Human Hearts

Mother has always called me weak. I am too soft-hearted, she says, to be a real kumiho. "You must take after your father in that way, Okja," she says, teeth flashing with disdain when she sees me balk at an easy kill. She often says this—that I must take after our father in whatever way that she finds lacking in me.

Mother often remarks on the differences between me and my twin sister, Mija. Mija's eyes were a bright gold and her fur was russet, the color of fallen leaves in autumn, whereas mine is a dull, tawny brown. Even in human form, Mija was lovely, with large eyes and thick, glossy hair that streamed down her back when it was loose.

Mija has been dead now for seven days. Mother was coming home with two ducks in her mouth for dinner when she found her, not far from the mouth of our den. "Why weren't you watching for her?" she screamed at me. The mountains echoed with her reproach and the additional, unspoken question of why it was Mija who had succumbed to a shaman's poisoned snare, and not I.

Kumiho are much stronger and cleverer than humans, but we are not immune to their wiles. The mingled smells of poison and magic made me feel dizzy. Mija would have smelled it, too, but she could never resist a challenge. The smell of fresh blood must have driven her beyond reason and made her decide that the tender haunch of rabbit inside the snare was worth the risk. Mija had eluded hunters' traps before, slipping past their clever nets to delicately mouth a piece of meat and steal away without getting caught, but she had not counted on the hexes that would have weakened her body the moment that the snare had tightened around her paw, as well as the poison that had been braided into the rope of the snare.

We have burned Mija's body so that the spells that killed her will not be transferred in turn to us. Mother's grief has driven her to an uncharacteristic somnolence. She sleeps all day, and I can sense her dreams on my skin. She dreams of warm blood, soft feathers, strands coming loose from a long braid that tapers down to a fine point like a tail. She wakes only at night to hunt in the valley while I stay home and watch the moon rise. The moon's yellow grin reminds me of how Mija would smile whenever she was the first to draw blood during one of our hunts.

"Why do you let Mother scare you?" Mija used to ask me when we were children.

"I'm not like you, Mija," I said. "It's not just Mother I'm afraid of." I was afraid of everything in those days—the gnarled claws of old tree roots, the harsh cawing of crows, the glowing eyes of the other forest creatures that watched us at night. Most of all, I was afraid of being left alone, of one day waking up to find that Mother and Mija had abandoned me and left me to fend for myself in the forest.

The world of the humans who lived in the valley below was an even more frightening prospect. Mother told us stories of greedy hunters who would skin us and wear our pelts around their necks; of bent-backed old women who would scald us in cauldrons of boiling water for soup; of vicious young boys who would impale us with sharp sticks, tie rocks to our tails or, even worse, cut them off completely.

But Mija was never frightened by these stories, or even by Mother herself, with all her moods and furies. "You don't have to be afraid of anything as long as I'm around, Okja," she said, baring her teeth at me affectionately. "I'll protect you."

The first time Mija and I came across a tiger, we were just cubs. Mother had gone out to hunt, after telling us to stay close to the den. But Mija had...