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She doesn’t realize that she’s made of ticks until she gets her nipples pierced. This is a long time to live without revelation, but Yun-suk also lived without respect, agency, or pleasure until recently, so it isn’t that outlandish. Five days into being pierced and 12,530 days into her horribly long life, she is cleaning her piercings when she notices the pale dot.
It’s the size of a small pear seed. It’s sitting on her left nipple barbell. Yun-suk pauses, saline-soaked cotton swab in hand, and tries not to let her hovering, uncertain reflection rush her. Her barbell was clean when she was brushing her teeth a minute ago. How could this be? They told her there might be lymph or pus seepage alongside swelling, but she’s still shocked something emerged from her while she was conscious. It’s indecent that it didn’t happen under the darkness of night or shirt.
Her body acted in front of her eyes without her. How violating. Yun-suk scrubs at the pale dot with her cotton swab. To her shock, it squishes like a cooked corn kernel’s skin. It’s a little pouch hanging out of the raw tunnel through her nipple.
“Maybe I should soften it,” she says, uneasy. She sprays her breast with saline.
The dot that’s also a pouch—yes, it’s surely a pouch, not a crusted droplet, because it’s not giving way—stays perched on the titanium. Yun-suk scrubs at it again. All her performance anxiety and readings on aftercare melt away. The woman in the mirror looks irritated. Yun-suk sprays her nipple again. She swabs it again.
The dot remains.
Behind her catching breath, she hears Hyeong-min soothing their toddler, and their neighbor beating a carpet on their split balcony again. Yun-suk wants her husband’s assessment on whether this piercing looks infected or not. She’d be ashamed if it were. She’s been telling her friends that Hyeong-min requested the nipple piercings to liven up their bedroom life. They would rip into him if either piercing was infected.
In truth, the nipple piercing was Yun-suk’s idea, and Hyeong-min had no say in the matter. It’s easier for Yun-suk to impose an idea of demand on her terminally relaxed husband instead of admitting she desires something for herself. Hyeong-min knows what she’s been saying. He looks past it and Yun-suk’s scandalized friends with careful, senescing patience. He must sense she’s taking refuge behind him the way a child takes refuge behind a sand wall on the beach—though she’ll face the waves eventually, for now, she needs shelter.
Blaming Hyeong-min for any pain or self-inflicted complications, however, is unacceptable. Yun-suk wipes her reddening piercing again. This time, a black wisp appears from beneath the white dot. An eyelash? A hair? Before Yun-suk’s gaze, another wisp stretches from beneath the dot and kicks at the cotton swab.
It’s a leg.
There are eight of them, most wrapped around the barbell. With a rush of childhood memory, Yun-suk recognizes the dot’s teardrop shape and its faint dimpling. It’s a tick, its head buried in her nipple.
She grabs her tweezers. When their cold metal tips pinch the tick, pain stings her, as though she has pinched herself. From within her nipple, another set of legs extends, comforting the seized tick. Yun-suk’s skin immediately becomes clammy. Goosebumps light every centimeter of her. She crushes the tweezers around the first tick. Pain crackles through her, as though the piercing needle is impaling her nipple again. She yanks.
A rope of ticks explodes out of her breast. An endless handkerchief trick of parasites. They dangle out of her, dripping from the tweezers, desperately clinging to each other. As Yun-suk stares at the clam-flesh-mucus, leg-feathered chain of ticks swaying beneath her raised arm, it isn’t breakfast that churns in her stomach, but more ticks.
She senses them now the way that someone told to breathe senses their breaths. Countless ticks turn inside her, pulsing through her sack body in waves. They are the pink in her eye corners, the live wire within her eternally tapping fingers, the clenching muscle and egg that barely created her daughter; they are the pounding mass in her chest and the cage around it. Yun-suk drops her tweezers. The freed rope of ticks flees back into her breast. They ball over each other, climbing, clumping. They knock against her skin, light and scratchy; as they do, the ticks inside Yun-suk press against the film separating them.
A revelation explodes through Yun-suk: She is not a woman, but a city, a mass made singular by address and appearance alone. She is made of ticks, millions of them, each a droplet of her self and soul.
She always has been made of ticks.
Yun-suk is shaking so badly she almost yanks her bralette onto her piercings. She fumbles with the bathroom door and stumbles out. Hyeong-min is squatting on the sitting room floor, coaxing Seo-yun to eat a bowl of diced white peach. Seo-yun, gripping a toy in one fist and a napkin in another, eyes her father with deep suspicion.
“Hyeong-min,” Yun-suk says, the galaxy within her crawling. She’s nauseous. “Can I talk to you in private?”
He adjusts his glasses. “Give me a moment. I need Seo-yun to be good and eat her tasty, tasty breakfast peach first. At least a bite. That shouldn’t be too hard, eh, Seo-yun?”
“It can’t wait.” Yun-suk kneels. “Seo-yun, sweetie, if I go talk to your Dad in our room, will you eat and behave?”
Seo-yun shakes her head. Yun-suk’s temples ache.
Per usual, the one thing that cannot wait is their child. Eventually, they pacify Seo-yun by storing the diced peaches and granting her television time and kimbap instead. She’s staring at her cartoons with a judgmental wrinkle to her nose and mashing seaweed-wrapped rice between her fingers when Yun-suk and Hyeong-min withdraw to their room. They keep the door cracked.
“What’s the matter?” Hyeong-min says.
Yun-suk fans her teary eyes. “Everything! It’s awful!”
Hyeong-min listens to her explanation without interrupting, his intense expression a near duplicate of their daughter’s. At any other time, Yun-suk would laugh. When she finishes, she chews on her nails while her husband, lips pursed, cleans his glasses. He always cleans them during difficult discussions.
You will have to divorce. Although Yun-suk isn’t sure of that, the cruel, berating voice in the back of her mind is. She’s reined it in more frequently after leaving home and finding her footing, but in this revelation, it runs rampant. The longer the silence stretches, the stronger the voice grows.
Of course they’ll have to divorce. Hyeong-min cannot love her. She’s failed as a woman, again. The shame of being married to a sack of ticks will be too much. How can she be at peace with this form? Why do only others’ opinions terrify and pain her? That’s repulsive.
They just settled into this apartment; they just bought an expensive rice cooker together; their daughter will be split between them; they didn’t sign a prenup—
“It can’t be helped,” Hyeong-min says, finally. “If you’re made of ticks, you’re made of ticks.”
“How can you be so accepting?” Yun-suk breaks into sobs. “We have to separate, or I’ll suck your blood, or Seo-yun’s, or get you both sick. Oh, God, I’ll dissolve and be eaten by egrets, or be killed by some dog’s pest collar!”
“Yun-suk, that’s silly. None of those things will happen.”
Yun-suk sniffles into Hyeong-min’s hands as he cups her face. Visions of ticks spraying from her sinuses in scurrying waterfalls overwhelm her. She lets Hyeong-min soothe and kiss her anyway. His pants scratch the underside of her legs. When a gentle tongue-tip pokes her lips, she meets it, even as she imagines a vomitous stream of ticks pouring from her throat into his, all of them wet with spit, needy for blood. She imagines tick ridges beneath her probing tongue and a glob of parasites coating Hyeong-min’s tonsils as their heads burrow inside him. Shamefully, she can’t rebuke his affection.
At least Hyeong-min wants her.
Once they’ve calmed, Yun-suk leans against her husband, letting him stroke her hair. They are still for several long moments, listening for the television and the sounds of Seo-yun eating.
“If you’ve been like this as long as I’ve known you,” Hyeong-min murmurs, “then why do you think you’ll do such awful things?”
“It’s what ticks do. It’s expected. And it’s natural.”
"So? Those aren’t binding obligations, Yun-suk.”
Whenever she’s reminded that her husband grew up free from expectations so strict they’re natural law, she hates him a little. Or she wants to tunnel inside him and hide in his safe skin. Her arachnid composition brings clarity to the second feeling.
The thuds of their neighbor beating carpets echo through the wall.
“No wonder we had trouble conceiving Seo-yun,” Hyeong-min says.
Yun-suk closes her eyes. She frets against another nightmare’s hundred beaks. The millions of life points contained in her shape—bound in an elastic, fleshy suit—squirm.
“How did we have her at all?” she says.
Asking why doctors or past suitors didn’t uncover Yun-suk’s nature is stupid. Because they didn’t look, they didn’t see it. Yun-suk has discovered herself by accident.
Partially. When she recalls the swooping, victorious freedom that floods her every time she beholds her pierced breasts, agency glittering plainly on her body, a kind home and kinder, wanting voices around her, Yun-suk starts to melt. Even acceptance now surrounding her makes her cellular fortress sag.
No wonder a tick fell out of a new hole in her. No wonder she spent so much of their early marriage in Hyeong-min’s arms, crying. Safety ruins vigilance.
Still, there’s the question of Seo-yun.
“I have an idea,” Hyeong-min says. “When I lived near Namwon—”
“Wait. What if Seo-yun has Lyme disease? Can she even catch it?”
“Love, please.”
“I’m sorry.” She squeezes his wrist. “Go on.”
“When I was growing up near Namwon, one of my neighbors fell in love with a ghost. He didn’t know she was a ghost at first, of course. He just thought she was homeless. Before he invited her to live with him, he didn’t mind seeing her in the forest or her decrepit house. He was the kind of freeloader whose dick took him places no soldier with a gun would go. But he did love this ghost, dearly. He changed for her.” Hyeong-min adjusts his glasses. “He had a baby with her before someone sent him a newspaper clipping of her murder.”
Yun-suk gasps. “No!”
“I swear, he did! This is entirely true. She nursed the baby and everything. By the time my neighbor confronted her with the newspaper, their daughter was seven. The ghost disintegrated. Their daughter was fine. When I met her, she was a healthy and normal preteen, even if her father was struggling. So, the worst is never certain, even if troubles are.”
Yun-suk’s thousands of stomach ticks somersault at the way Hyeong-min looks at her. Some lower down are threatening to set friction bonfires with how they’re spinning. She kisses her thumb, then presses it to his lips.
“At least I haven’t made you a necrophiliac,” she says.
Hyeong-min chokes on his laugh.
There’s a crash in the next room, followed by the sound of violently sloshing liquid. Yun-suk and Hyeong-min trip over each other trying to get up. When they bolt into the sitting room, disheveled, Seo-yun is standing before the refrigerator with a sealed carton of coconut water in her grip. The stool she used to reach it lays nearby, fallen. Seo-yun makes eye contact with them both and forcefully shakes the carton again.
Her satisfaction is evident.
“I want my peaches,” she says.
“You’re a wicked little girl,” Yun-suk says, her headache renewing, exhaustion soaking in. “You’re far too smart.”
Hyeong-min scoops their daughter up. As he grabs the peaches from their refrigerator shelf, Seo-yun blows her mother kisses. Yun-suk uses the last of her energy to pretend she’s catching them. It takes practiced restraint to not say, Women don’t act like this. Her millions of ticks, the manywhole of her, are torn between fading fear, irritation, and love. Regardless of everything else, she wants to sleep.
“Do you need some space? I can care for her before I head to work,” Hyeong-min says. “My mother could probably take Seo-yun for a day or two. She’s been asking for her.”
“Please.”
When Hyeong-min leaves the postal warehouse at midnight, he knows his daughter is peaceably snoring in his childhood apartment, his wife is probably still shut in their bedroom, his body will be sore for hours, and everything will pass. Some drunkard’s empty bottles are rattling around in a tote while Hyeong-min is on the bus; that clear, light sound follows him beneath streetlights and sagging electrical wires long after the bottles are gone.
Bright cords of pain burn in Hyeong-min’s arms and calves as he punches his apartment keypad code. The keypad keeps sticking. He’s tired. This too will pass. Though he’s been called lazy or delinquent countless times for his attitude, as far as Hyeong-min is concerned, no action or reaction is needed unless something is important. If anything, people seem oblivious to how many important situations surround them. Peaches need diced; dogs need petted; children need shoes tied; partners need assured.
Hyeong-min steps into the apartment. Unlit like this, it’s a modern painting: many black quadrilaterals of different size and orientation jammed against each other, or overlapping, or haphazardly stacked. There is no light but the city’s lights. There is no noise but the city’s noise.
Hyeong-min shuts the door behind him.
He calls into the dark, “Yun-suk?”
An old, old thought tells him, An unexpected person will reply. It’s been years since his apartment brimmed with down-on-their-luck and disowned friends, a new but known body on the couch every night, but the muscle memory is hard to shake.
Headlights from passing vehicles flash through the closed sitting room blinds. Their streaks come and go in seconds. A faint, wet sound tickles Hyeong-min’s ears. He edges further into the apartment. He flicks on the kitchenette light.
No cleaned bowls rest in the sink, no dirtied ones on the counter. No faucet or overwatered plant drips. The hanging tier of metal produce baskets still overflows with mandarins and clothespinned notes about groceries, appointments, and celebrations. Nothing has changed since Hyeong-min dropped Seo-yun off at her grandmother’s. Ripples of faint, wet sound—squishing—continue.
The bedroom door is closed.
Hyeong-min approaches it. He tries the knob. It’s unlocked. He doesn’t open the door.
“Yun-suk?” he repeats, tentative.
“come in.”
His wife’s voice is a rustle.
When Hyeong-min enters, he senses an immense shift. Yun-suk is nowhere to be found, but her outfit is folded on the bed. All the lights are off. The bed, dressers, and nightstand are unmoved, the hamper’s overflowing clothes not a wrinkle different, the bathroom door hanging lopsided, per usual. But the room is entirely changed. It sounds moist. It glows.
—No. There’s one new garment. It’s crumpled on the floor, far from the hamper. Almost beneath Hyeong-min’s boot toe. As he steps back, he kneels. The garment is a bodysuit the color of sepia chamomile. A molt? It’s delicate and pliable. It’s folded on itself like thick, wettened paper. Hyeong-min recognizes the beauty mark dotting its shoulder before he recognizes the vacant, sagging face, the paint brush-swipe of black hair, or the keratinous glimmer of nails.
A titanium ball peers out of the creased skin like a lone jewel. Cellulite swirls around it, ripples left from invisible waves. Hyeong-min touches the emptied breast it’s attached to. It’s warm.
“welcome home.”
Yun-suk, Hyeong-min registers, is everywhere.
Every millimeter of the walls and ceiling are sunken in ticks. They cover the vents. They cover the windows. Because there are millions of them, they swallow any gaps or indents, leveling every surface in a rippling, rhinestone sea of arachnids. Their opalescence illuminates the room; their movement fills it with tidal noise.
“you look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Yun-suk frets from every crevice. “sit down, Hyeong-min! rest.”
Will this, too, pass? Hyeong-min bursts into laughter. There’s nothing else to do. He sits down heavily on the floor.
“What did you do?” he says. “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
“no, no. i unzipped myself.”
When the ticks’ legs fan out, they make black ripples, inverse of the way sunlight dapples moving water. Hyeong-min feels seasick. He closes his eyes to get his bearings.
“i love you.”
“I know.”
Although vulnerability bubbles at the edge of Yun-suk’s many-faceted voice, Hyeong-min doesn’t detect any desperation or hint of unhealed wounds. This is more extraordinary than anything. When he reopens his eyes and says “I love you too,” tick-capped waves on the wall begin to lull, and their tide stops frothing at the floor. Yun-suk settles into a shining, placid, parasitic sea.
All is calm.
“You sound happy.” Hyeong-min slips his shaking hands in his pockets. None of Yun-suk notices. She sighs dreamily. She has the same tone as when Hyeong-min has just finished inside her and they’re entangled on the bed, indolent and mentally vacant.
“i am,” she says. “i’m free! free, free, free!”
An iridescent, many-limbed whirlpool churns on the ceiling.
“you can’t begin to know my relief, Hyeong-min. i’m not a woman. i’m ticks! i’m beholden to nothing!”
“I’ve tried to tell you that,” Hyeong-min says, gently.
“you have. but you haven’t borne my body. i needed to unshackle myself. oh, Hyeong-min, i’ve been a cruel liar to me, and you, and i was making a cruel inheritance for Seo-yun. no more. i can finally live as i please.”
A waterfall of ticks cascades from the ceiling. It stretches towards the floor at a glacial pace, sparkling, seething. Hyeong-min, chin up, watches it descend on him.
“You aren’t going to drink my blood, are you?”
He’s half joking. He can picture the tick whirlpool exploding open onto him in a cut artery of longing; he can picture it unfolding onto him at a glacial, dripping pace. There would be a greedy, tunneling tick head for his every pore and crevice. He would vanish under the abdomens ballooning with his blood like some bejeweled mummy.
Hyeong-min isn’t sure he would run.
“no.”
The tick waterfall nudges open a central slit in Yun-suk’s bodysuit. It drips inside. The ticks coalesce into a not-quite-person-shaped pillar. Before Hyeong-min’s eyes, their pearly appleseed bodies begin refilling the bodysuit into recognizable dimensions. They sound like the pouring of damp rice.
But even as her shape ripens in other places, the fingers don’t finish refilling. Their tips hang limp. Yun-suk’s face, too, refuses to fill—though it’s regained volume, her features remain rubbery and dented. A dismayed wheeze escapes Yun-suk’s lips. It reminds Hyeong-min of the gasp that escaped her when they had just begun dating, and he glimpsed her without makeup.
Of course. Returning to a familiar place is difficult, especially when you’ve fled. For all that he doesn’t mind now, Hyeong-min eternally recalls the shame that suffocated him when he quit a job in tears, only for bills to insist he slither back and beg for reemployment three weeks later. Although two decades have passed, he knows the mortification of resuming a routine after being perceived.
“Hang on,” he tells Yun-suk.
He takes her left hand and spreads her fingers across his. Her unfilled fingertips feel like silken gloves. Her pulse skitters over his. Slowly, a breath at a time, Yun-suk’s hand develops. After it’s finished, Hyeong-min can’t tell it’s made of ticks at all. He lays her finished hand across her abdomen before taking the other one. This one, too, re-renders itself.
Yun-suk looks at him. Most of her ticks have vanished inside her, but an anxious handful flicker around her nostrils and mouth in opaline snot trails. Her face remains cratered in the center. The last of its creases stick together like so many arms defensively folded over a bare chest.
“i’m afraid,” she says. Hyeong-min can’t tell if she fears the process or the end. The return.
“Don’t be.”
He cradles Yun-suk’s head in his lap. He slips a thumb into her mouth, gently hooking the corner and pulling her open, saliva and soft, tick-covered tongue probing at him, Yun-suk’s fingers squeezing his wrist. They’re hot. In the dark, the inside of her mouth shines, pebbled and titanium-bright.
“Seo-yun.” Yun-suk is feeble and urgent.
Hyeong-min chews on the inside of his cheek and strokes Yun-suk’s hair. He ignores the spike of pain in his forehead.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll raise her no matter what she’s made of.”
Slowly, the last ticks ooze inside Yun-suk. They reassemble the veins and muscle strings. Slowly, Yun-suk’s head inflates and unfurls, her features blooming. She’s a moon revealing itself from behind trees. Then, finally, Yun-suk gives a shuddering breath, whole. Hyeong-min stares at the face cupped in his hands; the face stares back.
What can be said to a star? Hyeong-min holds the whole of Yun-suk, bright and quivering and many.
She holds him back.
Editor: Kat Weaver
First Reader: Ashlee Lhamon
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department
Accessibility: Accessibility Editors