[b]Han Kang
The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.[/b]
That was me once. One and then the other.
I don’t know you, she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.
And here of course any mirror will do.
Now and then, all of this struck me as being not so much ridiculous as faintly ominous. What if, by chance, these early-stage symptoms didn’t pass? If the hints at hysteria, delusion, weak nerves and so on, that I thought I could detect in what she said, ended up leading to something more?
What if, by chance, she’s right? This time, in other words.
We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
Or they will make you realize something altogether different. And there are almost always a lot – a hell of a lot – more of them.
A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?
It just can!!!