Korean Short Stories
Hwang Byungsng We Ate Cookies Together 같이 과자 먹었지 Translated by Lee Hyeongjin
Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea . Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr
We Ate Cookies Together Crows that resemble their mother . . . Pumpkin-yellow car and sweet cookies . . . rainbow . . . night street . . . This is the world that I met at the end of beauty and sorrow. We were five all together. Crows that are happy because they've become crows would occasionally talk to me but I could not hear what they said. They seemed to say: Shall we eat cookies together? Shall we eat cookies together? That's what I understood and I nodded in agreement. From the car muffler rainbow-hued smoke was rising, spraying like paint. None of us looked back, but we all knew, and became all the closer and more intimate, like sisters reconciled after a bitter quarrel, so that our hearts grew warmer with feelings of love. We held each other's hands, and I smiled like the crows' younger sister. The crows worried about my future and encouraged me, like kind and caring sisters . . . dream-like time, tears ran timidly down my cheeks, this is what they call the scent of the rainbow, this, a story of the sisterly love of sisters who ride a car together, a black-hued street with nothing more to wish for, this is the family, the warm food, the time of affection, and the future that we have longed for so dearly. I hated and felt afraid to open my eyes. This is the world we meet at the far end of beauty and sorrow, while I eat cookies together with my four sisters, sweet words that keep ringing in my ears: We ate cookies together today,
1
We ate cookies together today. Cars whispering as they speed along, sisters, I felt bitter that I was born with eyes, and I hated and felt afraid of drooping shoulders, arms, and trunk, of these two hands and legs that will rot and decompose. At the far end of the beauty and sorrow of sharing cookies together, there is another dirty and stinking world of flesh, blood, excrement, semen, that I hated. While eating cookies together, munching on cookies together, as I was no longer able to call the crows my sisters, I eventually jumped out of the speeding car. Blood, blood, blood, my knee was bleeding. Get away, sisters . . .
Those sisters who really went away, this is
the sound of the ring of a pledge that slipped off and fled. This is the smell of a family irrevocably cracked, a blood-red street that could not be more conspicuous, this is the war, the stale cold food, the time of hatred, the present time that we hated so much, I no longer hated or feared to close my eyes. The car carrying the crows vanished into the distance, the rainbow disappeared, a world where things like cookies to share cannot be found. At the time when heartless sisters, crumbled cookies, rolled and fell down from the pumpkin-hued roof, like the armpit odor of the crows sticking to the tip of the nose, We ate cookies together, We ate cookies together, a fleeing voice, a rainbow, a night street, a time that will never come again.
2
Copyright 2008 Literature Translation Institute of Korea
3