“Sister-in-law.”
The way he addressed her still sloshes in my ears like thick syrup.
That day it rained, too. In the underground garage, under the weight of a scarf’s perfume, she walked away—from me, from our entire family—hand in hand with my brother.
The Ink-Black Bloom of That Day’s Fragrance
The ink on the stamped divorce papers was still wet with blood.
Not mine.
Watching her kiss my brother, the red-azalea sting in my nostrils was really the smell of the raw meat I had clawed from my own heart.
Why, of all people, my brother?
Out of every man on earth, why the one who shares my blood?
Since that night, every evening the cold concrete of the underground garage and the mingled scent of her shampoo rise again. I blocked her, yet after five years I still haunt her social media. There was a child: my brother listed as father.
The scent of blood, again.
Whispered Words over Soju
In the back room of the neighborhood tavern, on tatami mats that knew my brother’s taste, a friend set down his glass and murmured:
“Hey, you hear about your sister-in-law?”
As if I could not know.
The soju in my hand trembled quietly.
“Jae-hyun dropped by his brother’s place… saw Seo-jin flipping meat in the kitchen and lost his mind, they say. Hot-pan smoke, Jae-hyun’s breath—everything tangled. Not just once. Whenever Do-hyun’s on business, they roll on the floor by the fridge.”
My friend closed his eyes, then added:
“Seo-jin whispered while leaning into Jae-hyun: ‘He’s not you, you were always your brother’s shadow.’ After that, Jae-hyun swore he’d never set foot in the house again. But three years later, the night Seo-jin announced the divorce, Jae-hyun stood at the same door. Baby supplies on the mat. Instead of blood, the smell of formula. He knocked.”
Another glass poured, another voice:
“There was Yuri too. With her father-in-law…”
The tavern’s old lady, gazing at the rain outside, continued as if to herself:
“Must’ve been an afternoon her husband was away. The old man trembled, saying he’d dreamed his son was murdered. Yuri stroked the back of his hand… then kissed it. ‘You can devour me instead of your son.’ After that, the father-in-law drifted from his own child; Yuri bore a baby alone. Only she knows the infant’s eyes are the old man’s shade.”
Why We Reach for the Flame of Taboo
The contest with my brother began in the womb: two men sharing the same uterus, the same amniotic sea, the same oxygen, arguing who would emerge first, who would grasp more.
She was the extension of that rivalry.
The simplest proof of strength: take your brother’s woman.
The darkest desire is a blood-stained towel named obsession.
The moment I let her go, my heart began tearing open yesterday’s wound. The smell of blood is merely the scar breathing.
Five years did not heal it; they calcified it.
A Fragrance Still Unwashed
Cold concrete of the underground garage, someone’s muffler, a blood-soaked towel of a wound gone rotten—the scent still claws at my heart.
A room left alone, an empty bed.
Dawn seeping through the window.
Among those drifting smells, whose will I search for first?
And the moment I find it, whom will I betray next?
When the rain stops, the smell of wet earth drifts in. Somewhere in that soil, blood not yet dried may still be buried—like the rain of that day five years ago.