But lying next to the small, tanned body of her son, after sleep draws itself down over his guiltless young face, the night begins again for her. A time when there is neither sight nor sound of any other living thing. As long as eternity, as bottomless as a swamp. If she curls up in the empty bathtub and closes her eyes, the dark woods close in around her. The dark lines of rain drill into Yeong-hye’s body like spears, her skinny bare feet are covered in mud. When In-hye shakes her head to dispel the image, summer trees in broad daylight flicker in front of her eyes like huge green fireworks. Is this because of the hallucination Yeong-hye told her about? The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the undulating forests that blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up. Only fragments of cities, small towns and roads are visible, floating on the roof of the forest like islands or bridges, slowly being swept away somewhere, borne on those warm waves.

There’s no way for In-hye to know what on earth those waves are saying. Or what those trees she’d seen at the end of the narrow mountain path, clustered together like green flames in the early-morning half-light, had been saying.

Whatever it was, there had been no warmth in it. Whatever the words were, they hadn’t been words of comfort, words that would help her pick herself up. Instead, they were merciless, and the trees that had spoken them were a frighteningly chill form of life. Even when she turned about on the spot and searched in all directions, In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. Some of the trees had refused to accept her. They’d just stood there, stubborn and solemn yet alive as animals, bearing up the weight of their own massive bodies.

—

Time passes.

In-hye puts the lids back on all of the containers. She packs everything up into her bag, starting with the thermos. She zips the bag closed.

What other dimension might Yeong-hye’s soul have passed into, having shrugged off flesh like a snake shedding its skin? In-hye recalled how Yeong-hye had looked when she’d been standing on her hands. Had Yeong-hye mistaken the hospital’s concrete floor for the soft earth of the woods? Had her body metamorphosed into a sturdy trunk, with white roots sprouting from her hands and clutching the black soil? Had her legs stretched high up into the air while her arms extended all the way down to the earth’s very core, her back stretched taut to support this two-pronged spurt of growth? As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? When Yeong-hye had balanced upside down and stretched out every fiber in her body, had these things been awakened in her soul?