* A short story from AOI Garden, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd., 2005.

The phone call came about a month after his wife had gone missing. A body part appearing to belong to a woman had been discovered in a ravine. It was the same ravine where his wife was presumed to have drowned. He told the officer he would leave first thing in the morning and hung up. It was a five-hour drive to U City, not counting the time it would take to stop at a rest area for a bowl of udon noodles. Even if he left right away, he would not reach the police station that was handling the case until after two in the morning.

A right leg had been found. He would have to confirm his wife’s death from nothing more than a right leg. The length of the average adult leg is about half the total height of the body. His wife was 160 centimeters tall. So her leg, he mumbled while spreading his arms eighty centimeters apart, is about like that. He pictured her body in four pieces, as if sketching it, from the bottom of her feet to her kneecaps, from her kneecaps to her genitals, from her genitals to her nipples, and from her nipples to her head. The rough outline of a female body took shape in his mind. He couldn’t tell whether it was his wife’s body or the body of some prostitute that he had slept with.

He strained to remember what his wife’s right leg looked like. He recalled that she used to complain all the time that her legs were fat. But were they really that fat, and if so, how fat were they? Were they only fat in comparison to her unusually long and slender arms, or fat compared to other women her age? He couldn’t even remember whether she shaved her legs or not. He began to question whether he had ever in his life touched his wife’s right leg. He ran his hand over the air as if stroking the contours of her leg. He could not for the life of him recall whether she had thick calves or whether they were sleek and smooth, and whether the ankles hidden inside her long skirt were slim enough for him to wrap his hand around or so thick that they merged right into the calves. He lay down and tried to erase the imaginary woman But instead of disappearing, the woman raised her right leg and rested it on top of his head.

As the leg bore into his brain, he finally remembered something about his wife’s leg. She had a small skin tag on her leg. That would tell him whether the unidentified leg was his wife’s or not. It was no bigger than a grain of rice. But to his wife, it was a lump the size of a fist. She had said that she sometimes felt like her body was nothing but leg, and it was all because of that skin tag. Someone had told her that if she wrapped a strand of hair around it, it would fall off on its own. Since her own hair was too short, she had used a thin strand of black thread instead. The thread cut off the blood supply and, after a while, the tag dried up and turned black. But it did not fall off. That blackened and withered fibroma dangling from her leg would be the clue that determined what had happened to his wife.

She had gone missing and was presumed to have drowned to death. Someone had witnessed her f loundering and screaming for help in the watery ravine where she had fallen. To be precise, the witness did not see his wife but rather a woman. The witness could not recall his wife’s clothing or the length of her hair or any distinguishing facial features. He merely said that he saw a woman floundering in the ravine. The detective in charge of the case had concluded that it was most likely his wife but they could not be certain.

He pictured the imaginary leg again in order to add the skin tag to it. But then it hit him that he did not know which leg the tag was on. If he did not know that, then he could not very well tell the detective there was small, black fibroma clinging to his wife’s right leg. His uncertain speculation might leave his still-living wife for dead. Or his long-dead wife could go missing forever. The leg fell on his head with a loud thump. He felt like a detective who had let a criminal slip away right before his eyes. He felt baffled, too. He realized that what bothered him the most was the uncertainty: the police were sure she had drowned and yet, because there was no body, they were handling it as a missing persons case. She was neither alive nor dead, and that bothered him. It bothered him because her state was not so different from his own. He, too, was not so much living as dying. He was so pathetic. How could he not remember anything about his wife’s body after living together for more than a decade? He stomped out  of the house and left immediately. He would see for himself the right leg that had been fished out of the ravine. Then maybe he would know whether it was his wife’s or not.

*

On the way to U City, rain, which had not been forecast, began to fall. He hurried to turn on the wipers. They sluggishly began to move, but the left side stopped before sweeping any of the rain away. Raindrops slid down the left wiper, while the right side thumped away slowly. He almost let go of the steering wheel in shock. Laboring along on its own, the wiper looked like a woman’s right leg. He wanted to turn them off, but the rain was coming down too hard. His wife’s right leg, which he was incapable of identifying, wiped the rain from the windshield for him.

*

The detective was not at his desk. The man sat on one of the chairs in the waiting room. He thought he would just take a quick nap. At at the sound of someone coming down the hallway, his eyes snapped open. A black shadow was tramping towards him, dragging heavy rain-soaked shoes. As the shadow drew closer, a raw smell filled the air. It was the same smell that came off of his wife, who had handled fish for a living. He kept his eye on the black shadow. It was his wife. She was struggling to walk towards him on one waterlogged leg. Her right leg looked like a thick wooden stump. Startled, he tried to get up, but she swung the stump at him like a club. He cowered to avoid the blow and suddenly awoke. The detective was shaking him by the shoulder. The detective did not ask why the man had come down to the station after saying he would come the next day. If he had, the man might have panicked and blurted out the story about his wife’s skin tag, even though he wasn’t sure of it yet. He might have even blurted out something about his dream, in which his onelegged wife kicked him with her stump.

The right leg was lying with the other unidentified bodies in the morgue. The detective pulled open a metal drawer. Resting in the middle of the long iron tray was the stiffened leg. It gave off a smell of formalin, solvent, and antiseptic. Even the drawer smelled metallic. The man could not hold back his nausea. But it was not the smells that made him gag. The leg was so rotten, the flesh black and blue, that he could not believe it belonged to a person. Tattered muscle tissue hung like loose threads around the exposed femur. The bone looked solid in contrast, as if it were part of an anatomical model. It glowed fluorescent within the black, rotting flesh. The kneecap that protected the knee joint looked as strong as ever, and the tibia glimmered whitely where it connected to the femur. The skin and flesh were clearly that of a rotting corpse, but the bones belonged to someone living. The toes were crushed beyond recognition, and he even thought maybe there were no toes there to begin with.

Who did this leg belong to? He tried to picture the unidentified woman from whom this leg, now dead and black as charcoal, had hung. The woman probably never imagined she would end her life in the deep waters of a ravine. Before it became rotten and disfigured, the leg might have belonged to a busy college girl who rushed from place to place on foot. It might have belonged to a saleswoman in a department store who massaged her tight calf muscles, stiff from being on her feet all day helping customers. Or it could have belonged to a track and field athlete who tensed her muscles with every jump, trying to leap higher. The leg might have been used to tread a dance floor over and over, dancing itself to exhaustion, or to bend beneath a wedding dress, bowing in deference to a new bride’s in-laws. The leg could belong to every woman, but it would never be his wife’s leg.

He stared dumbly at this thing that was nothing more than part of a dead body. The leg proved its own death by ruthlessly continuing to decay. Leeched of organic matter— moisture, protein, nucleic acid—it was but a lifeless object, a long way from anything like life or the world of the living. It gave him no consolation that he was alive. Instead, it impressed upon him the fact that the human body was just a lump of protein, easily putrefied. The urge to search his body, to examine every part of it to make sure nothing was rotting, came over him. Given the choice, he would swallow a fistful of preservatives before dying.

He trailed his eyes over the decaying flesh in search of the skin tag. The mottling was especially bad around the knee. He couldn’t tell whether he was looking at a skin tag or just torn skin. He shook his head at the detective.

This is not my wife, he stammered. She has all of her toes.

The detective shrugged and said, So does this leg.

The detective pointed at the mangled tip of the foot. Snow-white bones rose like milk teeth from between the torn lumps of flesh. The detective explained that the toes had been eaten by fish. The man countered that his wife’s legs were not that fat. The detective said the leg was not fat, just swollen with water. At that, the man vomited. The udon noodles he had eaten on the way poured out of him. The vomit was congealed and blackened from the roasted seaweed garnish. It looked like part of the rotted flesh resting on the metal pan. His stomach lurched again, as if he had eaten his wife’s toes himself. The detective silently closed the metal drawer.

The right leg had been found at the lower end of the ravine. A fisherman had reeled in a shredded leg. There was no clothing or other body parts. The detective asked the man if his wife had ever had surgery on her leg.

No, never.

Only after answering did he realize that he had no idea whether she’d had surgery as a child or before they started dating. He corrected himself and said he did not know. The detective told him that suspicious marks were found on the bones, the kind that were not likely to have been caused by breaking against rocks or being bitten by fish. He said it looked like the leg had been severed. When he looked puzzled, the detective added that it could also be scars from routine surgery or a dislocation.

Bodies raise all kinds of questions, the detective said.

He nodded slowly.

His wife had gone missing during their first fishing trip.  She stood on a mossy boulder. He kept telling her to stand somewhere safe, but she had refused, saying that the water where she was standing was shallow and still. She did not know the water was deeper than it looked, due to heavy rain some days before. He, too, had no idea how deep the ravine was and how fast the water was moving. When his wife fell in, the water carried her off in an instant. The witness who said he saw a woman drowning was fishing downstream, but he did not jump into the rain-swollen gorge. The man was not confident he would have jumped in either if he had been the one to see his wife drowning. The water looked as sharp as blades, like it would pierce him through to the heart at the slightest touch.

The police had interrogated him about his wife’s disappearance. He repeated over and over that he did not shove his wife into the gorge. Nobody believed him. There was no one who could testify that he left his wife alone by the water while he wandered upstream. But no evidence was found that he pushed her either. Though she was presumed to have drowned, without a body to confirm it, the detective had to treat it as a missing persons case. She might have disappeared into the water, or in some deep ravine, or been swept away to a distant city that he would never find. Only the gorge with its razor-sharp water knew his wife’s whereabouts.

Actually, they were in no position to be out fishing and enjoying themselves. It was a bad time to take a vacation. The considerable deposit they had put down to buy a new storefront had vanished into thin air. Dozens of other victims had formed a committee to try to get their money back, but he had dismissed it as a lost cause. It would have been better  or him to stay and try to retrieve their lost deposit with his wife. If he had, she might still be alive.

His wife was the one who suggested U City. It was a long way from where they lived. For a couple now bankrupt, it was much too far for a weekend trip to blow off steam. It was  five-hour drive just to reach the tollgate. Then they would have to drive further, along a winding cliff, to reach the ravine. But his wife said it had to be that ravine. She told him the water was deepest in U City, that waters more secretive than the ravine itself ran cold and sharp as knives through that deep gorge, and that the water was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom. The clearer the water, the deeper it might be, so deep as to be unfathomable.

They reached the ravine and drove upstream a long ways, far past where the paved road ended. Along the way, they saw parked cars and figured others were out fishing. The ravine wound on and on. It seemed they could have driven until sunset without reaching the end of it. They picked a relatively isolated spot. Though it was their first time fishing, his wife had no problem with the maggots they used for bait. She handled raw fish for a living, so there was no reason for her to shrink away from maggots. She stirred the squirming maggots around and chose an especially fat one. Suddenly he felt angry. He thought maybe it was his wife’s fault they were penniless, because, to her, nothing was too disgusting or dirty. For all he knew, she might have served their customers rotten fish, too reluctant to toss it out, or fed them fish eyes. He set down his pole and watched his wife out of the corner of his eye. She was threading a plump maggot onto a floater. It was not her fault they had to close the restaurant. He was the one who lost their deposit. But the desire to beat her with the fishing pole was overwhelming. He imagined shoving her into the deep ravine below. He clenched his fists to quell the urge. He left his wife where she was hooking the maggot and returned to the car. When he looked back, his wife was casting the floater into the water.

He decided to take a drive to calm his anger and find out where the ravine ended. But the road kept going. He went around one curve only to find another, as if he were driving in circles around the same spot. Exhausted, he turned the car around to return to his wife. But it was no easier finding his way back. He drove in circles for hours and returned to find the maggots had escaped from their canister and were crawling everywhere. His wife was gone.

On the way back from the police station, it rained again. He turned on the windshield wipers, which were still broken, and pictured the decaying right leg he saw at the station. Thinking about it now, the leg was thin and bony. His wife had sagging breasts and a thick waist. The leg was far too thin to be his wife’s. He muttered just as he had to the detective that it could not possibly be his wife’s leg. Somewhere in the raging waters of the ravine, his wife’s right leg was slowly decaying and turning to silt. It would feed the fish and later whet the appetites of the fishermen. The remaining left leg, torso, arms, and head would meet the same fate. His mouth watered. He opened the window and spit into the rain. The falling drops were as thick as the maggots they had used for bait.

*

The building was a dump. It looked like it had been hit with the wrecking ball, though demolition had not yet begun, despite the fact that the shops had long gone out of business. When it was first built, they said the building was so well constructed that people in the neighborhood came just to take a look. It was the only building in the area with an elevator. Children would try to play inside of it, forcing the doorman to keep a closer eye on the elevator than the entrance. That was forty years ago. During that time, the building had grown weak and begun to fall apart. But the falling apart did not take place gradually over the course of four decades. It happened suddenly. Like water rising in a ravine during an unforeseen downpour, like being sucked down into the depths and swept away by a raging current, like water rushing into your windpipe the moment you go under, it happened in an instant.

The first symptoms were spotted right after it was announced that two different companies had bought the empty lots on either side of the building and were planning to build high-rise residential-commercial complexes. The vacant lots filled with people. High metal fencing was erected to the left and right of the building by the big construction companies. The fencing had a picture of a forest on it. The picture was elaborate and detailed. It was easy to imagine birds flying into the fence by mistake. Next to the fake forest, the building with its heavy concrete walls looked like a giant garbage can. The fence blocked the entrance of the building from view, so even the few customers who were left stopped coming. The building began leaking tenants. The owner had no choice but to go to both of the construction companies to try to sell the building. If he’d sold it earlier, he might have made some money. But because construction had already begun, he had no choice but to sell it below the market rate.

Demolition was to begin in earnest the following week. Their restaurant would be reduced to piles of cement and shards of glass and steel, along with the rest of the building. He and his wife had owned a cheap fish restaurant on the ground f loor. For the last ten years, the restaurant was the only living thing they cared for. They had nursed the restaurant through the first years, but later the restaurant nursed them. It made them laugh, gave them a chair to sit on when their heads ached, and kept them from arguing with each other even when they were angry. He did not find out until later, but the store also kept his wife in fish eyes. His wife plucked the eyeballs out of the fish that she grilled and simmered for customers. It wasn’t difficult to do since nobody really cared whether the fish had their eyeballs or not. His wife’s favorite food was simmered fish eyes. It was her main source of protein, as she did not care for meat.

He rolled up the metal security shutters and opened the door to the restaurant. The smell of rotting fish stung his nose. The smell had been seeping out even before he lifted the shutter. He had not been back since his wife had gone missing. All of the fish inside the restaurant was bought before they left for U City. He plugged his nose and opened the freezer door. Once the electricity stopped, everything inside had begun to stink and fester. The decomposing things all jumbled together were unidentifiable as flounder or sole or pike or mackerel. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled everything from the freezer. A black liquid was leaking out of the spoiled bellies. As the rotten fish hit the floor, water spattered against his pants, leaving black stains that looked like mottled flesh.

He found a plastic bag filled with fish eyes in the freezer. His wife had been saving them. A teary black discharge was seeping out of the eyes, which had been rotting along with the bodies. He turned on the tap. Nothing came out. The water had been cut off along with the electricity. He used some barley tea that was still in the refrigerator, and which was clearly spoiled, to wash the bagged eyes. Most of the eyes had already decomposed. He picked out one that was still mostly whole and put it in his mouth. The vile smell of fish and scent of rot spread through his mouth. Each time he took a breath, a fishy smell rose from deep inside him. He thought maybe it was the smell of his internal organs dying. He took his time, slowly sucking on each of the rotted eyes. Only then did the tears come. Suddenly he was certain his wife was dead.

*

A few days later, he got another phone call from the police station in U City. The detective spoke slowly, sounding embarrassed.

I’m sorry but you’ll have to come back to the station. It’s nothing urgent. You can come by any time, but we think it would be better if you came sooner rather than later.

He waited for the detective, who was beating around the bush more than usual, to finish and said he would leave right away. But just before he was about to hang up, something occurred to him.

What did you find... this time?

The detective was quiet for a moment. He regretted asking such a pointless question.

I guess you’ll find out anyway when you get here.

The detective told him what had been found.

It’s the left arm and hand. We’re having trouble getting fingerprints off of it.

After they hung up, he stared at his left hand. The hand was connected at the base to the strong, thick wrist via blood vessels, nerves, and muscles wrapped in fascia. At the other end stretched five fingers, each with their own bumpy knuckles. His fingers were short and stubby, but the skin was a healthy color because of the even supply of blood they received from the straight blood vessels. The veins bulged, as if to prove it was the hand of a living person. The hand and arm was definitely his. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what they looked like. He pictured his big, coarse- looking knuckles, then the wrist, too thick to wrap his hand around—but that was as far as he got. Had the detective ordered him to describe his own hand, he was not sure he could have done it.

He could not even picture his wife’s face clearly. He could only see the sharp, cold line of her mouth. If he could not remember her face, then there was no way he would remember her left hand. He thought about the ring she always wore. They had bought it together several years after they got married. It was a plain, slender band with a tiny diamond, a common design that could be found anywhere. The tiny protruding diamond was covered in scratches visible even to the naked eye. The ring had gone into the water with his wife but fortunately not without leaving its impression behind on him. He could only hope that the hand still had its fingers, and that one of those fingers wore his wife’s ring.

This time he did not stop to eat anything on the way. He did not want to look at a tattered hand and heave up black chunks of seaweed like last time. On the way to U City, he got a phone call from the landlord telling him that if he did not remove the tableware from the restaurant by the next day, it would all be demolished along with the building. He said he would separate out the things he would take from the things he would leave behind as soon as he got back. Not that there was anything to take. All of it could be thrown away. Still, he wanted to get his wife’s knife. She always used the same knife, whether she was slicing fish, chopping them up, gutting them, or scraping off the thin scales. It was a long, thin sashimi knife made from carbon steel. It wasn’t the right knife for grilled or simmered fish. She should have used a heavy cleaver like the kind used by chefs in other restaurants to chop and gut fish. His wife was good at scaling and deboning fish. But she sometimes cut her wrist. The blade of the knife was long and the tip sharp. The tip of the knife often grazed her wrist when she used it to gut fish. The cut was never fatal. She said it felt like being poked with the blunt end of a needle. But it bothered him because it looked like she was trying to sever an artery.

If the left wrist had knife scars, it could be proof that it was his wife’s. The man felt thrilled to have finally found an identifying feature of her body. He decided that if his wife ever came back he would inspect her body thoroughly from top to bottom. He would learn everything: which of her molars had fillings and how many; the approximate length of her nose hair and whether they were thick or protruded from her nostrils; the shapes of her earlobes; the relative softness or hardness of the cartilage in her ears; which way her nose bent; whether her hair was stiff and rough or whether it was soft; and the location of every mole on her body. He swore he would remember the length of the hair that covered her private parts and whether it was darker than other women’s, as well as the shape of her labia. If he could, he would even memorize the size of her uterus inside the pelvic bones. He would know whether his wife’s uterus, which had never once carried a child, was really as small as a fist, and whether it really did curl in like the mouth of an old woman. That way, even if she were torn from limb to limb one day and he had to confirm her identity from a body part fished out of the water by chance, he would be able to tell the difference between what was his wife and what was not.

*

The detective apologized to him. He was sorry to put him through so much trouble again. The man did not respond. He swallowed his words before he could say he hoped the wrist that had been found this time was his wife’s. The wrist was swollen with water and blue with putrefaction, just like the right leg. The flesh, which was missing a chunk, looked like ragged strips of paper. The tips of the fingers were bitten off. The blood vessels were split into dozens of pieces like a snipped wire. It might have been his wife’s hand that had picked out the plumpest maggot to use for bait, the hand that scaled, gutted, sliced, salted, and roasted fish. It could also have been the hand of a typist who could type 600 characters a minute on a computer keyboard, or the hand of a musician who performed a concerto on the violin. He asked the detective if they had found a ring.

There was no ring.

The detective looked stumped. She might have been wearing a ring… If you look closely, the base of the finger does look paler there. But we can’t be sure whether that’s from a ring or from the water.

This time, as well, the man said he did not know whether it was his wife or not. The detective nodded slowly, as if to say he suspected as much.

It’s always hard to determine the identity before the head is found.

Nose torn off, teeth cracked off at the roots, cheeks puckered with water and plucked out, eye sockets stuffed with waterweeds.... The man got goose bumps picturing his wife’s detached head. He pointlessly started to say, if only there had been a ring. The detective apologized again.

That ravine gets a lot of drowning victims. People slip on the moss between the rocks and fall in, or go swimming and get caught in the rapids, or get swept away by the current while dipping their feet in the water. Sometimes, people go there for fun but wind up shoving a friend or family member into the water in a fit of anger. And there are a lot of suicides. If they don’t leave anything behind, they are listed as missing forever. The ravine is so long and deep that it makes searching for anyone impossible. The people of U City don’t go there unless it is to fish. It’s very well-known, and there is even a rumor that it’s haunted by a ghost who drags people down into the water. People tell stories about it, and it’s even been in the news a few times. Have you seen it?

The man slowly shook his head. The detective pulled off his gloves.

They say fishermen come from all over the country to fish there, deep into the mountains where the roads aren’t even paved. They say the fish that are caught there taste better. Because of all of the people who have drowned.

The detective finished by asking the man why he and his wife had come all that way for a vacation.

If they found the body, he would have to return again. Eventually he would be asked to identify a head or breasts or buttocks. The whole time the man was listening to the detective, he was thinking about his wife’s hand. The hand that had stroked his cheek, the hand that cooked for him, the hand that kneaded his penis, the hand that dug out fish eyes and pulled out crimson fish organs, the hand that sparkled in the light when it was covered in fish scales, the hand that smelled of hot spices, the hand that raised and lowered the security shutters thousands of times, the hand that wiped away tears after they closed the restaurant, the hand that punched him when he came home after losing their deposit, the hand that picked out a maggot, the hand that floundered in the waters of the gorge. Of all of those hands, not one was left. What he saw in the police station was just a piece of a limb that not even maggots would eat.

Without electricity, the restaurant was dark. He took the bag of eyes from the fridge where he had left them last time. They had rotted more since then. He threw the rest out. The smell in the restaurant was so strong that he kept gagging while emptying the freezer and refrigerator.

Each time he saw something rotten, he pictured his wife’s sunken body decomposing underneath the water. Her body would have been smashed, bones broken against the jagged rocks as she was swept down the deep gorge. Her shattered body would have been carried away by the strong undertow while bloodthirsty fish tore her flesh to pieces. They say hearing is the last of a person’s senses to die. As she was swept away, his wife would have heard her own screams mixed with the raging current and the flutter of sharp-toothed carnivorous fish approaching, her bones cracking each time she smashed against a rock, and gadflies’ wings fluttering as they sensed death and swarmed nearer. She would have heard countless fishing lines bobbing in the current and the laughter of fishermen reveling with no regard for her as she died. She might have wanted to reach her arm out and grab their lines.

Just then he heard a sound coming from the kitchen. A black shadow wavered before his eyes. The shadow was slicing a rotten fish.

Is that you, honey?

He had not spoken in so long that his voice was hoarse. His wife sliced the fish with her left hand, which was blackened and shredded from being nibbled at by fish. Her body leaned a little to one side, as if standing on one leg; she was using the decaying right leg that he had seen in the police station in U City as a crutch. She did not turn around. She was absorbed in the task of holding the fish down with her left hand and scooping out its eyes with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. A long blood vessel dangled from the eyeball. The tips of her fingers were dark with blood. He watched helplessly as his wife gulped down the eyes of an uncooked fish that might have been swimming with parasitic larvae or Vibrio bacteria. With the eye still in her mouth, his wife glanced back at him then disappeared from view.

As soon as the black shadow vanished, the restaurant grew a little darker. He took his wife’s knife from where it glimmered keenly between rusted metal bowls. The handle was warm, as if someone had just set it down. He picked up a rotten fish eye from the cutting board and put it in his mouth. The sour smell of fish spread deep inside him. He wiped the dark blood off on his clothes. He would take the knife home. All the rest could be thrown away.

*

In mere moments, the building would be demolished without a trace. The man felt like his bones were cracking each time the metal ball that swung from the crane struck the walls. The shop that he and his wife struggled to raise and that had been like a child to them, the shop that gave them food to eat and chairs to sit on and money and eyes, was turning into scrap. He buried his wife and their shop beneath the debris. He thought of something he saw on TV once, a funeral for some tribe in southern Africa. They said that when someone died, they would pull the roof down on top of the body and then leave the place without any special ceremony. His wife and their shop lay beneath the earth with a cement heap for a grave mound. The long sign for their restaurant fell. The glass door shattered into tiny pieces without a sound. Just then, the phone rang. It was the detective again. It had been less than ten days since the last phone call.

I’m sorry to bother you, but you’ll have to come back.

The detective sounded calm. The man did not want to try to identify another body part. They might all be parts of his wife, but since she was already gone, they were just inanimate objects that had nothing to do with her. He said that unless they found the head this time, he did not want to go. For all he knew, it would be the right arm, and then the left leg, the limbless torso, then the right leg. The fishermen could bring up as many body parts from the deep, secretive water as they wanted. He did not want to go back and forth identifying all those parts.

That’s why I called. We found a head this time, and we believe it is your wife’s. We checked it against the facial features of our recent missing persons, and it bears the closest match to hers.

His heart thumped wildly. At last they had found her head. It was the decisive clue that would change her status from missing to deceased. He would not have to identify any more body parts. He thought it over for a moment and then asked how his wife’s face looked. The detective hesitated before responding.

Drowned bodies are rarely found intact. Most are found floating face down with the head and limbs submerged. As a result, the blood settles into the head, face, and throat, which speeds up decomposition. The face swells so much that the features can be hard to recognize. Of course, it’s not often that we find only the head.

The detective was beating around the bush, telling him that his wife’s head was spoiled beyond recognition. The man said he would leave right away and hung up.

When the man first heard that a witness saw a woman drowning in the gorge, he had stared at his hands for a long time. Hands that were made up of fourteen bones in the fingers, five bones in the palm, and eight bones in the wrist, all more fragile than any other body part. Hands that flinched, reacting immediately whenever the thousands of nerves registered pain such as hot, cold, or stinging sensations. Hands that might have pushed his wife into the gorge. Hands that might have sensed the agony that flared up inside him when he saw the maggot wiggling in his wife’s hand and unconsciously shoved her.

The man’s hands hung limp as he returned home to pack his wife’s knife. He had to hold a funeral with only his wife’s head. Her eyes might be wide open and glaring. The waterweeds plugging her eye sockets would make it look like she wept black tears, and the maggots writhing inside her blackened lips would maker her look as if she frothed at the mouth. She might be too swollen from the water to fit inside a coffin. All of her parts, except her head, would be stuffed with cotton and dressed for burial. He planned to set the knife on his wife’s chest. The sharpened knife would never rot and would serve as his dead wife’s spine, as her femur, as the soles of her feet. The knife was the only thing she would take with her.

*

On his way back to the police station, the man took a detour to the ravine where his wife had fallen to her death. The sun was on the horizon. Each time he thought the road would end, another curve appeared. The further upstream he drove, the fewer fishermen he saw. Where was the spot he had gone to with his wife? He only recalled the endless drive and could not remember exactly where they stopped. He went around another curve and was heading further up when he saw a group of fishermen standing close to the gorge. The men all looked alike and were crowded together in one spot, casting their floaters and pulling in their catch. They were excited about something. The fish seemed to be biting more there. He parked the car and walked over, as if drawn to the spot. Though it felt like he’d been driving along that winding road for over two hours, the road continued on as if the end would never come into sight. He had no idea how much further he had to go to reach the end, or how much farther was the spot where his wife had disappeared.

The water was translucent and lapped gently; it looked ankle-deep. But he remembered that his wife had said the clearer the water, the deeper it was. Was this where she fell in and was swept downstream while her head was torn off, legs ripped apart, and wrists severed? The icy water swirling in the shadow of the trees must have been extremely cold. If the water were warmer, she might have survived a little longer. Even so, she would not have lasted more than half an hour before dying.

The man moved a little closer to the fishermen. They fished together in silence. No one was bragging about landing a big one or grumbling that it was barely a minnow. They looked like they were toying with the lines, bobbing them up and down. They looked skilled. They kept reeling things in. The man went closer to take a look and let out a shriek. One of the men was pulling up an arm dripping with black blood. The man next to him reeled in a pair of buttocks, the white of the bones exposed. Blood trickled from where chunks of flesh had been torn out. Another man rejoiced as he raised an eyeball the size of a ping pong ball with a clotted capillary stuck to it. A head with the tongue lolling out of it. Blackened toes. Hair clumped together like waterweeds. Glossy blue intestines jiggled from a hook. One man brought up a winged torso. The body had blue markings, and the face had a red and white beak. Several of the anglers worked together to haul in something heavy. With great difficulty, they pulled a grotesquely swollen torso out of the water. Covered in fish scales, the torso sparkled and shone.

The body parts took the bait that the fisherman cast. They were using maggots, plump and large as worms. One man, too busy to attach fresh bait to his line, pulled a handful of squirming maggots from his pocket and tossed them into the ravine. When they landed in the water, the maggots did not spread out but clumped together. The water stood still and did not move. Torn limbs and body parts swarmed around the maggots. Shocked, the man took a step backwards and lost his footing. He grabbed for the exposed root of a dead tree to keep himself from falling into the water. A slimy mass landed on his head with a thump. The moment it touched his head, the mass broke into pieces and spread all over his body. He let go of the root to try to brush the things off of him, and fell into the ravine.

The sun had set, and the water was so cold it seemed his organs would freeze instantly. The current did not move but tightened around him. He grabbed at the fishing lines in the water, struggling not to be swept away. His legs were spread out in the water, making him look like a black waterweed with its roots swaying around. He could not make out the shapes of the fishermen in the dark. He shouted for them to pull on their lines. The fish were coming towards him.

They were already nipping at his toes. Someone cast his hook towards him, and it snagged the top of his head. The floater rose, slowly peeling back his scalp. The maggots in the water burrowed into the openings in his flesh. He was slowly pulled up on the fishing line. After they reeled him in, the fishermen tossed him into a large net along with the other bodies they’d fished out. His skin chafed against the ground and peeled away. His body was torn and bitten all over.

The ground was damp with dew and gave off a soft smell. He lay with his battered body against the earth and listened to the sounds of the ravine at night. He heard dry leaves rustle in the wind and fall softly onto the fishing net. He heard the glistening white maggots contract and expand their bodies as they crawled towards him. Each time the fishermen cast their lines, the water splashed sharply as if struck with a whip. The stagnant water droned and eddied. It sounded like his wife sobbing. The maggots swarmed the fishnet, crawling over his body, and began marching up the trunk of the dead tree. They climbed in single file, like a white line being carved into the bark. They reached the top and flung their bodies lightly into the air. Maggots poured down on him like rain. He was buried in the pitch-dark night of the ravine. 

* Translated by Sora Kim-Russell.