going to arrest me?”

The officers looked at each other and laughed. “What? What for?”

“The videos from the bathroom. You saw them, didn’t you?”

“Hey. No big deal,” Officer Lim said, raising his hands and chuckling. “It’s just a few videos. And that’s all confidential. No one will ever know about them. It’s not like you hurt anybody.”

+

There was a story Junyoung’s mother had told him when he was a child.

A woman, wanting to be beautiful for her boyfriend, had decided to get plastic surgery, only to have her face marred by a careless surgeon.

When she woke up, she found that her mouth had been cut from ear to ear.

The bloodied lacerations would not heal no matter what she did, and her boyfriend, appalled by her appearance, ran away, never to be seen again.

Distraught, the woman wandered through Seoul, searching for him, wearing a red mask to hide her wounds.

If she encountered any strangers on the street, she would approach them to ask, “Do you think I’m beautiful?

” If they said yes, she would take her mask off, slowly, revealing her terrible smile.

“Then I’ll make you just like me,” she’d respond, before cutting their faces open with a knife.

After first hearing this story, Junyoung had been unable to sleep.

In every passing face, he saw the woman’s red mask, her bleeding mouth.

In his nightmares, he saw her floating toward him, ghostly in the moonlight, a sharp blade in her hand.

He would wake from these night terrors sweat soaked and trembling.

As an adult, the nightmares returned, but now it was Dahye he saw, her expression chilling, her laughter in his ears.

He would try to run from her, only to find that his legs were no longer working.

Her pupils glittered at him, red as the mask, like blood.

His screams were caught in his throat. He made no sound as she sliced his mouth open, the blade sawing through his flesh.

+

Summer turned to fall. The leaves on the trees began to change.

The reporters had stopped calling. A movie director had contacted Junyoung in the hopes of writing a script based on his story.

Junyoung continued to have nightmares of Dahye.

Sometimes he would hear water dripping from the faucet in his bathroom.

No matter how tightly he closed it, it leaked constantly.

Once, while taking the subway, he thought he saw her sitting across from him. He clutched onto the railing, feeling as though his blood had turned to ice. But when the woman turned, he saw it wasn’t Dahye, but someone else entirely.

At his mother’s urging, Junyoung returned to work.

On his first day back, he stood outside of the building, remembering all the times he had watched Dahye walk through the doors, her face serious, the snail-shell bun bouncing at the back of her head.

How much he had loved her then. How much he had cared for her.

Taking a deep breath, Junyoung made his way to the basement. As soon as the doors opened, he was startled by a raucous noise. His coworkers were standing and cheering for him. Junyoung flinched, startled, as a broad figure approached him. It was Mr. Choi.

“Junyoung!” he said in his booming voice. “Good to see you! Come to my office—we have a little gift for you.”

Junyoung passed familiar faces, all men, all happy and smiling, patting him on the back, murmuring notes of congratulations. The fear he had been feeling was swept away, replaced by pride. Mr. Choi held the door open for him and gestured toward the chair in front of the desk.

“Take a seat.”

Junyoung looked around in wonder. It had seemed so long ago that he had been sitting here in this office, relishing his victory over Kangmin. The glittering glass trophies were still on the shelf, the light piercing through them. It was beautiful.

On Junyoung’s side of the desk, there was a small box. Mr. Choi pointed at it. “That’s yours,” he said.

“Mine?”

“Yes. It’s a gift from us to you.”

It was heavy. He struggled to open it as Mr. Choi watched patiently. When Junyoung finally managed to get it out, he saw that it was a glass trophy, just like the ones on the shelf. The gold plate at the bottom read EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR.

He held it up to the light, marveling at its beauty.

+

His life returned to normal. The nightmares came much less frequently.

The movie director had stopped calling. The leaves fell from the trees, and winter came, the first snow blanketing Seoul in white.

Junyoung read through the old articles that had been posted about him again and again, checking daily for new comments.

People dubbed him the savior of men, a knight, a champion.

Occasionally, there were negative responses, and a particularly terrible one left him riddled with anxiety for weeks:

CHO JUNYOUNG IS A DISGUSTING PIG!!! They

should have killed him instead. That poor girl

deserved better.

Pig. Junyoung shuddered at the word. Right away it evoked images of Dahye and the sound of her voice whistling past him, singsong, lilting, terrifying in its playfulness.

He managed to shake the image out of his head. “It’s probably one of those crazy feminist bitches,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.

+

He kept none of his promises. He wasn’t kind to his mother. When she asked him tentatively about the dentist again, he shoved her away, anger flaring hot inside of him. “Why?” he thundered as she shook, cowering before him. “Who are you trying to impress?”

He did not delete any of the footage of Dahye. Sometimes, when he wasn’t sure if it had all been his imagination—when he wasn’t sure she had been real—he rewatched the videos, remembering.

He snuck into the work restrooms one night to reinstall the cameras. When he went to observe the feeds, he found himself waiting, even as the stalls were empty, the lights flickering.

What was he waiting for? Dahye was dead, long gone. He had seen her broken body lying on the floor at his feet. He had read the articles about her funeral, which had been hotly protested by men’s rights activists. Her parents’ images had been splashed across the internet.

Still, he was haunted by her ghost. Sometimes, he thought he saw her on his screen, walking across the women’s bathroom with light footsteps, staring right up into the camera.

+

“And then what happened?”

Junyoung was drunk. It was late in the evening, and he was at a bar near his apartment, talking loudly about Dahye. A small group had formed, and the faces were turned to him in rapt attention. He rejoiced in it.

He had told the story so many times now, each time embellishing it a little more, so that he now no longer remembered the truth. In this version, he had arrived just after she had cut off Hyukjoon’s member, and it lay bleeding on the floor as Junyoung fought the she-devil that was Dahye.

A stranger passing by overheard the last of his story and grabbed him abruptly, startling him. “Hey!” the man said. “I recognize you! Aren’t you the guy who killed that psycho bitch?”

“That’s me,” Junyoung said.

“You’re a hero!” The man gave him a high five.

When the crowd thinned, Junyoung stood up to leave, picking up his scarf. It was always the worst part of the night, returning home alone in the cold, listening to Dahye’s voice, twisting and snakelike, in his head.

Outside, he inhaled deeply, feeling the wintry air in his lungs. He still had a scar on his cheek where Dahye had cut him. He touched it gingerly, feeling the raised edges with the tip of his finger.

As Junyoung stepped off the sidewalk to head home, he heard a car approaching.

Headlights bounced along the asphalt, and Junyoung quickly began to cross the street.

He expected it to stop, but the car roared, speeding up.

He halted abruptly in the middle of the road, eyes wide, the light blinding him—

There was a terrible sound as Junyoung felt himself being thrown into the air.

He flailed as he slammed against the car’s hood, bounced, and landed in the gutter.

Dazed, he looked down. His body was twisted, and his legs were facing the wrong direction.

There was blood everywhere. And his feet—he couldn’t feel his feet.

Pain, excruciating pain, crept up his torso, taking away all feeling in his arms.

Junyoung threw his head back and let out a wail as the car pulled up next to him. The driver rolled down the window and gazed down at him. It was a woman. Her face was familiar. She smiled.

Panting, Junyoung closed his eyes, trying to break through the cloud of pain.

Who was she? His thoughts were disjointed and blurred, a strange sound cutting through them.

Someone was humming. He turned his head, even though each movement brought him a new wave of agony, and saw a woman sitting next to him on the cold, hard ground.

Dahye. She had returned. She was staring, watching, eyes gleaming red. Terror eclipsed him. He had to get away from her, but his body—it wouldn’t move.

His only hope was the driver of the car, which was idling in the street next to him, smoke from the exhaust fanning out into the sky. The woman was still sitting there, watching him. What was she doing? “Please,” he whimpered. “Help me.”

“You’re going to die, Junyoung. All alone in the fucking street.” She gave him a look of pure contempt. “And then you’re going to burn in hell.” It was Dahye’s friend. The one he had followed around in Sillim. Bora?

Without another word, she sped away, disappearing around the corner. Junyoung let out a gurgling moan. He could taste something salty in his mouth, and his tongue poked into the empty spaces in his gums where his teeth had been only moments ago.

Someone else approached, and Junyoung let out another cry.

It was a girl. She was dripping wet, and her skin was wrinkled and blue.

As he watched, she sat down next to Dahye and took her hand.

The two of them opened their mouths at the same time and began to sing, softly at first, and then louder and louder until it was all he could hear.

Their words rang in his ears as he took his final breath.

All pigs go to the slaughterhouse to die.

On the street corner, the red light of a camera blinked. Miles away, a security guard sat slumped in front of his monitor. He was fast asleep. Had he been awake, he might have seen the man—a national hero—bleeding out on the wintry Seoul street.