The Testifying Tree
— The Broken Laurel Branch—
by
Mar 25. 2026
[단편소설]
작품설명
Language is not a means of connection in this work, but the site where connection fractures and leaves its mark.
The Testifying Tree is an experimental work of literary fiction that reconceptualizes testimony not as narrative recollection, but as a bodily and linguistic procedure. Rather than recounting events, the text stages an interrogation in which language itself functions as evidence, and the speaking body becomes a marked recording surface.
Structured through sustained questioning and interrupted responses, the narrative resists conventional plot development. Meaning emerges through breaks, repetitions, and phonetic disruptions that expose the material limits of speech under pressure. These formal fractures are not ornamental, but structural, reflecting the ethical and physical weight placed on language.
Central to the work is the conception of the body as an archive. Wounds and deformities appear not as metaphors, but as persistent records when narrative coherence fails. Concise yet formally dense, The Testifying Tree engages questions of voice, embodiment, and the limits of representation in contemporary literature.
본문 일부
I ask you this.
If you take my words through one ear and spill them out the other like water, then fear the slice of my sharp tongue at your heart, fear the . wounds your flesh will suffer at the blade-like tips of my handO, I ask you—why do I strike the keyboard braced by this stiff support branded Pro Skin—I am tired—why do I shape letters braced by this frayed wrist brace stitched with a proud red body holding a basketball—sleep presses in—why do I splice sounds at all?
I, Myself
I—I can speak nothing but what I have seen and heard. If I begin to answer your question, I will not, will never, speak a lie. The tongue—this lifelong sentence laid upon me—prevents me from speaking falsehood again. And if my answer is your life’s desire, then even if it becomes the greatest torment of my own life, I will speak. If it lightens my punishment even a little, then even if your two fingers pierce my eyes, I shall answer without a grain of deceit. From your wrist, from the back of your hand, from the trembling at your fingertips, fo, force—forces gather and offer you ho, hollo—hollow letters. Cast them away. They are useless as spe—spent sounds, as the vowels of , the consonants of the Consonant Clan—throw them into the river. Return the force that rises at the ti—tip of your fingers to the childhood where no gifts were granted. Return to the days when you swallowed frogs, when even their beating hearts slid down your throat. That slick blue body—the living torso you dissolved in stomach acid. Grasshoppers, mudfish, leeches—not only those: bats, woodpeckers, and even sna, snake. Fearing someone might steal it, your eyes glinted white as you swallowed the snake whole. With your body shining like castor oil spread over skin, you searched for another.
the Vowel Clan
I never ate grasshoppers or snakes.
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