Points, Lines, and Light

[단편소설]

작품설명

Disappearance is treated not as an ending, but as a structural condition.
This work examines what remains when space, body, and form no longer hold.

Set in a small room within a Buddhist temple, the narrative follows a speaker who, after her mother’s death, begins to reconsider existence through points, lines, color, and frame. Death is not approached as an event, but as a condition that alters perception and spatial relation.

The text minimizes psychological exposition and character development, focusing instead on the gradual destabilization of the body as a reliable subject. A figure that appears repeatedly at night is not presented as a ghost or a memory, but as a sign of formal disintegration. As mass dissolves into line, and line into point, the narrative relinquishes volume and coherence.

Rather than offering resolution or emotional catharsis, the work investigates what remains when spatial occupation collapses. By foregrounding structure over sentiment, the text proposes a mode of contemporary experimental fiction in which disappearance functions not as conclusion, but as a method of inquiry.

본문 일부

My mother’s funeral, for a woman who had not lived even a full hundred years, ended with startling simplicity. There was no wailing, no companion for the road beyond, not even a proper set of burial clothes. Soon after, I too left, following her, and everyone who had known me spoke with one voice, saying that I had died. I laughed as I looked at their serious faces. They were so utterly certain that they seemed unreal, like a delusion in broad daylight. They lived believing that the space they occupied was unmistakably real, that their lives were organisms with just cause, living and moving each day. Yet in less than two centuries, they too would die, realizing that the space they had inhabited had been nothing more than a dream.

When I switched on the light and stepped into the small eastern cell of Sumisa, strange colors caught my eye. I stopped with one foot still over the threshold. Red, yellow, and blue were not unusual colors in themselves. The primary hues blazed everywhere—in the painted beams of the main sanctuary, in the Buddhist painting and hanging scrolls—so there was nothing inherently strange about them. What was unmistakably unsettling was that the familiar lattice of the cell’s door had changed, both in its arrangement and its colors, just as my mother—once an art dealer—had abruptly withdrawn from life. My mother had died two weeks earlier.

Of the forty-three panes of the lattice, only four had been colored. Having known every corner of Sumisa through more than three hundred years of coming and going, I noticed the change at once. The four panes looked as though colored paper had been cut out and pasted on; their texture was utterly unlike that of hanji. It was clearly someone’s mischief. Because the temple had bought nearby houses and used them as lodgings for pilgrims, anyone could come and go freely. A yellow rectangle in the upper left. A red square in the lower right, with a red rectangle aligned directly beneath it. And a blue bar in the lower left. Even if it was only a trivial intrusion, it excited me, and for a moment I could forget my mother’s death. My mother was dead.