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Korean Ratsnake, Cat snake, Short-tailed viper snake, a snake, snake…. is creeping up your house wall that protects you from the outside.

We know a priori its uncanny wriggle, and

uncanny wriggle is Entelechy wrapped in scales of life and death....

So, do not turn away from the snake for you feel it is gross!

A snake who eats its tail again and again endlessly, being resurrected forever, this being who

swallows itself so, giving birth to the universe and holding the universe in its body is eternity

and universe itself without beginning and end.

Today the universe whose scales shine brilliantly dances in a state of beatitude.

 

One spring day,

My grandfather caught the universe that just revived.

The universe soon was hung, as its dead body, on a branch of a persimmon tree in the backyard of our house.

Drooping universe......

The universe was dead, its soul vaporized.

 

My grandfather and I are looking at the dead universe.

I’m so sad!

Today our next-door child also caught and killed the universe, another universe.

The corpse of the universe casts an ominous question to me,

If the seeds of the universe dry up,

If the universe disappears forever,

What will happen to our destiny!

 

In early summer, my grandmother catches and kills gross snakes,

and puts them in a damp place under an eaves.

Then, nasty flies smell the bodies of the universes and gather in them in swarms.

Two days later, the rotten fleshes of the dead universes are swarming with maggots, as if they were destined to devour the flesh of the dead universe.

When the maggots are plump, my grandmother feeds them to a hungry chicken.

As the chicken devours a lot of maggots nourished with the universes without their souls, it become fleshy as the days go by.

One day,

my grandmother cuts the chicken, makes boiled chicken with rice and gives it to weakly me for my birthday food.

Should I eat a chicken who ate maggots eating the rotten fleshes of universes?

Today the universes are sad, I am also sad!

 

In the distant future, all universes die, all human beings disappear,

Artificial flowers bloom in the dead bodies of universes,

on human graves.



Jong-Ki Lim (임종기) is a writer and translator from South Korea. He has published various translated books of literature, humanities, social science, and natural science, and his book The New Literary Revolutionof SF Tribes: The Birth and Soaring of Science Fiction that is SF literary criticism. He is currently writing the most uncanny, creative, compelling speculative fiction and fantastic poems in Seoul. You can read his interesting Korean writings on his blog, https://blog.naver.com/tumorism.
Current Issue
16 Feb 2026

Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.
In the beginning, the ocean was lonely / and so she created a fifteen-year-old girl / (or was it the other way around?)
It’s me not you, and the / Hole in the sky still weeps sticky tears.
Wednesday: Lies Weeping by Glen Cook 
Friday: Slow Gods by Claire North 
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By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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