The first time I woke with my face pressed to Su-jin’s stomach, I already saw the stain—a pale, six-centimetre scar peeking above her white panties. My skin understood before my mind did: that thin line branded her body incapable of bearing children. That night I traced it with my tongue and whispered,
“I’ll hide this. No one will ever see.”
She closed her eyes. I lied. In truth, I registered the scar as an obstruction—a divine foul where no new umbilical cord could ever be tied.
After a company dinner, I opened the door and caught Su-jin’s scent at once. Docile scent—shampoo rinsed to listlessness, damp towel musk. She sat on the sofa; I buried my face between her knees. When I lifted my head, I searched for the smell of a child. What rose in my gut was not discovery but the void of not finding.
“They had a kindergarten event today. Manager Dong-ho brought his son.”
I said nothing, only drew more of her cooling heat into my mouth. Yet I felt my need for a child before I felt hers fade.
During lunch break I met Manager Dong-ho on the seventh-floor stairwell. He flashed his phone, proud: a six-year-old in green overalls flashing a V-sign.
“Last sports day before grade school, hyung. You should hurry up too…”
I gave a thin laugh. What I could never have was smiling straight at me. The scar flashed again—how that brief line would sever my DNA more cleanly than any photograph. That night I closed my eyes above Su-jin’s body. She still believed I rose over someone’s wife; she didn’t yet know I rose over an impossibility. I pressed my palm to her abdomen, confirming the absence of everything that would never grow—and I ravished that emptiness all the more roughly.
A month later I asked Personnel for a transfer to Japan. I lied: my wife needed overseas treatment. In truth I obeyed the genetic imperative to leave. The moment the paperwork slid across the desk, I was already a traitor. Su-jin watched me pack and asked,
“What about me?”
“…You might come, or you might not.”
She understood. “Might” is the polite way of saying never. We saw each other plain: she knew I now saw her as a defect, and I knew she still saw me as a chance.
On the plane I looked down at Seoul’s lights. Apartment complexes glittered, each square exhaling someone’s laughter, someone’s cry, the static of life. Only then did it strike me: love alone is not enough. I had loved not only Su-jin’s body but the limits of her body, and those limits had gifted me a childless future.
Just before take-off I opened my phone and typed a last message:
“I want a child. Without you.”
I didn’t send it. Instead I summoned the scar again, how it would cut my DNA short. I tried to rewrite the moment when I’d branded her body a stain and turn it into fate. As the jet raced down the runway, I wondered: when you leave because the body you love cannot draw the future you need, do you become a monster—or were humans always such monsters? In the end I followed the genes’ command and turned away. The night I leapt into bed knowing Su-jin was barren, I had already become the stain etched on her skin.