“Ms. Yumi, I brought the pads.” The part-timer held out a small paper bag. Inside lay a single black mask—the “item” Yumi had quietly requested for the last six months.
She peeled a coupon from the top of the refrigerator and pressed it into the girl’s hand, voice trembling. “This too.”
The clerk accepted it without suspicion, but Yumi’s gaze had already drifted elsewhere. Each night she stood before the mirror, slipping the mask over her face and layering another face on top of her own. Whose features do I borrow? Each time, the air inside her throat turned metallic and cold, as if she’d swallowed a jar of winter.
A Cold Breath That Fills the Mouth
I had been “alone” since twenty-seven. Marriage felt endless; cohabitation felt crowded. While friends cheered at two pink lines on a pregnancy test, I slipped out the back door of the bar and downed a bottle of Burgundy. In that glass floated everything I didn’t want, sedimented like dregs.
Yet something refused to die. After thirty-five, when the word fertility began to sound like an elegy, I discovered an opposite heat. A corner of me burned hotter than ever.
Her Substitute in the Freezer
“Yeon-hee, you’re going to use it again tonight?”
Instead of answering, I opened the freezer. A vacuum-sealed something lay frozen to the glass shelf. A blood bank, under the pretext of low immunity. Every three months those packs provided the only proof that my cells had not yet mutated.
Yeon-hee, thirty-nine, senior manager at a conglomerate. Her apartment was lacquered white and colorless. Beneath the bed, however, a drawer held rubber fingers riddled with holes. She called them “nostalgia injections.”
On the subway home, she sat beside a man and brushed his knee—silently, only the skin that touched. That night she rolled a pellet of frozen blood over her tongue. It didn’t taste sweet; it sounded like iron splitting open.
Blood That Boils Alone, Blood That Freezes Alone
Psychologist Rachel Harsch once observed:
“Voluntary solitude is not absence but the surrogate of taboo.”
We reject the institution of marriage, yet we savor what that institution forbids:
- We do not give birth, yet we raise something similar.
- We have no husband, yet we cultivate the palate of betrayal.
- The rooms are empty, yet congealed desire fills every cubic inch.
When the Fourth Door Opens
Last week I visited the same convenience store. A new clerk stood behind the counter. “Same order, ma’am?”
I nodded. Inside the bag, where pads should have been, lay a tiny scrap of paper:
[Do you truly believe you are alone?]
A phone number on the back—familiar digits beginning with 010. His number, the one I’d severed five years ago without warning. I saved it, deleted it, saved it again.
Tonight I opened the refrigerator. A drop of once-frozen blood had melted and was running down the shelf. Above it rose the hot breath that proves I am still, stubbornly, alive.
And you? When the fourth door opens, what will you reach for? Will it finally testify that you are not alone, or will it only bury the fact of your solitude more deeply?