Mother
She had held his face at age seven, talking about his dimples and his eyes. He didn’t understand at the time why it made him want to back away and find his box at the corner of the closet. He should have been happy that Nari was holding his face in her thin bones and calling him cute, darling, but even children can tell the difference between their mother and someone else.
Namjoon first learned that adults could lie when his father slapped Kijung so hard across the cheek she fell and the blood of her head from the edge of the table mixed with her snot and tears. She said she was okay, but she wasn’t, and he tried to hold her hand like she would hold his. She dripped snot and tears and blood on her shirt and dragged herself to a healer. And didn’t come back for days upon days. He watched the sunsets with his hands pressed to the windowsill and focused on the color purple instead of the breath of the monster in the other bed.
At seven, he became well-acquainted with knives.
A stranger slapped him so hard across the cheek he lost himself completely. He was somewhere among the white stars and feminine acid. The stranger murmured at his ears as he was thrust from the ground, not bleeding, not crying, snot clear from his nose. Words like “disgusting,” “slut,” a beautiful array of Korean words and more were not to be forgotten at age seven. Hands that should not have been intimate raised themselves in his mind and tickled the backs of his thighs. Shame and tarnish speckled his gold skin like age spots, like smears of blood stroking across his genitals. It was not the first time his young mind wished his acquaintance with knives had simply rid him of every filthy spot on his body.
He was only seven.
And the stranger had slapped him, thrust him from the ground, called him undesirable in no few words, and dragged him to a table he’d only seen hold machines. He felt like one, wanted to be one, because machines could break but at least they didn’t know why they screamed.
“I love you,” the stranger said, and the ends of her hair tickled his tucked, tense dimples as the maple in his chest cracked and creaked in an effort to get further and further away on the metal tabletop. He remembered the smell of her breath. It smelled like the rotting roots of shrubs during monsoon season swirled with ink and coffee. Namjoon had learned not to flinch from touches under his shirt, to tongue against his nipples. He had learned not to scream, even as she bit so hard his skin finally started to leak. The maple in his chest just became smaller, is all, cradling the light in tears. “So pretty, Jelly.” The smell of rot and ink and coffee could be traced to the slick stripe on his cheek. “Why’d you have to do that, hm?”
The ceiling was still clear and pale, faded with black around the edges where the light couldn’t reach. “Disgusting,” she said, voice as liquid and squelching as her saliva making tiny puddles of his bony body. The table was cold against his bare thighs, bare backside, and he tried to breath as the maple shrunk and the light became too small and a plea started snagging at his frozen throat. “Where did he touch you?”
Namjoon shook his head, and first became acquainted with a knife. Later, he knew it to be the pretty one that was engraved with ivy, shining silver and a polished black.
He screamed before he cried, wanting to say everywhere, everywhere, everywhere but only finding words for, “Eomma, eomma, please.”
The ivy kissed his skin, and metal tinted his nostrils a regular shade of copper.
“You never scar, baby boy. But I can see it, hm? He touched you here—” Her fingertips tickled amidst the blood and his shaking muscles, sweat freezing him to the tabletop. He bit down on his tongue. “—and here…” The knife point dug into his navel and he started to cry, then, a scream bouncing in the corners of the tech lab like a pathetic ping pong ball that wouldn’t stop going. “… and here.” A sob ripped at his throat before she touched him there and his fingernails made a mess of his palms.
“I’m sorry, sorry eomma.” The cuts resembled a wishbone, and the stranger didn’t have to snap it. She just left, the tips of her hair red. The ceiling bled into Van Gogh’s swirls, nonsensical and a sheep’s wool white. Salt mixed with rot and ink and coffee, but never reached the cooling pools gathering around his thighs. His vision faded with his dimming breath.
Kijung smelled like springtime.