Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Author:Bora Chung [Bora Chung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Honford Star 2021

Home Sweet Home

“Surely you must know that it’s only good manners to compensate me thirty million won in this situation, if you know what I mean, dear.” The owner of the blood-sausage stew restaurant spoke to the young woman and the young woman’s husband in an oddly unsettling confusion of polite and informal speech.

The restaurant owner’s husband chimed in, “You young people don’t seem to know the ways of the world very well. But if you can’t do this little thing, it can become a miserable life for all of us.” He glared at them meaningfully as he said this.

The man in black, standing next to the restaurant owner and her husband, nodded. Then, wordlessly, he smiled.

“Excuse me,” said the young woman’s husband to the three of them, “but the exchange of a ‘premium’ is only a traditional practice between renters, is it not? It has nothing to do with the landlord in official legal terms. And thirty million won is not a small sum of money. Would you be so willing to part with it?”

Even as the young woman was half-listening to her husband’s trembling voice as he used the proper honorifics and formal speech while trying to reason with the extortionists and their black-clad “assistant” (or, rather, their hired thug), she was watching the child. The child was in the corner of the store, sweeping her fingers along the wall, then fiddling with the pot of fake flowers by the door, but she did not venture outside. When their eyes met, the child smiled. The young woman returned the smile.

On the seventh year of her marriage, she managed to repay all her loans. Her in-laws had helped out a little (or a lot, really), but in the end, she had paid them off. Hearing that the best way to raise your children in one place was to have a larger home to begin with, she may have gone in over her head when she bought their first apartment, and she had to quickly adjust to the bitter feeling of going to the banks and giving them almost every cent they earned for seven long years. But it was money well spent in the end. After those seven years, the apartment finally belonged in its entirety to herself and her husband, and she decided they should sell it and move to a neighborhood which was cheaper and quieter. And so, on the eighth year of their marriage, she bought a mixed-use building in a cheap part of town.

She hadn’t been entirely happy with it. “Pleased” would’ve been an overstatement. The times she and her husband had made surveying expeditions into various parts of the city had been fun. The neighborhood they had settled on was quiet, not too expensive, and most of the people who lived there had the aura of calm that came from having been there for decades. As most of the inhabitants were rather elderly, the real estate agent (whose sign still used the old-fashioned term

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