“Is he ever coming home today?”
Mother’s murmur drifted over the soup. Red marrow dissolved like crushed rubies. I set the bowl down and slid my hand beneath the table. A knee brushing past my toes, quick as breath. Hot blood rushed to the bridge of my nose. Secretly, I let the back of my hand graze Yeon-ji’s calf, pretending it was accidental. Cool flesh. I wanted someone to notice. No one did.
The instant I shut my mouth, the chain snapped
At first I was terrified. What if Mother noticed? What if Yeon-ji or Dong-jun sensed it? I held my breath at every meal. Each time someone mentioned Father my heart dropped like a stone. Yet nothing happened. Nothing. So I dug deeper. Instead of his name I said “him.”
“Has he come home yet?” Mother would ask, and I only shrugged. That was enough.
He grew transparent; I grew immense. This was no simple ignoring. It was execution. By sealing my lips I murdered my father outright. Without a single consonant or vowel he could not exist. At the dinner table, without judge or jury, I sentenced him to death.
Sometimes, when I whispered “him” to myself, my tongue flicked with giddy delight. The moment it brushed the roof of my mouth I felt the living warmth of his body. In the silence his breathing became sharp and clear. My breath—or his. One of us was definitely still there.
The pretty boy Jiseok and the lawyer’s son
Second year of high school, the day Jiseok transferred in. He swaggered to the center of the classroom waving a legal envelope: his father was a lawyer. Obvious bravado, but at lunch I sought him out in the library.
What does your dad do?
Prosecutor. Impressive.
…Not really. He doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t exist.
I folded my arms on the desk and bowed my head. Jiseok studied me for a long moment, then smiled. I understood that smile. From that day we became secret friends.
Two months later rumors flew: Jiseok’s father had smashed through the sliding door and burst into the house. Jiseok stopped coming to school. I pictured it vividly—the door groaning open, that monstrous presence entering the bedroom. I shuddered, but inwardly whispered: at least you still spoke his name.
At thirty-one, the table still has only four chairs
Lunar New Year. Mother set the ancestral rite table. Writing the list of names for the spirits, her pen paused.
What was your father’s name again?
Dong-jun stopped scrolling on his phone. Yeon-ji glanced at me. I tried not to remember. Yet the name was already alive inside me.
Fourth-grade sports day, thick fingers drumming on the back of my hand on the hot iron bleachers. Elementary-school entrance ceremony, the smell of a black suit. A pair of 1982 leather gloves waiting at the school gate in pouring rain. I had the chance to expel them all at once. My lips stayed sealed.
I whispered to Mother:
I don’t know.
She tore up the paper, leaving only empty space. That blank space is me.
Why do we want to kill our families?
Freud wrote that because we cannot kill the living father we must turn him into a god. I did the opposite. I killed him precisely to keep him from becoming a god.
We were imprisoned too long under the name “family.” Unable to shatter the windows in one blow, we chose to chip away, quietly, piece by piece. Silence is the sharpest tool. If a single word scars the face, not speaking flays the muscle.
Psychologists call this “revenge by ignoring.” That explanation is naïve. What we want is not revenge but re-creation. We wish to design a world without fathers. To erase an entire continent from the map of beliefs we once crawled across.
What is your tongue still erasing tonight?
Tonight you may be sitting at a table. Someone speaks the name of the person opposite you. In that instant, what taste rises in your mouth? Blood, stale dust, nothing at all. Either way, you are killing someone. Or you have already been murdered. Either way, the silence endures.
So I will not ask why you still refuse to say the name.
I ask instead: in the moment you seal your lips, whose living name is still trembling inside your mouth?