Organ Failure
Sunny Jeong-Eimer
Like most kids, I was never a big fan of bugs. I still can’t articulate exactly why insect bodies repulse me. Maybe my fear originates from the time I spent visiting my mother’s family in Korea the summer before I entered second grade. A summer of tongue-tied Konglish stuttered out in ebbing back-and-sometimes-forth conversational flow. A perpetually humming fan cornered by the tail of an exercise bike that hasn’t been pedaled in years. Pedaling nowhere, pedaling in place.
Halaboji’s knees are “bad”—we say bad like a man’s knees can wear a dunce’s cap because knees, as with every other body part butchered from the whole, are not immune to accusation. That summer, I was witness to knees standing alone on trial: condemned at the stand for losing their grip on a man’s now-expired pipe dream of youthful immortality. Still, every other evening, he mustered up the strength to grunt and sigh his “gone-bad” body uphill, extending one hand to me, the other to my brother. It was always unclear who was holding who. A four year old with unsteady gait, a nine year old tumbling over excess glee––were our bodies also bad for tripping over stones, scraping blood into concrete, clumsily careening off the beaten path of controlled, bodily function? It was always unclear.
July and tinted visors doing their best against triple-digit sun. My eyesight is already starting to blur from too many nights spent furrowing my eyes into unsophisticated YA novels, or perhaps, it’s the first flag of an incoming family inheritance passed down from my great grandmother and her “bad” eye. Bad genes, bad luck. When I squint into the sun, my halmoni cautions that my face will lose its youth and distort into constellations of wrinkles and spots. That night we sit cross-legged and cup mismatched bowls of kimchi stew to our mouths, sweating all the while from the compounded heat of spice, dusk, and steam. As soon as the bowls are scraped clean, she wordlessly whisks me away from kitchen counter to vanity. We sit on two mats before a mirror that is gradually being eaten alive by 4x6 shots of various kids and grandkids smiling into flashes, each flash drawing the shutters on candid moments of youth going bad. Her wavering hands paint and pat a careful succession of anti-aging creams, fragrant moisturizing gels, and serums onto my face first, then hers. It is a tender series of gestures but I sense a slow-burning frenzy in between each application as if she is racing against time: its fuming breath and hooked teeth, its jaws closing in on us, our vanity, every other expired frame of the past.
Sweat, blood, tears. The calendar over the vanity is now flipped to August, that month which marks the beginning of a season’s death when light and heat seemingly evaporate just under your nose. Summer is forever, until it isn’t. August is also the month when Korean mosquitoes abandon mercy and let their mean streak loose. Indeed, it was that August when mosquitos viciously devoured nearly every square inch of my limbs from head to toe. “Your blood is too sweet.” Who knew drawing blood could be sweet, painless even? Again and again, the organ called my skin was glossed in miniscule quantities of localized anesthetic and soundlessly extracted from with surgical precision. A few seconds of innocent blood withdrawal inflamed into two mosquito lifespans’ worth of agonizing, ruthless temptation; giving into the forbidden act of itching for immediate catharsis only amounted to further condemnation. By day, I wore my swollen epidermal cape of fiery welts with shame; by night, in the recluse of disembodied unconsciousness, I dreamt of possessing a body made of steel—to be stoic and opaque, impenetrable and indifferent to the laundry list of primitive hazards which inevitably intrude and haunt every mortal’s nasty, brutish and short existence.
By the time I met my limit with mosquitoes, we found our bodies and things dropped at Incheon airport security again. This time, it was my eyes, not my skin that failed me. I watched my mother’s chest collapse into guttural sobs as she shrunk into my halmoni’s delicate, hunched frame. No matter how perfect, Konglish would not have sufficed to capture the scene, anyway. Instead, goosebumps multiplied across the already uneven, splotchy terrain of my body. I sat next to my brother on a bench, holding with white knuckles the two rolls of kimbap my halaboji had sealed in aluminum that morning. Seated there under an impossibly high glass ceiling, we turned into a family of wingless ants blinded by too much light, too much space.
The sites where those anonymous Korean mosquitoes drew sweet blood made for a sea of bittersweet memory. Engraved for the time being, the agony of their lingering presence demanded my attention through the end of August to my first week of school when I would learn in a Scholastic Kids magazine that only female mosquitoes, scavenging for blood to feed their young, bite humans.
And I wonder now whether there is something more to my repulsion of insects—mosquitoes, in particular. I cannot sympathize but I can at least appreciate their stubborn insistence that their maternal act of survival against the brutality of time be remembered on the human body. Can appreciate how it is that an act of care, painless in the moment, can still agonize one more than anything in its afterlife. I am repulsed because I have come to learn that the aftermath of a being’s presence outliving the being itself is, above all, a human phenomenon. Our bodies testify to the aftermath of each other, even after we have ceased to be physically present in each others’ day-to-day lives. So it goes with blood too sweet, time too bitter.
Halaboji’s knees are “bad”—we say bad like a man’s knees can wear a dunce’s cap because knees, as with every other body part butchered from the whole, are not immune to accusation. That summer, I was witness to knees standing alone on trial: condemned at the stand for losing their grip on a man’s now-expired pipe dream of youthful immortality. Still, every other evening, he mustered up the strength to grunt and sigh his “gone-bad” body uphill, extending one hand to me, the other to my brother. It was always unclear who was holding who. A four year old with unsteady gait, a nine year old tumbling over excess glee––were our bodies also bad for tripping over stones, scraping blood into concrete, clumsily careening off the beaten path of controlled, bodily function? It was always unclear.
July and tinted visors doing their best against triple-digit sun. My eyesight is already starting to blur from too many nights spent furrowing my eyes into unsophisticated YA novels, or perhaps, it’s the first flag of an incoming family inheritance passed down from my great grandmother and her “bad” eye. Bad genes, bad luck. When I squint into the sun, my halmoni cautions that my face will lose its youth and distort into constellations of wrinkles and spots. That night we sit cross-legged and cup mismatched bowls of kimchi stew to our mouths, sweating all the while from the compounded heat of spice, dusk, and steam. As soon as the bowls are scraped clean, she wordlessly whisks me away from kitchen counter to vanity. We sit on two mats before a mirror that is gradually being eaten alive by 4x6 shots of various kids and grandkids smiling into flashes, each flash drawing the shutters on candid moments of youth going bad. Her wavering hands paint and pat a careful succession of anti-aging creams, fragrant moisturizing gels, and serums onto my face first, then hers. It is a tender series of gestures but I sense a slow-burning frenzy in between each application as if she is racing against time: its fuming breath and hooked teeth, its jaws closing in on us, our vanity, every other expired frame of the past.
Sweat, blood, tears. The calendar over the vanity is now flipped to August, that month which marks the beginning of a season’s death when light and heat seemingly evaporate just under your nose. Summer is forever, until it isn’t. August is also the month when Korean mosquitoes abandon mercy and let their mean streak loose. Indeed, it was that August when mosquitos viciously devoured nearly every square inch of my limbs from head to toe. “Your blood is too sweet.” Who knew drawing blood could be sweet, painless even? Again and again, the organ called my skin was glossed in miniscule quantities of localized anesthetic and soundlessly extracted from with surgical precision. A few seconds of innocent blood withdrawal inflamed into two mosquito lifespans’ worth of agonizing, ruthless temptation; giving into the forbidden act of itching for immediate catharsis only amounted to further condemnation. By day, I wore my swollen epidermal cape of fiery welts with shame; by night, in the recluse of disembodied unconsciousness, I dreamt of possessing a body made of steel—to be stoic and opaque, impenetrable and indifferent to the laundry list of primitive hazards which inevitably intrude and haunt every mortal’s nasty, brutish and short existence.
By the time I met my limit with mosquitoes, we found our bodies and things dropped at Incheon airport security again. This time, it was my eyes, not my skin that failed me. I watched my mother’s chest collapse into guttural sobs as she shrunk into my halmoni’s delicate, hunched frame. No matter how perfect, Konglish would not have sufficed to capture the scene, anyway. Instead, goosebumps multiplied across the already uneven, splotchy terrain of my body. I sat next to my brother on a bench, holding with white knuckles the two rolls of kimbap my halaboji had sealed in aluminum that morning. Seated there under an impossibly high glass ceiling, we turned into a family of wingless ants blinded by too much light, too much space.
The sites where those anonymous Korean mosquitoes drew sweet blood made for a sea of bittersweet memory. Engraved for the time being, the agony of their lingering presence demanded my attention through the end of August to my first week of school when I would learn in a Scholastic Kids magazine that only female mosquitoes, scavenging for blood to feed their young, bite humans.
And I wonder now whether there is something more to my repulsion of insects—mosquitoes, in particular. I cannot sympathize but I can at least appreciate their stubborn insistence that their maternal act of survival against the brutality of time be remembered on the human body. Can appreciate how it is that an act of care, painless in the moment, can still agonize one more than anything in its afterlife. I am repulsed because I have come to learn that the aftermath of a being’s presence outliving the being itself is, above all, a human phenomenon. Our bodies testify to the aftermath of each other, even after we have ceased to be physically present in each others’ day-to-day lives. So it goes with blood too sweet, time too bitter.
Sunny (PO '25) is a queer poet & multidisciplinary creator born and raised in Chicago, IL. passionate about exploring storytelling as an avenue to intersectional liberation and self-preservation.