Cursed Bunny (eBook)
256 Seiten
Honford Star (Verlag)
9781916277199 (ISBN)
Bora Chung has written three novels and three collections of short stories. She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She currently teaches Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean.
The Embodiment
몸하다: “to body.” To menstruate. To undergo menstruation.
The bleeding refused to stop. It was twelve days into her cycle. Usually the flow began to lessen around the third day and ended on the fifth, but it was now almost two weeks without any sign of stopping. The flow seemed to taper off at night but would inevitably return by dawn.
A fortnight later, the blood still flowed; should she see a gynecologist? But the gynecologist’s office was not a place a young unmarried woman could visit without feeling oddly guilty.
After the twentieth day, the dizziness began, and she became so tired that it was starting to affect her daily functioning. She gritted her teeth and went to see a doctor.
The gynecologist wordlessly slathered a transparent, slippery gel on her belly and passed a cold metal disc over it. He mumbled as he stared into a foggy black-and-white display, “I don’t see anything strange …”
She wiped off the gel as best she could—it kept getting all over her hands and clothes no matter how vigorously she mopped—and went back to the consultation room. The doctor glanced at the chart before him and asked, “Have you been very stressed lately? Or had any big changes in your environment?”
“I’m writing my master’s thesis … But I don’t think I’m that stressed about it …”
The doctor gave her a look before scribbling something down.
“Stress causes hormonal imbalances that can lead to your situation. According to the ultrasound you’re fine, so I’ll prescribe you some birth control pills. Take them for three weeks, go off them for one, then take them for three weeks more, then rest for a week, and so on. You’ll be back to normal in two to three months.”
She began taking birth control pills.
She took them for three weeks and had a week off. Then three weeks more before quitting after those two months. But her period, which began two days after she had quit, refused to stop for over ten days. This meant going back on the pills, and like clockwork, the blood stopped. When she tried to get off the pills again three weeks later, the same thing happened. She ended up having to foot the unexpected expense of taking six months of birth control pills.
After six months, her period went back to normal, ceasing after five days. She cheered.
Another month later, she got out of bed one morning but had to sit back down when the world began to spin.
She dry-heaved all day. The dizziness was unbearable and nothing she ate stayed down. She felt sluggish and had a touch of fever.
A full-body check-up was in order. At a big hospital, she got her X-rays taken and her blood and urine examined.
The doctor informed her of her results in an emotionless manner. “You’re pregnant.”
“Excuse me?”
“You should see an obstetrician.”
She went down a few floors to see one of the hospital’s obstetricians—a young woman in her thirties who wore an unbelievable amount of makeup. After a few more fairly unpleasant examinations, the obstetrician declared her diagnosis in an ice-cold voice. “You’re six weeks pregnant.”
“But I’m unmarried and have no boyfriend.”
“You’ve never had any sexual experiences? Or taken any pills?”
“I did take some birth control pills for a while because my period wouldn’t stop—”
“For how long?”
“Six months.”
The doctor gave her a sharp look, narrowing her bright blue eyeshadowed, thickly penciled eyes.
“Were they prescribed?”
“The doctor told me to take them for a couple of months, and you don’t really need a prescription for birth control pills …” Her voice trailed off as she felt oddly ashamed.
“If the doctor told you to take them for just two to three months, you should’ve taken them for just two to three months!”
“Well, uh, my period just wouldn’t stop …”
The doctor sighed her irritation out her vividly painted red lips. “If your body happens to be abnormal, a side effect from taking birth control pills for a long time can be pregnancy.”
“Really? But … aren’t birth control pills made to prevent pregnancy?” Her objection came out meek.
The doctor’s black-and-blue gaze immediately turned sharp again. “You’re the one who overdid it with the pills— it’s your own fault. Medicine isn’t candy you can gorge on whenever you feel like it.”
“What … what do I do now?”
The doctor flipped through the chart. “Does the child have a father?”
“Excuse me?”
“Does the child have someone who can be their father?”
“No …”
The doctor looked up and again gave her a scary look through her thick makeup. “Then you better hurry up and find a man who’s willing to be the father.”
“The child’s father? Why?”
The doctor shot back, “You’re carrying a child—of course the child needs a father!”
“But, uh, what happens if there’s no father?”
“You’re in a situation where you’ve become pregnant under abnormal circumstances, which means that if you don’t find a male partner, the cells of the fetus will not properly propagate or grow. You know how in grocery stores there are freerange fertilized eggs and non-fertilized eggs? It’s the same thing here. If the fetus does not properly grow, then your pregnancy will not proceed normally, and this will ultimately be bad for the mother. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Clearly, the doctor was annoyed with her.
“W-what do you mean bad?”
“That depends. You’re only six weeks along right now, so I can’t really tell you what’s going to happen.” The doctor sighed. Then, she glared at her again and threatened, “You better find a father for that child, fast. If you don’t, things will really get bad for you.”
Her family concluded that she should take a leave of absence from school and get set up by a matchmaker before she began to show. She wrote “sickness” on the request form as her reason for taking leave. Her short-tempered thesis advisor threw a fit over her taking a break just when her thesis was finally shaping up. She regretted the interruption in her work as well, but there was nothing to be done. The people in her department commiserated with her as if she had contracted a fatal disease.
She didn’t have much to do once she had left school. Her family became busy instead, coming together for the great “Find the Child a Father” project. It wasn’t long before her mother and the matchmaker had set up her first matchmaking seon date at a café.
An awkward silence descended between her and the man as soon as the matchmaker and her mother left the table. This was her first time on a seon date, and she didn’t know what to say to this complete stranger or where to look or what to do with her hands. Her morning sickness, which had seemed to ebb, had come back that morning with a vengeance, and the strong air-conditioning breeze of the fancy hotel café, coupled with the smell of the black coffee, was making her shiver and her insides flip-flop.
The man, somewhat apologetically, began to speak. “So … you’re a graduate student?”
“Yes …” Her lips were blue from the cold and she could barely manage to answer him through her shivering.
“What are you specializing in?”
“Slavic literature—”
“How very unusual! I’m sure there can’t be many people studying Norwegian literature in Korea?”
“Uh, that’s not quite—”
She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of the coffee. Casting her dignity to the winds, she bolted from her seat and sprinted to the ladies’ room. For a long time, she wrung out nothing from her stomach other than a little coffee, air, and bile. She prayed the man had left as she washed her mouth and hands.
But he was waiting for her in front of the ladies’ room with worry written all over his face. He quickly supported her arm as she came stumbling out the door. “Are you all right?”
“Yes … I’m so sorry.”
She was bright red and didn’t know what to do with herself. The man helped her back to their table. As she leaned on him during the short distance of their slow walk back, she noticed how his shoulders were wide enough to wrap around hers in an embrace. Her hands and shoulders, freezing from the air-conditioning, registered that the man’s arm was strong and hard, but at the same time warm and appealing. The room was still spinning, her legs threatened to give way, and she was so ashamed that she wanted to make a run for it, but as she became conscious of these facts about his body, her red face grew even more crimson.
“Are you very unwell? Shall we go?”
“I’m sorry, may I sit down for a bit?”
“Oh, of course.”
She collapsed into the chair and couldn’t think of anything to say to him. The man, not knowing what to do, kept sipping his coffee.
“Are you sick today? I...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 15.7.2021 |
|---|---|
| Übersetzer | Anton Hur |
| Verlagsort | London |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction |
| Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen | |
| Schlagworte | Feminism • Horror • International Booker Prize • Korean literature • Short Stories |
| ISBN-13 | 9781916277199 / 9781916277199 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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