There are three things she learns in rustic Busan.

One. Mother is afraid of the monsters underneath her bed. This is what she tells Hyeri, when the little girl asks, at the age of 5, why she brings home men that never stay for breakfast. Her innocence keeps her blinded from the blurred line of sensuality and lewd ism that her mother engages in with a different man more often than she could count on her fingers. Her dreams are white picket fences that barricade her of her mother's doings -- dissipates the potency of her mother's need to be held, to be touched, to be owned but her dreams often do not protect her from the aftermath of the evening's happenings. Each man leaves with a bed stained with last night's throws of passion, but Mother cries a different name into her palms. She sheds acid tears over a man that had left her at the beginnings of the pregnancy that had brought Hyeri in the world.

Mommy never stops crying for Daddy, Hyeri learns. Mommy says only Daddy can keep those monsters away.

Two. Monsters do not only exist within the sanctuaries and confines of beds and closets. Some monsters do not hide, some monsters soak in the sunlight, they have warm hands and eyes that look exactly like yours. She does not forget the happiness that radiates from her Mother's pores when Daddy shows up on their doorstep. Daddy whispers apologies against the crook of her slender neck, cradles her with his big, warm hands and buries promises in the form of sunsets her plants on her collarbones.

Hyeri is 15 when Mommy welcomes a stranger home and tells her to call him Daddy. Daddy paints his tongue with alcohol and draws pent-up anger on Mommy's lovely skin. The cycle is endless, Daddy hits Mommy, Daddy apologizes and treats her like a queen, the alcohol pollutes his troubled mind and everything circles back to step one. Hyeri thinks of insanity when her mother says that each bruise was an evidence of love.

Hyeri is fifteen when she realizes that monsters can be humans too.

Three. Alcohol does not create monsters, it summons them out from the cages they are locked up in, hidden within the thickness of our skulls. She does not forget she sound of her mother's neck snapping within her father's chokehold, it is a devastation she cannot forget, its image stitches itself on the back of her eyelids. She is eighteen when she watches her mother, broken and lifeless on the floor. She is eighteen when she realizes she was a monster too. She is blinded by fury, one moment she is mourning, the second moment she is driving a knife into her father's abdomen until she forgets how to count.

She is eighteen when she first kills a man, and the easiest thing she can think of is douse the entire house in gasoline. Their corpses burn along with their house, reduced to forgotten ashes and bitter memories. Guilt burns through every time she swallows yet it is fear that prevents her for turning herself in.

The last thing she learns in rustic Busan is this: You say that you are not a monster, sometimes you are.

There is one thing she teaches herself in bustling Seoul.

The tabloids paste the news all over the place, television spits out in static dissonance about the search of a murderer. There are two corpses and one missing person, she hears while she cuts her hair short, dark waterfalls falling to the ground, Police say they are investigating a murder, she replaces her dark halo with a caramelized brown, shortened locks barely brushing past her shoulders. She flees like this.

There is one thing she teaches herself in bustling Seoul: do not get caught.

PLOTS

to be posted.

author notes

Timezone is GMT +8. Online essentially every day but replies come sporadically. I don't mind genres for the most part as long as it's entertaining. My writing style is versatile. I primarily write bull in the form of detailed para where aesthetics is heavy and my character's mind is put into focus. I usually do not follow the "you ask, you start" policy but if I see it fit that my character starts I will do so. Third pov only.  Please remind me if  owe you an reply after two days of not providing such, I am very forgetful thus  I do not mind. Feel free to drop a thread if you're not feeling it, it is something I won't hold against you.

“ you see the layers when you tear yourself apart. ”