*Title Credit: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

 

Foreword: This piece was inspired by a traditional Korean folktale, “해와 달이 된 오누이" (The Siblings Who Became the Sun and Moon). In the original story, a tiger ruthlessly chases two children and lies to them about his true identity in order to eat them. The children are rescued when God grants them a rope upon which they can climb into the sky, where the brother becomes the sun and the sister becomes the moon. The tiger, as the villain of the story, receives no such salvation: the rope he climbs rots, and he falls to his death. Legend says that his blood turned sugar cane red.

 

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Think about the predator’s devotion to his prey. 

 

Think about the tiger and the children. The sun and the moon. The God. The rotten rope, its thin slipping threads, the final fall. Think about where the blind sort of faith got you at the end. Yes, let’s. Let’s think about the end of this story, the bent angle of your neck, eyes staring blurry against a night sky, stars garish & blazing. 

 

But most of all let’s think about your devotion to the children.

 

Remember the mother. Her rice cakes. How it began as a joke, you’d take two or three and pretend she wasn’t there, because you weren’t going to eat her anyway. You didn’t eat humans. That was a sort of unspoken ground rule — to gauge the taste and the consequence, the fullness of your belly against the decay of your murdered corpse. You swore you were going to leave her alone, but that was before you began to laugh, reveling in her fear and her trembling hands. You swore many things before you found out a hole keeps yawning once it opens, before you felt hunger begging like a god in your body, before you knew a beast like you could eat and eat and eat and never be satisfied — only sick to bone and muscle. 

 

If you ask me, I think it’s the love that did it. If you ask me, you were the space blank between lines, unseen & unloved, the villain in every story including yours. Doomed by the narrative and haunted by the space you occupy — if you ask me, it’s a wonder you didn’t succumb earlier. Did the first bite of that rice cake remind you of the mother you’ve never had? Did it make you imagine the life you could’ve had with human legs and human hands, a life spent biting as many rice cakes as you want? Do you think that might’ve been it — the very lostness of your own life, a dark darker than the dark itself, an anger that led to hunger that gave way to obsession? Tell me, who remembers you before the devouring? Who remembers you before the children? Who remembers who you were before you killed their mother? 

 

Isn’t that funny. You enjoyed her fear and hated it, disappeared beyond the hills and ran back just to ask for one more. And when she ran out of those cakes, you saw the terror reflected clear as night in her eyes and decided to yield for once in your life. Why not shake your head in defeat? Why not shrug and turn away from your own teeth, pretending you don’t see her body between your jaws? 

 

Didn’t she cry about her children? Didn’t that knot in you a strange lump of agony, crocheted from the thin dark veins of your heart? And so, for a brief moment, didn’t you want to kill them too? Your love is as hungry as you are. This is why you close your eyes, stumble across the mountain to their cottage and knock on their door. The girl thinks you are their mother and you think this is the funniest joke, because you might as well have been her anyway — because you ate her, and her remains will dissolve inside you until you become her and she becomes you  — and she tries to open the door. A lie goes a long way, and the brother knows this, too — when he asks you to prove that you’re his mother, you can’t help but tell another one. It’s my voice, you say. It’s a little hoarse, and my hands are coarse from all the work I’ve done. 

 

See, you can lie and lie and lie but some things you just can’t hide. When the brother sees your canary-yellow eye through the crack in the door he can’t do anything but know that you are not what you say you are, that you have never been what you say you are. Your hunger keeps tossing inside you like a quiet animal. Like it has a voice of its own. It has been too late for you your entire life. So when they run, tiger, when the brother takes his sister’s hand and turns on his heels and flees out the back door, you don’t even contemplate stopping. Your stomach doesn’t consider being satiated with just one. It asks: why are you so content with subservience? Don’t you want to know about the things you could destroy? Admit it, you want what should have been yours since the beginning. Your love is as hungry as you are and there is a reason for this, because your hunger is a god and martyr and executioner. It is your birthright and your cardinal sin, and it is what you have been missing, the hole in your weak diminished heart. 

 

Embrace it. Let it be yours. Why shouldn’t it be. 

 

And so you will do anything to keep it that way, but the brother tells you a lie. The secret to climbing the tree is sesame oil, but you can do nothing but slip and slip and slip as your paws scramble on the trunk. They are laughing. They think you are pathetic and yet the worst thing that has happened to them, but they’re also the type of young to find foolishness in joy, to lose sense in laughter. You know, you can climb the tree if you use the ax to hoist yourself up — when she covers her mouth with her hands, she’s ten seconds too late. 

 

A predator is so devoted to his prey he’ll risk everything to get what he wants. You love them so much, it can’t be described in any other words. They are all you want now, and all you have wanted, and you begin to think it is the memory of this want that has left you hungry forever. Listen, you are the closest you have ever been to human when you are in the act of slaughter. The suppression of your cruelty and violence was really a suppression of your humanity.  See, no one who knows mercy ever abandons murder completely. 

 

And they say: God, have mercy on us. If you ever really loved us, save us and let down a rope. 

 

So you witness God’s love. His blessing. What could have been yours had you been born right — that is to say, a little more human than beast. God does not have any pity to spare for you because  your entire life has been an apology and now it is nothing more than an enveloping hunger. You were never taught to pray but now it’s an instinct, almost animal. 

 

In your last moments, you think God is the cruelest thing you have ever known. No amount of repentance from Him will ever absolve the betrayal settling cold in your heart the moment the rope went rotten in your hands. You could have God crawling on his knees but the feeling of falling would still haunt you and empty your every step. You wonder if He will ever understand living a life lesser than the one you were given, something deserted and confined to the absence of what you should have been. If He had lived your existence would He have turned out any different? And so what right did He have to whisper benevolence while watching your fingers grapple at the rope’s thin slipping threads? 

 

You ask God why he had allowed this to happen and the answer never came. And the answer was silence. And the answer was an echo of everything you had ever said: I tried. I tried. I tried. I tried. I tried. And the answer was a question as cold as He had been: child, if every monster in the world had asked questions, where would we be? 

 

When you first held the rope, you almost didn’t climb it. This evidence of God’s compassion for you would have been enough. You could have walked away, but you were hungry for more than what could fill your stomach, something you had never been given. So when you didn’t, and you climbed, and the rope decayed, you wondered if this meant you could never be anything more. I destroy even my own salvation. I am unable to salvage anything from the ashes of my fire. I was born for this, to eat and eat and eat, to want and want and want, to take and take and take and then drown in my own desire. I devoured my own goodness just to see if it would satisfy me. And now there is nothing left of what was really me, my soft heart, my gentleness, my love. They will know only a sick rotting body and enough blood to turn sugar cane red and a pair of bitter sharp teeth.