Korean Short Stories
Kim keun Hallways 복도들 1 Translated by Yu Huiseok
Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea . Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr
Hallways Into that stomach I go, beginning with the fierce jaws and leading down to the sacred asshole, he drags me in whole and in this long round tube, there are no coarse twinkling scales, only soft flesh, a flabbily fluctuating bottom and walls, with doors hanging dark and damp, so many doors each with several slimy knobs, whose addresses I don't know and, well, no telling if the doors open inwards or outwards, no telling if here is inside his stomach or inside mine, if I am feed, or he, his feed, if either I or he and I are someone else's bone with little pieces of meat sparsely clinging to it, I mean my flesh that hasn't yet been digested and smells fetidly rotten and from the fierce jaws, outside of his and my time, he gulps down a bowlful of saliva dribbling from a horse drooping like the tongue of a dog in midsummer and though we have reached this place we can go neither in nor out so we just have to stay here as through the sacred asshole wind exits hissing and he drags me deep into his stomach, ever deeper while the wind smells like a widower who has stayed faithful to his dead wife his whole life long, holding brusquely onto my thin hand, he turns the sleek doorknob and in a flash his face changes into something neither completely like him nor unlike him before his face becomes blurry again. I thought there were too many damn doors and knobs on the doors but perhaps there were none at all. Ultimately, here, inside this languid stomach ceaselessly writhing neither fully inside nor outside uncertain even of my own whereabouts, I . . .
Copyright 2008 Literature Translation Institute of Korea
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