恋の罪

“I will rub your arms with perfumed water, blessed by the river's current. I will rub your legs until they are strong enough to carry you swimming to heaven.” I cleaned and trimmed her nails and put the clippings in the drawstring bag. Then I slipped the bag under her, letting her weight settle in my hand before pulling it out."

“This is the blood of a lost spirit, (...) Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I’m just spitting it out.”

“When women are forced to bleed, we have to take care to bind our spirits to us, or they will get confused and wander away. Ejected from our bodies, the spirit flows out on the river of blood, losing its name and its place. Sometimes that yongson spirit will try to invade another woman’s body—maybe one that reminds them of the body they left behind. Sometimes they will catch a seed in a woman’s body and be born again, but most times they will die.”

Slipping out of the body along pathways forged by blood, the spirit traveled and roamed free, giving the body permission to transform itself. Necessary but dangerous, these were times when the spirit could spin away forever, lost and aimless, severed from the body. “This is the blood of a lost spirit,” my mother told me when I first noticed the bloodied pad she unfolded from her panties each month. “Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I’m just spitting it out.”

It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires