David Lewis Says
The day Yumi got her eighth piercing—a semicolon on her left eyebrow—her mother pulled her into the kitchen and gave her an ultimatum.
“No more holes on your body,” she said.
They’re the cause of your misfortune, she meant. She believed that good luck leaked out of man-made orifices. It helped her rationalize her daughter’s misery.
Yumi didn’t tell her that the holes were a reaction, not the cause. That they helped her stave off other nameless compulsions. That revisiting the sensation at the parlor—the ringing in her ears, the chill of the quick prick—reminded her of a new sliver of space that passed through her. That the memory, at least while fresh, opened up a valve and kept her from exploding.
Her mother ambled toward the sink.
“Reverend Lee gonna set you up with a nice man soon,” she added.
Yumi tried to parse the back of her mother’s head. The permed curls uncoiling from a loose bun, the flushed rims of her ears. She wondered what her mother was turning away from. A broken promise, perhaps. (“Promising” was what Yumi had been as a girl.) An aching extension of herself, maybe.
Yumi’s mother opened a drawer by the sink. She pulled out a hole punch—a bargain find from Staples—and thrust it into Yumi’s palm.
“If you so crazy about holes, use this,” her mother said. “So many things outside you can put holes on. Not you.”
Yumi felt the heft of the hole punch as it winked with menace against the overhead light. It looked like a wrench for extracting teeth. Except it had one itself. A single, powerful steel molar.
It began with sheaf-y things. Discount coupons. Church pamphlets. Onion skin pages from dictionaries. Whenever the pressure within pulled her taut, Yumi set her throbbing fingers on the hole punch. Snip, snip, it went, slicing the world. Sometimes, she traced the O’s and snapped the words in half. Their meanings fizzed out. Løve. Høme. Sørrøw. Other times, she let the punch run through like a sewing needle. A time-lapse of moving circles. A void caterpillar, limned by the non-void world.
Little by little, Yumi upped the ante, letting the maw of the hole punch stretch wider. Cardboard boxes. Leather jacket. Plastic bus seats. The molar took them on, its snips ever crisp. Always it left a perfect circle. On anything. Everything. The harder the challenge, the stronger it seemed to grow, and every time Yumi wondered if the punch might finally give way, the world eventually gave in with a shudder. Yumi wondered if the punch was made in Japan like one of those impossible sushi knives.
In the spring, Yumi moved onto organic matters. Rose petals. Barks of elm trees. Waxy magnolia leaves in Ms. Bauman’s garden. Once, she almost got caught, and Ms. Bauman chased her for two blocks, yelling, “You filthy little aphid!”
That April, people reported seeing butterflies loping along in a drunken flutter, their wings framing pieces of airy blue sky in disconcerting circles.
All this time, Yumi saved up the round discs deposited by her hole punch—the result of perfect displacements, their borders final. The circles gathered into mounds in the kangaroo pockets of her zipped-up hoodie. Whenever her claws felt sharp, Yumi fingered through them. Her own cosmic sprinkle. Her little sampler of the world.
It was on the morning of the blind date that Yumi extended her experiment back towards herself. The night before, she’d found her mother lying next to her in bed. Her mother had unscrewed all the metals in Yumi’s body. Had taken them out during her sleep, praying silently for the flesh to close over.
“Now you really lucky again,” she’d said, caressing Yumi’s wayward strands of hair. “Sunday afternoon, you meet Mrs. Park’s son. He a lawyer.”
Her breath had been hot and briny.
An hour before the date, Yumi found herself in front of the bathroom mirror, sliding her left palm into the slit of her hole punch. “Where does the outside begin?” she wondered, as she squeezed the punch with her right hand. Click, it went, like a well-oiled guillotine. The punch deposited a doughy cylinder. A mini marshmallow of herself. After nodding at her own reflection through the hole in her hand, she put on her gloves and braced the outside.
Yumi wasn’t supposed to tell her date that she shelved succulents at Home Depot.
“Tell him you taking a break. Tell him you applying to law school,” her mother had said.
So Yumi asked him a question instead.
“Are holes real?”
“Excuse me?” The date answered, closing his menu.
“I mean, do they exist?”
A flicker of recognition.
“Maybe only in relation to the part that’s not a hole?” he suggested, his interest piqued. “If I say there’s a hole in this bread,” here, he picked up a slice of bread and peered through it like a telescope, “all I mean is that the bread is perforated, right? There’s no such thing as holes, qua holes.”
Yumi covered the bread basket with her gloved hand, as though in protection.
“Or maybe, holes aren’t truly empty,” she said. “Maybe an absence is a form of presence.”
The man broke into an indulging smile.
“Have you read David Lewis?” he said. “Metaphysically speaking…”
But Yumi tuned out. She suddenly felt powerful, hiding a hole inside her glove.
“Forgive me,” she said. She gathered her coat and walked out of the restaurant.
Yumi drove to the beach. She fished out a fistful of cosmic sprinkle and let it scatter towards the sea. Gulls snatched at them, glistening against the sunset. The heaviness lifted. Yumi plopped down on the sand and took out her hole punch. She clipped holes into herself, steadily, bit my bit. Doughy cylinders piled up next to her. Some gulls pecked at them. Others carried them in their beaks, flying out to faraway places. As the night dawned and the stars prickled the sky, Yumi became a mesh through which the wind whistled. Like an unfolding sail, she stretched from the breeze, her holes becoming larger and larger, her torso becoming thinner and thinner. When her gossamer body stretched to breaking point, she almost took off. But soon, tremors from the ground pulled her back. She alighted, shrouding the entire city. Strings of her flesh, thin as spiderwebs, pulsated as they touched on things she couldn’t withhold or let go. Ms. Bauman, lighting fire to the grill in her backyard. Her mother, nursing a lukewarm ginseng tea in her hand, thinking again of the logic of human sadness and how it had ensnared her daughter. Her abandoned date, gazing wistfully into his shrimp gumbo as his finger scrolled through Tinder. The tiny cylinders. Bobbing. Sinking.
Yumi embraced everyone, including herself.
Sunwoo Jeong (@translunarytree) is a Korean writer living in Seattle and Seoul in alternation. She is an academic linguist by day and an author by night. An alum of Clarion and Tin House, Sunwoo is currently working on a collection of linked short stories that take place in a forgotten alleyway in a K-town. This is her first literary publication.