Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

That was the first time he sobbed in earnest. Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.

Between the straw of the thatched roof, the stars sparkled above. He thought of how he’d smashed his steel chains against the walls of the cave just to see a single spark. Had some giant trapped inside the cave of the night sky struck their chains against some unimaginably large wall to create the stars? Had they done it as a cry for help? Or to endure, somehow, the emptiness and darkness? He had no way of knowing.

How strange a person’s fate was. When she was little, the woman had had an older brother and a father. A family that worried over her health, a home, a life. All that had been granted to the youth was this damp, moldy cave and its hard rocks, the handcuffs and manacles on a chain, and a stake attached to that chain. Every person has only one childhood, and instead of being full of hopes or dreams, his had been crushed by the fight for survival. He never once imagined in all his years spent in the cave that a different childhood from the one that had been accorded to him might have been possible.

Life is a series of problems. Especially when one is married and has a family. Because even when you manage to avoid the problems of the outside world and return home safely, your family is there waiting with a whole different set of problems of their own.

I didn’t believe in any bright future for me. I didn’t know if I would even be able to make a living. Therefore, “a moment ago” was always the best moment, and the present was always better than the future.

“He was dead when I came home one day. And right next to him stood a younger version of him. About the age I am now, the way he looked before he was taken to the concentration camp.” His grandfather’s younger self kept agitatedly looking back and forth between his older self’s face and his grandson’s. The grandson slowly pointed to the door. When he nodded, his grandfather’s younger self, still with a confused expression, slowly walked toward it and departed. From a window, the grandson stared for a long time as his grandfather’s soul walked down the street, crossed the sunlit plaza, and disappeared into a wider realm. “Grandfather had spent his whole life being terrified of a war that was long over, of a concentration camp that had long disappeared. It was only after he died when he could finally walk about the city freely,” he murmured.

Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it. Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too.