TRIGGER WARNING.

XL.

B O N E   D E E P

—aka, a son is a son is a son— what is a daughter?

INT— PARK ESTATE.

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA— MORNING.

SCENE II.

The very first job I ever did, I went through it with panic pulsing at my every heartbeat and a jaw clenched so tight I was giving myself migraines. The fear pressed weightily like a ghost. Enhancing the noxious feeling was the awareness of the unblinking eyes around me.

It was an easy job, one fit for rookies; flirt with a mark at a bar and get them to pay for you for the entire night. Drinks, food, a hotel room— the works. Remember the pin number, get a few baubles, and get out. Easy enough. The catch: you can't sleep with the mark. It was one of the final tests Mama gave our 'graduating class'. Sex was a last act of hurrah. A defence rather than an attack.

Defence is easy to learn in a pinch; follow your instincts and everything else will guide you. A seamless con is to attack on every front, overwhelm the mark before they could make sense they are being trapped like a lamb on all sides, and gilt that lamb with a clean strike to the neck and voilá— a perfect con.

I succeeded that job. The confidence it gave me was just as priceless as the pretty austere gold rings I got. To this day, I can recite his credit card number off the top of my head. A casual remnant of pretty history.

It was easy to forget that suppressing feeling of fear.

I didn't think it would come back now, licking my spine in a phantom vermillion tongue as I was shepherded inside the house in a maze of polished wood hallways and bone coloured walls. I was a lamb in the belly of the beast, the house just as oppressing as the two women sandwiching me.

I could hear others. Footsteps that weren't ours, voices nothing more than murmurs and escaped words. But I saw nobody, as if this area of the house was purposely vacant.

I was a lamb. A fish in a bowl. A food nestled prettily in the mouth of a monster. The teeth are too close for comfort, beads of blood popping like pomegranates as flesh broke.

We pivoted to a room on the far left, crossing a small, open courtyard with a pond and white koi fishes. I envied how they move lazily about, fattened and taken care of while I suffered a game of cat and mouse. The room had deep green furnishings and ornate furniture— a drawer that I was sure had a solid silver handle, surviving a dynasty or two.

The door hadn't been closed properly and a hand— hers, bones and skin and long nails, not different from a banshee or a spirit — struck out to me. I stiffened, stomach tightening, but all she did was feel my soft stomach. I refused to breathe as she hummed, the pad of her fingers pressing lightly.

I was too astounded to fight back, unable to decide if I was going to rip her hand away or push her off, before she was musing. For the most part, she smelled like antiseptic. Like what you would expect a patient who was confined in a hospital to smell like. Forgotten and freshly scrubbed. Another chore done for the day.

I was unsure if the heady scent of soil and iron was real or not. Wet dirt or blood singes the edges of antiseptic and a body who spent too much time on a bed. A crossbreed of the living and the dead.

"They said you were near nine weeks now. You weren't as skinny as I was when I had my son, so I thought you'd show earlier but I guess not." She moved to the sides, testing the firmness there while I resisted the urge to smack her, the shock washing off. "You would have a quieter labour, less painful. My nursemaid says you have good hips."

"Nursemaid?" I turned back to the blind old lady as I stepped back from Kristoff's mother's hands. "Isn't she blind?"

Nana smiles. Hollow and pretty, a glass doll with wide, expressive eyes. "It's the way you walk. She's also a midwife. She lost her eyesight long before she got old." She was already turning away, the topic the least bit interesting to her but not enough to leave out. "A punishment."

I shuddered, looking at the old lady whose smile had not dropped. Who looked on, spine straight, hands in front of her. The feeling of being in a beast's throat tightened in the renewed shiver down my spine.

I straightened myself. You can't win by being swallowed in fear. Think like a crook. Look around. So many precious things littered the room, her room I'm assuming— and the word was littered. Things thrown around haphazardly, casual vases of undetermined dynasty and artiste, and I just know a couple of those silk robes would fetch a pretty penny. All piled high and stacked, a contrast to the sleek, almost barren look of the usual interior.

But here was this lady, in a white shift that flowed past her feet— soiled, bare feet; the smell of earth wasn't an illusion and I shuddered to think about the blood, my eyes being drawn to her bandaged wrists. Sunken eyes and taunted skin. She sat behind a low desk ladened with papers and books, some accoutrements and pots of tea.

It truly was a beautiful room— if a bit cluttered from the things that were stockpiled, with the faintest tinge of scent one doesn't associate with a room. Just the tinged of smoky, dusty antique things, aged paper, and just an inch of that earthy scent again.

My brain was making tricks, I'm sure of it. Pulling wool and thread and twisting my senses. Something about her, the old lady, this room— this goddamned house — was ruin to my instincts. I had half a mind to ask if they were producing hallucinogens under the floorboards to keep everyone smiling and paranoid.

The amount of times I was tampering down my urge to run was starting to concern me. If this goes on, I might develop Stockholm Syndrome. Lie pliant and happy to the alarm bells.

I took a deep breath through my mouth.

Wit's in order. First thing's first, I smiled. All pretty and playing nice.

"Can I ask why you wanted to see me?" Assuming she spoke to me in English, I was going to reply to her in kind. Plus, it's easier to sound arrogant in an American accent. And arrogance is a good facade to hide fear beneath.

A quirk on her mouth and my facade shook. It was not a smile. Just a twist of her lips. It was Kristoff's. Nothing about her looked anything like her son until then. There was Yuna; in her gaze, her chin, and that undeniable crazy genetic no one can truly replicate.

But that twist of her lips was her son's. The mimicry was unmistakable.

It's fine. Sure she has less reasons to want you alive but you still have her air quote grandchild in your stomach. Worst comes to worst you squeeze her wrists, push the old blind biddy, and make a run for it. The odds aren't all bad.

If she's stronger than you realised, punch her in her goddamn mouth.

"Can't I meet my daughter in law before everyone else does? I don't know if you know this, but in Asian families, you usually meet the parents before the marriage. Sometimes, before you even get engaged." She laughed. Brittle and grinded. "But I understand western culture enough. There is not a lot of parental respect. Now that you're here, we can make sure my grandson is not a bastard. My father prefers marriages he didn't approve of to happen in his house. It's how I got married, and it's how the boy will get married to you."

The derision to her words was an undercut. A natural flow in her tongue that it could hide between vowels and sound.

I choked back the first rebuttal I thought of. Now that— that was also Kristoff. It seemed as if mother and son shared the worst parts of each other, and I can't exactly snap back at the woman like I do to her son.

Or run a finger across her collar. For all intents and purposes, Kristoff was heady to lust. He responded like a dog nuzzling to its owner.

God, I was starting to miss that son of a bitch.

"Does the patriarch always get the final say in anything that happens in the family?" I asked instead.

"It's the reason he's the head of the family. Rules are rules. Stray from them and you won't have a place here. Careful, child." Her voice quieted, a hush, conspiratorial murmur with a grin that made my stomach hurt. "This line of questioning is dangerous."

"I was just curious." I smiled. "Getting to know the mother of my future husband is just as important to me as getting to know the values and manners of his family."

She cackled. Long and loud, it reverberated from every corner of the room. From my periphery, I saw the nursemaid chuckle. A pinch of delight.

"You smile like an edge of a knife, girl. You would do well in this family." Her fingers, as if subconsciously, picked at the edges of the bandage. Long nails pinching cotton again and again.

"He will need you. A strong woman at his side and an heir— ha! He's halfway cemented himself into the position. Irrefutable since he is a son. The male heir my father always wanted. The male heir I denied him by being born a girl." A sardonic laugh. "If he only knew how much I wanted to grow a penis so he would choose me. It didn't matter how smarter, sharper— better I was than his sons because he needed them just because they're men. Men will inherit everything. Your brothers, your husband, your sons."

She spat the words with a sharp slick of her tongue and teeth, eyes tightening into nothingness as I turned to her old nursemaid and wondered how I would get my point across that the agitation was rising. A slight vibration, a sheen to her skin, before she slammed a fist down the table and I jumped. Like a bird or a bullet, the old woman blurred past my vision as she carefully tended to her mistress, murmuring uttered words I couldn't decipher.

Another bolt of a cackle struck the room and her eyes met mine in a taunted string that pulled and pulled, freezing me from looking at anything else.

"Being a woman is a curse, child. A woman is to be kept to be sold. Like a fine porcelain doll to be bartered to the highest bidder. Your worth is in the prettiness of your face, the purity of your cunt, and the well-endowed womb that carries a suitable heir. These days, red blood is indistinguishable to blue. Even mistresses get spoils. Even bastards get boons."

Her head tilted far to the side. Eerie and doll-like.

"But you will do well. You have done well. You opened your legs. Your womb cares for this family's future. You have power. It'll never be what the boy has, but it is something to someone like you who has nothing. You carry my blood in you and you have more than you deserve." She gestured to my stomach and laughed again, falling down on the softened floor with a hard thud and splayed hair. "Oh, how funny. How very, very funny! Noble blood or a common whore doesn't matter much. A son is a son is a son."

She met my eye again, jutting long nails at my face with her loose bandage stained red. "He is my son, girl, do you understand? Open your legs for him and he will grant you the world. But he has to be from me. He was an ugly babe then an ugly child, but he's prettier now, isn't he?" She laughed, tearing her hands to her hair. I stepped further back as the last screw from her head loosened. "A grandmother. Daughter, mother, grandmother. Gae-sse-gi. Someone should have told me none of it mattered. Ssi-bal!"

A sharp bell from the gnarled hand of the old lady screeched against thin metal before the door opened and three individuals stepped in. Two were nurses who immediately went to help the crazy lady on the floor, squeamish like a worm tossed in salt, angry mutters and short, wry cackles— and one boy — man? Young man? Shaggy dark hair and crumpled skin? Burnt skin — arrived in a flourish. The old lady said something before she bowed to me, holding her mistress' wrists in a tight grip as she was starting to claw at her bandages, yelling, spitting words.

Ssi-bal. Ssi-bal-saekki. 씨발. 씨발새끼.

Again and again.

As one of the nurses squeezed off the excess from a syringe with milky liquid, the young man bowed to me, leading me out with a mousy turn to the door. A gloved hand gesturing for me to go first as the screeches of a madwoman rose and rose, words being eaten away by shrieks—

Before it dropped to silence.

I got out.

The stench of unearth soil and blood was boldened when the door shut behind me.

I paused to let the attendant lead me wherever. I didn't care. They could do nothing to me. Madwoman aside, madwoman was right. When the nurses came, they shielded me first, ensuring I was out of reach from their mistress, eyes flickering to my torso. Neither of them even looked me in the eye. My hands pressed to where their gazes held, scenes flashing between my eyelids, flipping back and forth to this present and the next. To burning possibility; a future not just paved but cemented.

Me— older, dressed nicer, sleeker, white and beige and pale pink. The occasional black. Hung in simple gold and intimidating, slick back hair. Someone's wife. The fat diamond on my finger is unmistakable. The three dark haired children I give birth in this house, my blood sinking into the soil, naming my tomb— who I was, whose man fucks me, whose power shrouds over me — beautiful and pale and chiseled to look just as perfect as the rest of the family.

I look beautiful and dead. A perfect daughter in law.

I gripped the attendant's hand, and his scarred face— and eye; muddy and ordinary and slanted — widened as I pressed a hand to my mouth.

"Bathroom. Please."

I had to vomit this house out of my system or this house would swallow me.

Korean.

개새끼 [BASTARD; gae-sse-gi].

씨발 [Ssi-bal; ssi-bal].

씨발새끼 [ssi-bal-saekki; fucking son of a bitch].

It's been a while. Thank you for being patient with me. Welcome back to the final chapters. It gets progressively darker into the conclusion. I hope you're ready for them.