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To their precursors, a child can never be altogether human. An 'expecting' woman of course expects the birth of her child, but to eject an autonomous life, with all its full-boned, predetermined awfulness, would be too gross and burdensome to allow delivery.
The thumbnail of pain a child represents is only blunted by the promise of their hand in yours. Sweet, small. A newborn will see the headstone on your finger and chew it off. The people around you will say this is a good thing, and you will look at your changed body, the parts that are more, but feel so much less, and you will wonder why this animal of your own flesh has cannibalised you.
The hypocrisy of child-rearing is, upon realising a child is at least mostly human, the parent presumes themselves to be the one eroded by the assumption of their role. They do not recognise how their shaping of a life involves its shaving, a whittling down of potential to accommodate plans of what the future should hold, would hold, if that life were their own. What a parent gives is given willingly, but everything they remove is theft. It is taken for granted that while responsibility belongs to the parent, the life corresponding is still that of their offspring.
By the age of two-and-a-half, Seo Moon had developed a full set of deciduous teeth. Also known as 'milk teeth', and deceptively so, because they are sharper than the adult equivalent. Mature teeth are rounded and typically have visible ridges, called mamelons, which blunt the impact of the adult bite. Growing older, in this sense, is a devolution.
The first teeth that appeared in Moonjo's mouth were his incisors. This is because the incisors are the most serrated, and may easily penetrate the gums. They take their name from Latin.
'Incidere', to cut.
As a result of these particularly well-developed incisors, while suckling his mother's pinkie as she cooed and fawned over him, it took very little effort for Moonjo to sink his teeth in and drag. The object of his interest was twelve millimeters in length, and by then his mouth was almost three times that. It felt only natural to do what he did.
He was two-and-three-quarters years old, the day he ripped out his mother's fingernail and tried to swallow it. Both mother and son were rushed to the hospital, the former for a nail bed avulsion and the latter with concerns he might choke. Moonjo did not know it yet, could not comprehend as much, but it would only be the first of many, many visits to various doctors.
There was something wrong with Seo Moonjo. Something inexplicable and intangible, not an obstruction in the throat but a barrier in thought that separated him from other children. As he aged, he did not make friends, did not even pretend to. He was screened for autism at five, owing to his perceived 'social awkwardness' and strange hobbies, but no diagnosis was made. And so began the exporting of the Seo child to different professionals, who sat him in waiting rooms with jigsaws and picture books and asked his parents whether he wet the bed or killed animals. Most of the conduct disorders that were applicable to Moonjo could only be diagnosed in adults.
Time and money were wasted on trying to label what made him broken, even though his parents already had an abundance of words to describe it. Moonjo was privy to it all. He used a screwdriver to pierce a hole into his parents' bedroom, watching and listening through the walls as they argued. Domestic rows about his father's smoking habits and his mother's casual alcoholism were overtaken by discussions of how strange Moonjo was, how unnatural.
As an infant, his pet name was 'little man', because his grandmother thought he had the stare of an older gentleman. Now, six years old, he became known as 'little monster' instead. It did not hurt his feelings. He himself questioned if he had feelings to hurt.
When Moonjo was seven, he realised that while others called his father 'doctor', the man was actually a veterinarian. He learned this because the Seo clinic closed down for good that winter, and it was reported in the local newspaper. His father always drank and smoked more in the colder months, but what was once a means of relief became an addiction, and his collapse into alcoholism became a sudden, violent affair. The vet stopped waking up for work, let alone getting dressed most mornings. And that was why the clinic shut for good.
But he blamed his son, instead.
The first strike he made against Moonjo was intercepted by his mother. His father had cried like a fool, holding her bruised face in his hands and apologising profusely. I love you, I love you, I love you. The second time he hit the boy, nobody intervened, and nobody said sorry.
They say the children of abusers cannot comprehend why their parents dislike them. That it is natural for them to blame themselves, see flaws in their own performance as offspring, and try to earn the love of their caregivers with caution and compromise. But Moonjo understood why his father hated him, and he did not care. If his father intended to reject him then Moonjo would reject his father, and if his father intended to hurt him then, someday, when he was strong enough, he would hurt his father in turn. His father believed he was a freak because he would not cry, and he would bring the man to tears for trying to force him to do so.
But seven-year-olds are not known for their strength. As Moonjo took injury after injury, promising himself that the scales would one day be balanced, his body became riddled with scars and burns. His mother, who although functionally useless as a parent still fretted over him, was very upset about the wounds. Not because his father had inflicted them but because, how will you find a wife?
It was not a question he had given much thought to, at that age. It seemed cruel to put in the mind of a child, but his mother never seemed to think much of his cognitive abilities anyway, rarely censoring herself around him or waiting for his response. Smearing antiseptic on one of his scars and ignoring the way he flinched at the sting, she murmured, my Moonjo will be alone forever. Then she held him in a way he could not remember being held before, as though she desperately wanted to protect him. From what, he was unsure. Not his father. Himself, perhaps? His future?
She smelled like soju, second-hand smoke, and fabric softener. Inexplicably, Moonjo wished she would embrace him more often.
Nevertheless, her words clung to him like the reek of his father's cigarette. They hurt in a way that disgusted him, just as the subsequent burns did. When his father pressed the butt of his cancer stick into Moonjo's arm, initially the injury would resemble a gold nugget, implanted under his skin. The sort of geode you could dig out of the wall of a cave, as though prying your fingers along the sides and digging it up would reveal hidden treasure. Later the yellow would bleach to a dirty white, and ultimately take its final form as a raised, red blemish that would never truly fade. Sometimes he scratched the healed burns until they wept. The idea instilled in him by his mother, a prediction that he would never be loved, seemed to leave a similar mark.
A similar itch.
When Moonjo turned eight his patience waned. He was no longer merely apathetic: he was angry. His mother wanted him medicated, his father wanted him dead, and Moonjo wanted them gone. Achieving this would be simple. His mother was weak and his father had weaknesses aplenty to take advantage of.
In the beginning, he tried to settle things cleanly. After all, revenge had no time limit. He was still raw-boned and sickly, no match for a full-grown man. So, while his mother tended to his burns, he approached her with an honest petition: please, get me out of here, or father is going to kill me. This plan failed miserably.
He should have realised she would never choose him.
'Coincidentally', that same summer, while she left town to see family and their neighbors travelled abroad, Moonjo's father collapsed in anaphylactic shock. He was drunk, the story went, and tried rummaging through his child's backpack for something that could ease his appetite. A proficient alcoholic and incompetent father, he had failed to stock either the fridge or cupboards, and was both half-starved and unthinking as he ate. He only consumed half an energy bar, the rest already gobbled by his equally-starved son, but there was one major difference between them: while Moonjo was not allergic to nuts, his father was.
Within twenty-six minutes, the Seo patriarch was dead. He had fallen, and choked, and wheezed, and sobbed, and finally lost consciousness, with damp skin and a stupid slur to his voice, after begging for his son to call an ambulance. Moonjo sat and watched the first twenty-one minutes. It was only when his father passed out and stopped crying that he left and, by the time he returned, there was a corpse on the kitchen floor.
The whole house stunk of vomit and smog. With his wife absent and nobody to chide him for smoking, his father had no longer attempted to conceal his habit, despite the continued presence of his young son. Moonjo simply plucked a Marlboro from the counter and set it aflame with the lighter he found in the cutlery drawer. Then he pressed it into the clammy palm of his father's hand and let it smolder, leaving the cigarette on the floor beside him.
He wondered how the burn would develop on rotting skin.
A year passed, and Moonjo celebrated his ninth birthday. His mother killed herself two days later. When he came home from school, there was a note on her bedroom door -- 'don't come in' -- and she was dangling from the ceiling. The grief had been too much. He remembered his father choking, and smiled. Tightly.
Losing his mother was only slightly different from killing his father. She had sacrificed a nail for him, held him, taken blows on his behalf-- and then she had left him all alone, just as she promised.
An expected betrayal. What was there to mourn?
And yet, in the columbarium, brought before his mother's cremated remains, Moonjo screamed and beat his fists against the glass.
"You burned her!"
When Moonjo was ten, he spent fourteen months living with his grandparents, who no longer cooed and called him 'little man'. He heard them telling neighbors that he was cursed, but what annoyed him more was the tender way they spoke of his father, as though he was an idol Moonjo could look up to. They were lying to themselves. Both flinched at the sight of his naked body and loathed to bathe him. His wounds, unhealed and infected, leaked pus on the bathroom floor. Moreover it was obvious, even while huddled in long sleeves and full-length pants, that he was thinner than a boy his age should be. These signs went ignored. They continued to worship the memory of their son.
Moonjo was nothing to them but a shared surname.
At the end of his stay, Moonjo just so happened to overhear that his father's nut allergy was inherited. He crumbled almonds in his grandfather's rice that night. The efficiency of his grandmother's reaction saved the man's life, but the incident seemed too eerie, too sinister for them to accept Moonjo in their home any longer. He was never formally blamed for anything. Instead, he was excommunicated from the Seo family and sent to a ramshackle, no-questions-asked orphanage in the countryside, run by a woman who smiled wider than her face.
He hated it there.
The trouble with being alone is how tolerable it is, until you realise that you have become lonely. Once aware of this, you go to all sorts of lengths to regain the peace you felt in your own company, made calm by isolation. And yet, there is no turning back. It is as though you have always been lonely but the diagnosis came late. It is as though your condition is chronic. It is as though the pain will never ease until it kills you.
As time passed, Moonjo misremembered his mother's lament as an accusation. In his head, she did not mourn his coming loneliness, she condemned him to it. He knew he had been hated by his father, feared by his grandparents, but had he ever been truly loved by his mother?
He assumed not. Had she cared enough to love him, she would have cared enough to live. But his mother was a coward. It did not matter how much affection she had for him when, at the end of the day, the end of her life and thereafter, he still resented her.
Killing his father meant killing his mother. Moonjo had always known this, had incorporated it into his plans from the start. But there is no closure in suicide. Even when you pushed them to it.
It struck him all too late that, regardless of how she felt, his mother may have been the only person he came close to loving. And, without any firm objective, as if by his very nature, he had killed her.
Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
"My Moonjo will be alone forever."