Fury is a Tree that Grows
Eojin Park
It wasn’t clear at what time Lee San had died. It was before midnight, the physician argued, when her heart stopped. Nobody knew the cause: San had been healthy and young. Her body was stored in a shallow space, a thin sheet of gauze draped over her from head to toe. It was too late to perform the rituals for appeasing the soul: the town still believed, in its isolation, the importance of observing the dead. The shadow of the imperialist regime had only briefly darkened this village, protected by its undulating mountains and treacherous cliffs. Only a few of the soldiers remained, stragglers who were reluctant to return to their homeland. They were not welcome, but even the spirits could not purge the mountains of the unwanted.
The following day, in the silence of dawn, the herbalist’s apprentice, a young man who had sold San moonshine the previous day, stole into the darkened physician’s cottage and looked down upon the still, lying figure in the death chamber. He lifted the edge of the white covers and gently grazed the pale hand underneath. The hand, unmoving as a stone, was warm.
Unnerved, the apprentice lifted the rest of the fabric. The corpse’s eyes, bloodshot and brimming with hatred, stared back at him, blinking.
When the villagers rushed to the entryway of the cottage, the apprentice’s scream still resounding through the walls of the mud huts, a man decked in tattered robes tinged with a faded blue silently emerged from the darkened rooms. A few of the villagers bowed reverentially, for the man was a faith healer, a shaman priest. The others regarded him with narrowed eyes filled with suspicion. They did not trust the zealous priest, with his strange ways and his claims that he had seen the true form of the heavens. But they listened when the priest began to speak in a somber tone, his eerie voice resonating in the silence.
San was alive, the priest explained, through an almost inconceivable miracle. The tendrils of a sapling had enwrapped themselves around her legs, its trunk extending from her stomach. The roots of the tree were slightly visible underneath her waxy skin, a second set of veins that slipped against the hollow crevices between tender flesh and bone and still pumped blood through the body.
The priest theorized that a heavenly entity had taken hold of the corpse, and gave it life once more. He did not believe it was a malevolent spirit - what then, would be the point of dragging life through the lungs of the dead again?
He observed the crowd in front of him. A few wandering children, the village elders, and a group of women stared back at him.
An unearthly glint appeared in the priest’s eye, and a ghostly smile spread across his face.
“You want good fortune, do you not?” he asked. Quiet murmurs gave their assent. It was soon replaced by outraged whispers; shock descended on the villagers’ faces as the priest said the unthinkable.
“Then you must thread your prayers into San’s body. It will grant your wishes, etch human will against otherworldly blood.”
“You never touch a corpse, even if it has returned from the afterlife.” A woman snapped. “That apprentice is as good as gone, and now you say we weave paper charms into a dead body.”
“If there is no use in praying to the heavens, we will pray to a body that has survived death.” The priest swept his hands across the ground in reverence, the whites of his knees stained by the red-baked dirt.
When he rose, his eyes were fervid, the sun illuminating his irises gold. “But what else can this be but a sign?”
The villagers exchanged glances. They had tried everything: what else could they do?
When the first hesitant needle pierced the skin of the corpse, sewn in by the shaking hands of a village woman, there was no blood. The skin was like wax, sallow and tough, almost like dried persimmon. The needles began threading red into the corpse’s veins, hopes emblazoned in crimson letters swirling against the seams of the fingertips and arms, until even the eyelids were pierced and drawn shut by crimson threads.
At this, the children cried, and as they were too young to write anything at all, were shooed from the chamber where the body was stored.
The eyes of the corpse watched them, but the villagers did not heed it. They were enwrapped in the headiness of fortune, entranced by the promise of hope. They no longer knew who it was they were praying to - themselves, the priest, or the skies. In truth, they no longer remembered San. She was only a vague, passing memory, an empty vessel that contained their deepest wants. There remained only the fervent worship that consumed them.
The evening shrank, drawing her shroud over the hills as she ran from the embrace of the night. The apprentice was sitting in his chair, humming a quiet hymn to himself.
As minutes passed, he began to feel nauseous. He tried to press the feeling down, willing it to go away as his toes scuffed against the wooden floor. All he could hear was the distant lamentation of the evergreens and camellias, their branches whipping in the wind, wails resounding in unknown tongues.
He was not alone. A single, choked scream sounded from another cottage; slowly, one by one, the villagers’ ears were overtaken by the weeping of the trees. Their mouths elongated in a silent scream as their veins bled need and want and fury, almost as if it was a delayed sign from celestial bodies gravitating above.
When night withdrew from the green hills, the children, still drowsy, crept out of the straw-thatched houses. They had slept soundly, undisturbed by the scuffles and cries of the night, something ordinary in a war-torn country. Rubbing their sleep-filled eyes, with shouts of glee, they slowly surrounded the sight before them in the middle of the town square.
The glow of the sun shone on the sight of a massive tree, mossy and encircled by vines. The knots and ridges on the trunk almost seemed like gaping mouths, and the branches that formed a massive canopy were in the shape of arms outstretched towards the sky. They almost formed the illusion of human bodies impaled by twisting trees and submerged within bark.
The children, searching for the elders, ran to and fro for any signs. Instead, they found the priest, stretched across the ground, eyes dazed and forehead stained with ink. When they questioned him with lilting voices, his only answer was they’re gone, they’re gone. The trees took them, the trees did.
The children shrugged. They were used to madmen. Clambering up the trunk of the tree, they decided to survey the ground beneath them. Upon touching the tree, a girl exclaimed she could feel a heart pulsing, but the others dismissed her as silly. Climbing to the top, they swung their legs freely in the wind.
The birds were still chirping near the meadows. The branches wavered in the strong breeze. If you took a closer glance, beneath a cluster of leaves, you could almost see the illusion of San’s smile carved in the bark.