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On some level, I think I always understood
That these hands of mine were clumsy, not clever
And I tried to do the best that I could
But try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to hold you
Lee Sookyung is a writer. She is a dreamer. She is also—and this particular word catches in her chest as if it would ever be something to feel guilty about—a victim.
A few years ago, she added another label to the list. It has stayed at the top ever since. Lee Sookyung, first and foremost, is a mother. Not a good one. But a mother, nonetheless.
A good mother would have stopped this from happening in the first place. Or run away when it got too bad. Or taken her curious child into her arms and dropped him off somewhere safer than their house could ever be. Instead, she learns how to sew clothes from scraps and hide the pinpricks of blood on her hands. That part is easy.
The bruises her husband leaves are less so.
She feels filthy, the first time he hits her—a resounding slap that whips her head around—and that feeling just grows worse when the first thing she sees after her vision clears is her baby’s crib through the crack in the door, and the quiet cries that will soon grow in volume if she does not tend to him.
“You hit me.” Lee Sookyung sounds out the words on her bitten tongue, “You hit me.”
Her husband apologises, tells her to shut that brat up, then sends himself to sleep off the alcohol. Some instinct in her chest is crying with her child. She moves her feet to the nursery as if piloting them remotely, but when the door clicks shut behind her, a wave of nausea roots them to the floor.
She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to. But she is a mother now, no longer some writer, some dreamer in a stalling marriage, so she moves closer.
Lee Sookyung cleans up Dokja’s nappy as quickly as she can, clinical because she cannot bring herself to be comforting. Not now. She swaddles him up and puts him back in the crib, and maybe he senses the unwavering disgust swirling in her. He blinks up at her and she stares back.
She doesn’t know what to do with herself, but babies should not be left alone—is that right? Her scattered mind tells her to sit, so she does, and the sharp corner of a cardboard book digs into the underside of her thigh. The sharp pain wakes her rapidly, but her skin still itches at the thought of touching her child. She pulls the book out and reads it, voice quiet and steady, in the soft glow of the night light. The nursery rhyme rhythm has Dokja falling asleep.
Lee Sookyung stays awake, just sitting, just watching, until the sun rises again.
The bruise on her face blooms purple.
It's a secret I keep tucked inside my chest
With this heart of mine that's guilty, not remorseful
There is love that doesn't have a place to rest
But it would have buried you if it had settled on your shoulders
“Dokja-yah. My little reader. My darling boy,” she whispers, some evening when her husband has just stormed back out the front door. Her child, five years old, slips in the moment the coast is clear. He looks down at her with big, watery eyes, and bends down. “No, no, Dokja-yah—”
His lip wobbles, and she smiles desperately up at him as she dusts the floor with her bare left hand. The glass shards tinkle like bullets in her ears – the cuts they leave feel like nothing compared to the bloody smear she feels like she might now be, writer dreamer mother be damned.
When the floor in front of her is clean enough, Lee Sookyung sucks in a slow breath and lifts up her right arm. There is a noise in her throat that yanks itself up then sharply back down once again. “See? It’s clean now.”
It’s not. It may never be. But Dokja’s eyes brighten, barely, as he drops onto the ground next to her and wiggles under her arm, pressing his back against her stomach. “Mama!”
He presses clumsy little kisses to the injuries on her arm, the way she does to his playground bumps and bruises, and she hopes he isn’t old enough to remember her like this. Lee Sookyung tucks her nose into his hair and breathes in slowly. Past the cigarettes and the alcohol and the blood, she finds wet grass and bark. He’s been playing around with the tree down the road.
“Help me up, dear?”
Dokja hums enthusiastically and slips back out of her arms, energetic as he tries to prop her upright. It must take several minutes to peel herself off the wood, stack each bone and bruise and bloodstain up in the order that makes Lee Sookyung, mother dreamer writer.
“Thank you.”
“You’re hurt!” Her child says, now that she is acting fine again. “Why?”
She can’t bring herself to crouch to his level. Instead, she squeezes the small hand tucked into hers and guides him to a chair. “My little reader. Have you not heard this story before?”
Dokja frowns and shakes his head childishly hard, eagerness blooming. “Tell me! Tell me!”
“I will tell you the full story another time, okay? For now, we’ll just think about the message.”
“Mn!”
“Sometimes, there are mean, evil things that pretend to be love. You have to be careful of them when you’re all grown up.” She taps his nose lightly and his eyes widen comically as he nods, serious and emphatic. “But while you’re still my little reader, it’s my job to fight those mean things for you, okay?”
“Because you’re my mama!”
“Yes, darling! Other children’s mothers protect them from the boogey monster under their beds. But your mama is so strong that she can guard the whole house!”
Dokja cheers, bouncing around on his rickety seat, “Yay! My mama’s the best! She can fight all the bad things!”
Lee Sookyung thinks her smile might be a little bit sad. Dokja isn’t looking, so she has no need to fix it. Her fingers comb careful strokes through his hair. “And once they’ve been chased away, all that is left is love.”
On some level, I think I always understood
That a ship could never really love an anchor
So, I did the only thing that I could
And severed the rope to set you sailing from my harbour
It is a simple decision that she makes, with perhaps the calmest mindset she has had in years. Mother, dreamer, writer.
Lee Sookyung is not a victim any longer. But if she is the aggressor, then she will not be able to be there for her son any longer—not in any way other than listening to his life story as it plays out without her.
A simple decision. She is free in every way that counts, so she does everything she has not been able to do.
When her husband falls to the floor and gurgles a mouthful of blood, she takes her son into her arms and gives him a hug for the first time since he started refusing her attention. He quakes in her hold, and the knife is still in his hand, but that doesn’t matter. Not to her.
It’s just another failure on her part. She has always known that, without her, Kim Dokja would have run for the hills at the first opportunity he found. Maybe he knows the same of her. But he makes a guttural sound into her shoulder, wounded and terrified and relieved all blended together, and he is her son, and for all her failures, she can do this much. For him, she will do this.
“Dokja, listen to me.” She leans back and looks him in the eye, wrapping her hands around his—they are both bloody now. Her son shakes his head but keeps his gaze locked on hers, mouth opening and closing in mounting horror and shock. “I will read all of this again. This was self-defence. Understood?”
Lee Sookyung takes the knife from his white-knuckled grip, washes the handle carefully, wipes it on a bloody section of her shirt, and wraps her own hand around it in the same way Kim Dokja had.
“Now. Call the ambulance. It was self-defence. And no matter what happens next, you must not forget that you are a victim.”
As if in a daze, her child staggers to the landline and dials the number.
Lee Sookyung glances at her husband’s dying throes with a cold sense of satisfaction and repeats once more. “Kim Dokja. You don’t know what happened. He tripped and landed on the knife. You didn’t see it all.”
The call connects. She listens absently as he rattles off their address and several ‘I don’t know’s'.
In her jail cell, several days later, she is given a pen and paper at her request, and she starts to write. It is not the award-winning novel she used to dream of writing, but it is an award-winning novel. She sets up the royalties to funnel them to Dokja, for later use.
He will leave her behind in Seodaemun Prison, and she will leave him to the world. They will ask questions, but if her family cares even an inch for either of them, they will be there to support him through it.
Maybe she should be upset at her incarceration—self-defence should not have landed her here. But the women here are empathetic, and she forms some camaraderie with them barely two weeks into her interment. Kim Dokja, she tells herself, will be fine. He is freer than she has ever been.
He’s growing up now. She can only hope his demons have been put to rest with his father.
There are times when I still wonder about you
You are someone I have loved, but never known
And you'll never see the reasons I had
For keeping my claws away when they were close enough to hurt you
They have not. They have not, they have not, they have not.
When Lee Sookyung is cuffed to the table in the visitor’s room, she catches sight of a bandage taped to her son’s cheek and goes cold.
“Dokja-yah.”
“Mother.”
Why do they sound so distant? She wants to cry. Or scream. Or do something that will put her in solitary confinement for a day, so she might curl up in the corner and feel as physically hollow as her chest does.
“Why did you do it?” he asks.
Do what? She wants to reply, but she might already know.
“Write that book. Publish it. Why?”
“I did it for you.”
“You know that’s not an answer!”
Lee Sookyung stares at her son coolly through the plastic window. Any question but this—she can tell him anything except this. Speaking of it now would only put them both in trouble, have her in for perjury instead of murder, and her son labelled as a murderer rather than a murderer’s son.
“Mother—!” he pleads, face scrunched up and eyes shiny. His voice rises in volume with his emotions. “Do you know what fresh hell you’ve made?”
“What happened to your face, Dokja?”
“Something befitting of a murderer’s son.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
She feels muscles shiver down her back. Her son is furious, and she is a few hundred wounds too old to choose any expression other than her own. It is a tired one, she knows. Serene. Distant. They are good qualities to have in a prison; to seem weathered yet personable. At least in this, she has gotten lucky.
Dokja comes back every week and asks the same questions, screams the same things.
Then he jumps from the school roof, and she only learns of this because the next time she sees him is two months later when his casts have come off.
The next time she sees him, he talks about something else entirely. She latches onto this topic with greed, drinking in the new light of enthusiasm in her son’s eyes. He still shows up with new bruises and bandages, but his updates on this story—Three Ways of Survival in a Ruined World—bring back the life he’d almost given up entirely. She wants to engage in it with him, to ask questions and theorise the next week’s scenes. But her silence has become a habit that wires her jaw shut, so she stays quiet instead.
His words, eventually, run dry.
Midway through describing Yoo Joonghyuk’s forty-first turn and the ways tls123 has chosen to subtly highlight the ruthlessness this regression had chosen to fall back on, Dokja cuts himself off.
It takes Lee Sookyung a few moments to process the abrupt end, and by the time she understands how wrong it is, she notices her son’s searching gaze. His mouth is twisted in bitter disappointment, and she wonders how she has failed this time.
Maybe it was an accumulation. Maybe this is the last straw.
“Why am I even saying this? It’s not like you care.”
“I do,” she protests, but he bites his lip and looks away. Cuffed to the table, ever weary, there is nothing she can do as he rises from the thinly padded visitor chair. When he turns, she catches sight of a raw, pink scar that rises up the back of his neck from under his collar.
He hesitates.
“Why did you write it?” Dokja asks one more time, before he leaves for good. “Was the money so appealing to you, even in prison?”
“I did it for—”
“Me,” he snaps, following it with a rueful, spiteful little laugh. “You’ll never stop saying that, will you?”
They look at each other for a long, long breath.
Dokja walks out the door.
Lee Sookyung closes her eyes and wonders when she lost the ability to cry.
I am selfish, I am broken, I am cruel
I am all the things they might have said to you
Do you ever think of me and my two hands, and wonder why?
They never soothed your fevers
And wonder why
They never tied your shoes
And wonder why
They never held you gently
And wonder why
They never had the chance to lose you
The next time they see each other, Lee Sookyung leads a group of her inmates as the King of Wanderers. Her son leads a band of people, many of whom she recognises from his long retellings in the prison. He is known as—and this is something that coils in her stomach with amusement and indignation—the Ugliest King.
Sickly would be a better fit for him, she thinks. The Sickly King. The Dying King. His eye bags make him look like an aged ghost of the boy she once promised she would protect from the world.
Dokja-yah, she calls in her mind, you don’t look well. Dokja-yah, let me help.
But it is an endlessly simple fact that she has no place in his ideal ending. She can help. Her Wanderers are tenacious and cunning. And kind. Above all, they are useful.
She has made sure of it.
「Incarnation Kim Dokja will be killed by the person he loves most.」
How tragic, she thinks, why him? And then, matter of fact, I can protect him.
It doesn’t go as planned.
How could it, when all she really wants is to have him meet her eyes and tell her he understands? She wants to feel the loss of her son, but it has been years now and her heart is numb. He is a stranger in many ways. But in the shadows of his expressions and the stories she hears about his endeavours, Lee Sookyung uncovers the fragments of someone she has missed dearly.
Let me learn you again. Let me love you. Do you think you would ever be willing to learn me?
When she tends to the Fake King—Han Sooyoung, a writer that reminds her of her younger self—the woman calls her ‘Kim Dokja’s mother’.
“You are the only one who still calls me that.”
Han Sooyoung dismisses her sentiment with a broad sweep of her hand. “We don’t have the time for that sort of thing, unnie. You’re his mother, whether the both of you like it or not. Now, explain your prophecy to me.”
So she does, and relishes in the satisfaction of being able to assist her child in such a direct manner. When he goes, Lee Sookyung promises herself to be there. There are ways to survive everything, after all. Even death.
It is a bizarrely uncomfortable sensation, to be swallowed by a metaphysical Wall. Above the not-physical discomfort, there is the terror. Below it, the unmaking. But something is familiar, strangely enough, about the presence that separates her son from reality. As if she has been put in someone else’s dissociation.
Lee Sookyung lets it consume her. At least this way, she’ll never leave her child alone again.
The Wall takes her stories and memories and histories and reads them word by word across its surface, and there is nothing left of her to feel shame. The truth—all of it—spills out.
「My little reader … It was self-defence. Understood? … All for you … Goodbye … Goodbye … Only one who calls me that … His mother. 」
“Spit her out!” he screams. “Give her back!”
On the surface of the Fourth Wall, undisturbed by the ripples of Kim Dokja’s punches, one sentence drifts above everything else.
「Once all the bad things have been chased away, the only thing left is love. 」