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  • SF
  • Kim Sagwa (bio)

We’re lying in the shade beside the pool. The deep blue sky shines in the dark mirrors of your eyes. What could be more beautiful, I wonder as I look into those eyes. You sit up and find your glass of Coke. The ice whispers as it melts. I look beyond our feet at the city below. Its paleness is heavenly. You ease yourself into the pool and glide through the heated water. The air is cool and brisk.

We enter our room. The damp, chill darkness clings to us. In the flickering shadows we examine each other’s body, stealthy as we go, concealing our arousal, so very considerate, pretending to know nothing about the other. You’re nice enough to open the curtain. As I lie down on the bed I notice the painting on the wall.

“How do you like that picture?”“It makes me sleepy.”“It makes me want to fuck you.”

With every gust of wind, the tree outside the window shudders like a blind animal. We hear it but don’t look at it. We’re in silent motion. A gentle mist slowly envelops us. We’re the fog that shrouds the city, the clouds that drape the long bridge. We’re in [End Page 263] sightless motion, like the tree groping outside the window. How vivid the sound, we can almost take hold of it. We can’t see each other, I can hardly see my own self. We see only the sound of the blind tree shuddering outside the window.


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Process-encounter 4. 2013, silkscreen, collage, 51 x 78 cm.

[End Page 264]

Kim Sagwa

Kim Sagwa was born in Seoul in 1984 and studied creative writing at Korea University of the Arts. “02” (Yong’i), the title story of her first story collection, earned her the Ch’angbi New Writer’s Prize, named after the Ch’angjak kwa pip’yong publishing house. Her other book-length publications are the novels Mina (Mina, 2008), P’ul i numnunda (P’ul lies down, 2009), and T’ero ui shi (The poetry of terror, 2012) and the young-adult novel Na b Ch’aek (b and Chaek and me, 2011). “SF” is the first published English translation of her work.

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