Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  The youth stared back at him. Having vomited, his insides felt much better. No more dizziness. A little more confident now, he swiftly swung a fist the next time his enemy approached. But the opponent was quicker. The young man with the fierce expression moved as if he were gliding on his feet, dodged under the youth’s arm, and slammed the youth’s throat with his thumb and forefinger, a quick but effective blow. The wind knocked out of him, the youth began to fall forward. His opponent, seizing the opportunity, sidestepped and made to jab the youth in the neck with his elbow.

  Right before the opponent’s elbow struck, the youth heard the sound of rocks shattering and steel tearing. For some reason, it wasn’t as painful as before.

  His opponent’s elbow hit something unbelievably hard. The youth heard the sound of the young man’s elbow joint breaking and his screams.

  The youth sprang to his feet. Reaching out with his right arm to attack, he saw that he still had a cuff on his wrist. So he lowered that arm and with his left arm, grabbed his opponent’s neck. The left arm stretching out before him was covered in something hard and glistening, like gray scales, and his hand and fingers looked like they were hewn from rock. That gray hand, looking nothing like a human’s, was now wrapped around the ferocious-looking young man’s neck, and squeezing.

  All these things happened in what felt like a strange slowness. His hand holding up his opponent by his neck, the man’s face looked fit to burst, at first turning red, then white, and soon, blue. The youth watched these changes like he were a spectator of the fight.

  From the opponent’s side, an old man with white hair jumped into the arena. The bald man also came sprinting. This was the first time the youth had seen the bald man without a smile for him. He couldn’t make out what the voices of the people shouting at him were saying, but following the orders of the bald man, he dropped his opponent.

  His fingers, oddly slow, loosened their grip one by one. His opponent, eyes rolled so far back in agony that the youth could see only the whites, whimpered as he collapsed to the ground. The white-haired old man kept shouting as he dragged the opponent out of the arena. Throughout all this, the audience was in a crazed frenzy, unintelligibly screaming.

  Alone in the arena now, the youth stood staring at the chaos outside the ring. The bald man came up to him again, grabbed his right hand, and raised his arm up.

  A thunderous roar from the crowd was accompanied by a pelting of small, shining objects into the arena. The man was all grins again as he picked up these sparkling pieces while the youth stared down at his own hands.

  They were back to being his normal hands. His arm was back to being what it used to be.

  But in that moment, he could finally connect the sound of breaking, the bone-shattering pain, and the gray, stony scales that appeared from the triangular scars along his limbs and back and ribs. He couldn’t quite explain what he had understood, but he had a feeling that a very big question of his had just been answered.

  The bald man stuffed into his hip pouch the small and sparkling bits and pieces that the people had thrown and still had fistfuls in both hands as he led the youth out of the arena. In no time, the bald man’s people had packed up their things and they were on their way out of the village. Even as they made a run for it, the bald man was all smiles.

  At the inn where they arrived after a long day’s journey, they unpacked in their rooms then ate a large, jovial supper. On the luggage rack of their carriage tied outside, the youth dozed on a pile of straw.

  Something prodded him awake. The bald man was fastening a chain to the cuff on his right wrist and locking the chain to something above the youth’s head. As the youth tried to get up, the man pressed down on his neck. The youth obediently sat back down.

  Holding out a bowl of something, the man said, “Drink.”

  The youth lowered his head over the bowl to do so but involuntarily turned away. It was something similar to the green stuff he had drunk that morning but with an extra, sharper smell. The dizzy, nauseating feeling came back to him and he frowned.

  “Drink!” The man grabbed his neck and shoved his face into the bowl.

  Listlessly, the youth tried to resist with his left arm. All that happened was the chain dangling from his right wrist clanged, an irritating sound. With all his might, the man grabbed the youth’s neck with one hand and tilted the contents of the bowl into his mouth with the other, forcing him to finish it. Spasms rocked the youth and he coughed violently, but like before, half of it had already made it down his esophagus.

  The bald man looked down at him expressionlessly as the youth coughed and gagged. “If you hadn’t drunk that medicine before, you would’ve killed that bastard. Understand?”

  This change in tone was so abrupt that the youth looked up in wonder.

  “You were lucky that little shit didn’t die and we kept our money and got out of there. Think of what would’ve happened if you killed him. You’d be finished. Do you hear me?”

  The youth kept looking up at him and didn’t answer. The man’s hand struck the side of the youth’s face, hard.

  “You hear me?” he shouted again.

  Getting slapped out of nowhere made the youth angry, but he couldn’t move his body. His face flashed red, but all strength had left his limbs.

  “Eat everything I give you from now on, right? Don’t throw it up or get clever about it.”

  Having spat out these last words, the man, teetering slightly, left the carriage and went back into the inn.

  X

  Ever since the bald man gave him the mysterious liquid to drink and made him fight men, the youth began to feel worse and worse.

  The strong-smelling liquid no longer made him vomit so often, but the dizziness and nausea increased. Suppressing the vomit, he tended to be unsteady on his feet in the arena, making him more vulnerable to the blows that rained down upon him. His body was definitely deteriorating, which meant the speed in which he recovered from the effects of the liquid was slowing down.

  He knew, of course, that in the last moment, hard scales would sprout from the scars that It had left on him and protect his body from harm. But because he could not think straight, those defenses were slow to come into effect, and with the flagging of his strength and the battering his body was receiving, he could not fight back as hard as he could before.

  The day he faced a pale giant with an almost geometrically perfect smile, completely white skin, and red eyes, he thought he would finally die. The red-eyed giant, like a cat playing with a mouse, struck a blow on every part of the youth’s body and whipped the crowd into a frenzy. Sometimes the giant would make an aggressive move and the youth would feebly try to counterattack, only to have the giant sidestep out of the way in the last second and bow to the applauding audience, the white giant’s red eyes beaming with mirth and confidence. Just as the fight was beginning to seem endless, the giant attempted to strike the final blow on the teetering youth, who was near fainting.

  The youth would later remember that just then, he sprouted black wing-like limbs from his back and whacked away the giant that had been lunging for the youth’s throat. The giant’s body flew out of the arena, and the audience roared with appreciation at this unexpected turn. The wing-like limbs disappeared in the next moment, and the youth felt the blood drain from his face as he began to keel over.

  Immediately, the bald man ran up to him and snatched his arm with one hand and propped up his back with the other so that he wouldn’t fall. Holding the youth’s arm up, the bald man bowed to the audience and gathered the coins that the audience was showering them with as the youth tried not to vomit or fall. The world was spinning, and his insides hurt like they were being twisted.

  In the carriage as they pulled out of the village, the bald man counted his coins and cackled.

  “Yes, that’s the spirit! Keep doing exactly what you did today! Look like you’ve reached the end and then, bam! Those wings! How did you do that? What’s your secret? Oh, who car
es, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  The youth had no idea what the bald man was saying. He did not have the energy for comprehension or concentration. Whenever the carriage shook, his guts felt like they did a flip, and every beat of his heart gave him a pain that felt like something was swelling inside his head.

  That night, the youth stared at his right wrist, which was chained to the carriage’s luggage compartment, and thought that he needed to escape once more.

  XI

  It wasn’t easy waiting for an opportunity.

  From morning until evening, the youth was surrounded by the bald man and his gang, and in the night they all slept together in the carriage. On days when he earned a lot of money, he was left alone in the carriage while the others went drinking, but his right wrist remained chained to the luggage compartment.

  More than anything else, however, he was getting weaker and weaker. He no longer had to drink the suspicious liquid in order to feel nauseous; whenever he stood up after sitting for some time or emerged from a dark place into an even slightly brighter one, the world would spin around him. During fights, he had now reached a point where he simply teetered for a while as his opponent landed blow after blow, before he fainted dead away to the boos of the crowd. This prompted the bald man to stop giving him the medicine. But his body had already been damaged, and even as he struggled and tried to choke down his vomit, he was continuously sent out to fight.

  It was when the youth could no longer stand up properly on his own that the bald man was finally finished with him. No matter how much the man hit or kicked him or pressed down on his neck, the youth could no longer rise. The bald man spat on him and had one of his underlings carry him over his shoulder into the hills. Once the underling had hacked through quite a bit of forest, he abandoned the youth under a tree and disappeared.

  The youth lay on the ground and stared up at the sky. A fragment of blue peeping through the dense covering of the trees.

  As he lay there and stared up at the unmoving blue fragment, inhaling the scent of fallen leaves, his endlessly rumbling nausea seemed to ease. A dreamy, relaxed feeling overcame him where he lay completely still.

  The blue above him started to gray. It then turned ashen and rain began to fall. The leaves that covered the ground and his body were mercilessly pelted with fat raindrops.

  The rainwater was chilly against his skin. With the rain thickening and the smell of damp earth and leaves growing stronger, he was starting to feel nauseous again. He trembled and almost bounced off the ground as he suddenly sat up and violently vomited what felt like his entire insides. Mustering what little strength that was left in his battered body, he vomited for a long time until there was nothing inside him anymore.

  When he was done, he lifted his head and stared up at the sky where the rain was falling from. The raindrops hit his face and slid into his mouth. He drank them in; they were sweet and refreshing.

  He got to his feet. It was cold. But the shivers and the pain that had been strangling his guts were dissipating, and were soon gone entirely.

  Heading in the opposite direction of where the underling who had brought him here disappeared to, he started to walk.

  XII

  The youth wandered the mountain forest for four days. Aside from rainwater and some grasses, he ate nothing and continued to walk for a long time.

  When he emerged from the forest on the evening of the fourth day and discovered a village, the first thought in his mind was not joy that he had survived but that the village was somehow familiar to him. A rock near the village’s entrance, the green-brown earth and gray-barked trees, and the row of houses all came together in an uncanny sense that he had been here before.

  But why the village scene was so familiar or where he had seen it before was something that he didn’t have the where-withal to ponder. For four days straight, he had not eaten or slept properly. The things he needed most right now were food and warmth.

  He walked into the strangely familiar village.

  He still wore the clothes he had worn in the arena. The only thing on his body were the ornate, loose trousers they had given him, and he had no shoes or tunic, just the many scars marking his back and arms, bare to the world.

  The sun was melting into different shades of red above the clouds on the horizon, and smoke was rising from the village houses as their inhabitants prepared their evening meals. The smell of cooking made his stomach jump and skip. He walked into the alley between the houses.

  Villagers returning from their work stopped in their tracks and stared at him. In the tense silence of their fearful gazes, the youth remembered the day he had escaped It and the cave and come upon the world of people. But unlike back then, there was no grinning man coming up to run and grab his hand.

  No one offered him food or warmth. When he tried to enter the houses, the women would take one look at the scars on his ribcage and scream. Farmers holding hoes or rakes would chase him away, making angry faces. He was discouraged. He covered as many of his scars as he could with his arms and hurried out of there.

  Once he had escaped the village, he sighed. Should he go to the mountains? He had no clue as to how one survived in the mountains or forest. How to light a fire, where to get food—he didn’t even know where to start with such things.

  But he had managed to survive on raw meat and greens before. There was no reason why he couldn’t continue to do so now. More than anything else, there was no telling what would happen to him if he ever found himself in a village again.

  He turned back to the darkening forest and began to walk.

  After walking a long time through the trees, in the darkness he saw something like the round roof of a shelter.

  It really was a roof. Not only that, there was a whole house underneath it. But seeing how there were no lights on inside despite the dark, he thought it must be abandoned.

  He was overjoyed. A place to sleep. While still hungry, night had fallen so he might as well spend the night here and go out to forage for food when the sun came up.

  He approached the hut and pushed open the door. The door made a creaking sound as it opened.

  From the darkness, a white object approached him. Surprised, he staggered backwards and fell on his behind.

  “Brother?” asked the white object.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  XIII

  The woman stretched out her arm and fumbled around in the emptiness in front of her.

  “Brother?” she asked again.

  He tried to calm down. Slowly, he stood up.

  “Brother? Why aren’t you saying anything?”

  The woman approached. Her fingers grazed his cheek.

  He froze. Without hesitation, the woman stepped up to him and caressed his face.

  He closed his eyes.

  … The sweetest moment of his entire life ended with the woman’s scream.

  “Who are you!”

  Her shout frightened him. The woman flailed at the space in front of her as she shouted, “Why are you here! What happened to my brother!”

  In the confusion, he grabbed the woman’s thrashing wrists. The woman screamed. He turned her around and covered her mouth. As she struggled against him, he dragged her into the house.

  As soon as they crossed the threshold, the woman suddenly stopped struggling. He was so surprised that he stopped in his tracks, too.

  “Let me go,” the woman whispered. “I won’t scream, I’ll do what you want. Just let me go.”

  So he let her go.

  The woman carefully righted herself. She felt around with her hands and took a step away from him.

  “So what do you want from me?” she asked in a cold, low voice. “What have you done to my brother?”

  The youth did not know who this brother was. He wasn’t there to harm her, either. He wanted to explain this but didn’t know how, and he simply took a step closer to her.

  He tripped over something and lost his balance. In
surprise, he shouted out. And through the darkness, something hard struck the top of his head.

  He lost consciousness.

  XIV

  When he came to, it was bright all around him. He couldn’t stand; his hands were tied behind his back.

  There was a young man in front of him. A familiar man, strangely enough.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded the young man. “What are you doing so far from the cave, and what were you going to do to my sister? Speak!”

  The youth could not fully recognize either the young man or his sister. He hadn’t come all the way here to do anything. He vigorously shook his head.

  The young man was not assuaged. His words and gaze became a shade harsher. “That monster sent you, didn’t it? Did it tell you to kill my sister? Or bring her to it?”

  The word “monster” made his mind go white.

  The young man knew about It. How? The bald man, his gang, the inhabitants of all the villages he had passed by— none of them had ever mentioned It.

  Misinterpreting his blank expression, the young man threw a punch at his face.

  “Speak!” he shouted. “Why are you here? What were you going to do with my sister?”

  Not giving him a chance to answer, he punched the youth’s face once more. From the inside of his lip, the youth felt a salty liquid pooling in his mouth.

  “Answer me!” The young man struck again.

  The youth’s vision briefly went black. As he saw the young man’s fist rise again, he desperately twisted his body and turned his head. More than being misunderstood as serving It, more than the surprise from meeting someone who knew what It was, he was infuriated by this fist that silenced him every time he was trying to answer.

  “Brother, stop that.”

  The two men turned their heads at the same time. It was then the youth noticed the woman’s eyes.

  They were a translucent gray. Perhaps she hadn’t been born this way, but a thin membrane had formed on her eyes and clouded her vision.

  He thought her eyes were beautiful.

  The woman was more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen before.

  “If he’s bad, all we need to do is chase him away. Don’t hit him,” she said gently.