A Place with No Reason

—How to Leave in Order to Forget—

[단편소설]

작품설명

Movement is often imagined as escape, but what presses closer here is not distance—it is memory. Departure begins not with hope, but with the sustained exhaustion of remaining.

A Place with No Reasonfollows a solitary narrator whose desire to move persists without ever securing a sufficient reason. The story unfolds through repetition, hesitation, and the appearance of unstable figures—an amoeba, imagined witnesses, remnants of abandoned relations—that do not function as symbols to be solved, but as pressures shaping the conditions of movement itself. Memory operates not as recollection, but as a force that inscribes itself onto the body, repeating even where erasure is desired. The narrative resists resolution, offering neither catharsis nor arrival. Instead, it remains with the act of turning toward a place that cannot fully be reached, carrying forward what was meant to be left behind. Movement is presented not as progress, but as a state continually negotiated.

본문 일부

I was lying in bed, planning yet another move to—There, the Pond of Turquoise Iguanas. There is no one in the house. It has already been more than five hundred years since my husband died, the man who had spent two hundred years consuming—Organic in Name Only, Low-Calorie Fresh Vegetables—a celebrity product of Millennium Human Corporation, through a regular subscription. His body, which died while sweating profusely in a ceramic single-person sauna room the color of greenish-yellow vegetables, was scattered over Millennium Human Corporation’s carrot fields. No one knows why his bone ash was spread across a carrot field. At the very least, the person whose bones were scattered there should know the reason, but he is already dead. Perhaps it was meant to plump up the carrots sweetly, to enter someone’s mouth and be absorbed into that body, but that mouth is not mine. I do not eat carrots.

Turquoise Pond

Fixing my turquoise torso to the bed like a suction cup, a single iguana, I wish to be invited to—The Banquet of Turquoise Bodies—from here, and I search for the rationality, the propriety, and the legality of that wish. If I can clearly identify that rationality and propriety and legality, or perhaps its timeliness, my body might be released from being a taxidermy of memory and come vividly back to life. Unable to find a firm and immovable reason that would rationalize my move, I can think of nothing else. The more I try to find rationality and propriety, the more utterly preposterous thoughts arise, and at that moment I see someone lightly roll twice off the bed to the floor below, making a clattering resonant sound.

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https://ebook-product.kyobobook.co.kr/dig/epd/ebook/E000012527395