Twenty to four in the morning is the most honest hour in South Korea.
I know because I've spent four years and two months behind the counter of a convenience store in Daegu, the two-to-eight shift, and by that hour all the noise has died. The drunks have gone to sleep off their first bottle, the delivery drivers have loaded their vans, and out on the street there's only the hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional taxi passing without hurry. At twenty to four, the people who come into the shop stop pretending. They buy what they need. Or what hurts.
I stopped pretending a long time ago too. I learn people's habits so I can hate them properly: the one who leaves the exact change on the counter so he doesn't have to brush my fingers, the one who opens the ice cream freezer and stares inside for two minutes as if her life were in there, the guy on the factory night shift who always takes two cans of coffee and one of beer, just in case. Learning people is the most effective way of not getting attached. If you know the old man with the cane buys the strawberry yogurt because his wife used to eat it, you don't have to ask him anything. You don't have to love him.
And lately, I have a problem with loving.
My name is Yu-ri. I'm four hundred and twelve years old. I'm a gumiho, though these days you can hardly tell: denim skirt, gray hoodie, black hair clipped up because a gumiho's hair grows too fast and too shiny and has to be tamed like an animal. Every time I truly love, I lose a tail. That's how it works. Not when I sleep with someone, not when I get excited: when I truly love, with the kind of truth you can't fake, the tail falls off on its own, like a dry leaf, and it doesn't come back. Nine tails. Nine loves. And when they run out, I become human.
Human and mortal. With everything that means: wrinkles, flus, a heart that stops without asking permission.
I had one left. Just one. The last one, the one that beats low and slow when I crouch down to restock the rice triangles, the one that bristles without meaning to when he walks in.
He's Jae-min. Thirty-three years old. Forensic vet: he opens dead animals to find out why they died. He understands bodies much better than people, and you can tell in how he greets you, with a short, exact nod, as if measuring how much space I need so I don't have to talk. He buys two tuna rice triangles and a bottle of water. Always the same. Always at twenty to four. He's been doing it for three years.
Tails: 1 of 9.
The first time I saw him I thought: this one's going to last. I don't know why you think those things. He came in with his forensic institute coat half open and a smell of antiseptic and clean animal that went up my nose like a pin. He paid, said "thanks" without looking at me and left. And I stayed behind the counter with cold hands, gumiho hands that went cold when something mattered to me, and I told myself: no. Not this one. This one's a customer. Customers aren't loved, customers are classified.
I lasted eleven days classifying him.
The cold
The cold is the first thing that escapes me. We gumihos have our temperature set wrong: when we're calm we burn, when something stirs us up inside the degrees go to our fingers, to the tip of our nose, and you have to shove them in your pockets and wait. The night Jae-min showed up at twenty to four with wet hair and a gauze on the back of his hand, my temperature dropped so fast I fogged up the glass of the register.
"Did you cut yourself?" I asked him.
He looked at his hand as if the gauze were a recent invention.
"A cat. From the municipal pound. He doesn't bite, but he scratches when you sedate him badly."
"And you let him."
"I let him," he said, and half-smiled. "It's my job that it doesn't hurt them."
That night, when he left, I went into the storeroom and sat on the crates of soda. The storeroom is a two-by-three-meter cube with a flickering bulb and a smell of cardboard and floor cleaner. There, among the hum of the freezer chest, I felt the pull.
It comes from the base of my back. A dry pull, like when someone rips a band-aid off a hairy spot. Then the cold air in the gap. Then the tail, my last tail, sliding out on its own from under the hoodie, white with a black tip, thick as a child's arm, looking for space.
"No," I told my own tail. "Not yet. We haven't done anything yet."
The tail curled around the bottle of floor cleaner and ignored me.
At ten past four the next shift's cashier came in, Seo-yeon, her hair still wet from the shower and a coffee in her hand. Twenty-two years old. She's studying to be a radiology technician. She has the energy of a young dog and an astonishing ability to tell you things nobody asked about.
"Yu-ri, some guy has parked on the yellow line and I told him 'sir, not there,' and he said 'I know,' I mean, I mean, why does he know and still do it?"
"Because he knows you can't do anything."
"You're so cruel." She poured herself a coffee, sat on the stool. "Has the rice triangle guy been in?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"The vet. The handsome one with the bags under his eyes." She took a sip of coffee and looked at me over the cup. "You get weird when he comes in. You get that face like 'I want him to talk to me and shut up at the same time.'"
"I get the face of being four hundred years old."
"Well, you look sleepy, grandma."
Seo-yeon thinks I'm exaggerating when I say my age. Sometimes I think about showing her a tail and saving myself the explanations, but then I think about the paperwork and it passes.
The stocker, Dae-ho, arrived at five with the cart of merchandise and the face of someone who hasn't slept since high school. Dae-ho is twenty-six and has a half-finished philosophy degree and a theory about everything that happens in the shop. As he was putting out the energy drinks he said, out of nowhere:
"Love is a habit with good press."
"Good morning to you too."
"I say it because the rice triangle guy comes in every day at the same time and buys the same thing. That's not love, Yu-ri. It's a route. Animals and men do routes."
"How deep for five in the morning."
"It's just that at five in the morning philosophy is free."
Seo-yeon raised her coffee.
"Dae-ho, get to work or I'll throw yogurt at you."
And that's how my nights went: between the chorus of those two and the countdown I carried in my body and didn't want to look at.
Trying not to get attached (in writing)
I started a list. On the back of a delivery slip, with the pen Dae-ho chews when he thinks no one's looking. I called it "Reasons why Jae-min is not for me" and I took it very seriously.
- One: he comes at twenty to four, meaning his life is a shift. People with shifts don't have time to love, only to restock.
- Two: he says "thanks" as if it were a formula. Good. Formulas don't stick.
- Three: he smells of formalin and dog. Strong smells are remembered. Smells that are remembered are a trap.
- Four: he's kind to everyone, so his kindness means nothing.
- Five: he has a scar on his eyebrow that hasn't healed properly. A forensic vet with a badly healed scar. That's a man who leaves things inside himself.
The list kept filling up with things that, seen up close, were compliments. I crossed everything out and wrote a single sentence: "Don't look him in the eye for more than three seconds."
It worked for a week. The second, at twenty to four, Jae-min came in with a swollen eye and a scratch on his cheekbone.
"The cat again?"
"The cat again." He touched his cheekbone with two fingers. "He's a stray. He's been hit and now he hits. We're getting to know each other."
"And how do you get to know each other?"
"I feed him and stay still. At first he bites you. Then he bites you less. One day he lets you put your hand on him."
"That sounds like a dating manual."
He laughed. It was a short, tired laugh, with his swollen eye shut, and my temperature dropped to my ankles. I felt the pull at the base of my back and thought: no, no, no, not yet, it's just a laugh, people laugh every day.
The tail slid out from under my hoodie and curled around my own leg, like a jealous cat. I ducked quickly behind the counter and gathered it up with my hand, covering it.
"Are you cold?" Jae-min asked.
"Very."
"You should put something more on."
"You should stop coming at twenty to four."
"Why?"
"Because you mess up my shift."
He stood there a second with the water in his hand, not paying.
"I can change the time," he said. "If you want."
And that's when I realized the list was useless, because the problem wasn't his habits: it was that I already knew mine by heart and he had just offered to break one. A man who offers to change the time is a man who has thought about your schedule. And a man who has thought about your schedule has thought about you.
"No," I said. "Twenty to four is fine. It's rice triangle hour."
"Okay."
He paid. Before leaving he stopped at the door.
"Yu-ri." He called me by my name. He had it on my badge. "Do you eat anything at this hour?"
"Never."
"It shows."
And he left. I looked at myself in the reflection of the microwave: pale, with bags under my eyes, my hair clipped up any old way. Four hundred and twelve years old and the first man in three who told me my hunger showed.
Tails: 1 of 9.
But the tail already weighed differently. That night it got tangled in the storeroom tap and left a strand of white hair on the tip, as if it were getting ready. I started noticing other things. My fangs: they sharpened when I got excited and I had to drink water so they wouldn't show. My skin: it healed too fast, a cardboard cut on my finger closed in minutes, and that, in a gumiho nearing the end, is like the engine of a car warming up before it shuts off.
What was in the locker
Jae-min has a locker in the locker room of the forensic institute. I knew because one night, at five to four, he came into the shop with his coat on and a whole locker on his face: he had opened it and something had stayed inside.
"Is something wrong?" I asked. I had started using tú with him days ago, without permission. He didn't correct it.
"No. Yes." He ran a hand over the back of his neck. "Something silly. This morning I open my locker and there's a strand of hair. White. Long. Like a tail."
I went very still.
"Like a tail?"
"Animal, I mean. Animal hair. But in the locker, inside, caught on the coat hook. And it smells strange." He looked at his hands. "It smells like something I don't know what it is. And look, I smell things all day. I know what a wet dog smells like, what a cat with dermatitis smells like, what people smell like. This is none of that. This smells like..." He searched for the word. "Like winter."
I gripped the counter. The tail, under my hoodie, had gone stiff.
"And what did you do with the hair?"
"I put it in a little bag. Just in case." He scratched his eyebrow, the one with the scar. "Sounds crazy, right?"
"Sounds like you have a new animal at home."
"I don't have animals at home. I have a rented room and a landlord who doesn't want hair."
He took the rice triangles and the water. I went into the storeroom and lifted my hoodie to my waist. The tail, my last tail, had a skinned patch near the base, as if someone had pulled on it carefully and taken a strand. Red, shiny, with new skin already showing.
Hair had escaped me into Jae-min's locker. For weeks the tail had been sliding out on its own when he was near, curling around corners, getting into places. A tail builds its nest. A tail knows before its owner.
"Shut up," I told it, and gathered it up angrily.
At ten past four Seo-yeon arrived with her coffee and her young-dog energy.
"Yu-ri, why do you have a band-aid on your back?" She spun me around without asking. "And you have white hair there! Did you dye a strand? How trendy. Why on your back?"
"Because I like it not showing."
"You're the weirdest person in Daegu."
"Thanks, Seo-yeon."
Dae-ho, who was putting out the bread, said without looking up:
"White hair is the color of renunciation. A poet said it. Or my grandmother said it. One of the two."
"Dae-ho, get to work."
The countdown
I'd carried the count in my head for centuries and it had always been easy: nine, eight, seven. Each tail, a man. The first, a scholar of the Joseon dynasty who read me verses and left me for a widow with land. The fourth, a soldier who didn't come back. The sixth, a baker from Busan I loved so much I still remember the smell of his flour. Eight tails. Eight different men. Eight stories.
And then Jae-min.
One day I did the math and it came out nine. Nine tails spent, one left, and that one was his. I did it with my finger in the fog on the freezer chest: eight lines and one more. Eight names I barely remembered by face and one face I remembered in every detail. I stared at the fog and thought: it can't be. I've known this one for three years and we haven't done anything. We haven't had dinner, we haven't slept together, he hasn't said anything to me he wouldn't say to a cat. How can I have loved him?
Because the tail was falling. That was the important thing. The tail doesn't understand dates or declarations. The tail falls when it falls.
And mine, counting, was running out.
It was a rainy night. Jae-min came in at twenty to four soaked, his hair stuck to his forehead, and instead of his two tuna triangles he took a chicken one.
"Change of routine?" I said.
"A dog died on me today." He set the triangle on the counter. "One that had been with me two weeks. From the street. The one with the beatings." He ran a hand over his wet face. "I couldn't do anything. His liver was in pieces."
"I'm sorry."
"It's my job." But his jaw was trembling. "It's just that he was the one who let me put my hand on him."
And then, without thinking, I did something I never do: I came out from behind the counter. I walked over. I put my hand on his soaked arm and said, in the lowest voice I have:
"Well, put it on me now."
He raised his head. His eyelashes were full of water. He looked at me the way you look at an animal you don't know if it's going to bite, and then he put his hand, big, cold from the rain, on top of mine.
It was as if a door opened in my back. The pull bent me over. The tail came out whole, all at once, and curled around Jae-min's arm and his, and he looked down and ran out of air.
"Yu-ri," he said. "What is this?"
"It's raining," I said. "Let's go to the storeroom."
The storeroom
The storeroom is two meters by three and has a flickering bulb. I closed the door. Jae-min stood in the middle, dripping, the white tail with the black tip still curled around his wrist like a living bracelet.
"Don't be scared," I told him.
"I'm not scared." And it was true: forensic vets aren't scared of bodies, they're scared of people. "I'm... is this yours?"
"Yes."
"Have you always had it?"
"Always. Four hundred years."
"Okay." He ran his tongue over his lips. "Okay."
I unwound the tail from his wrist and let it drop. Then I stepped closer, took the wet coat off his shoulders and threw it on the soda crates. He let me. His neck was exposed and his Adam's apple was going up and down. I put my hand on his chest, over the soaked T-shirt, and felt his heart at full speed. A thirty-three-year-old heart, with all its life ahead of it.
"And now?" he said.
"Now you put your hand on me."
He did. First on my waist, carefully, as if I were the one who was going to bite. Then lower, down to the base of the tail. When he brushed it, a moan escaped through my nose and the tail curled around his waist, his ass, and pulled him toward me.
We kissed against the crates. His mouth was cold from the rain and mine burns when I get like this, and the contrast made him let out a hoarse sound. I bit his lip, careful of my fangs, and he held the back of my neck with both hands, my hair, the clip, everything came down and my black hair spilled over my shoulders, long, too much, and he didn't care: he wound it around his fingers and pulled my face back a second to look at me.
"Your eyes," he said. "Your eyes are a different color."
"I know. Shut up."
I pulled down his zipper. He was hard and hot and I took him in my hand, and he threw his head back and hit the back of his neck on the shelf and didn't even notice. I jerked him slowly, squeezing, my forehead against his shoulder, and he slipped his hand under my hoodie and felt for me over my underwear, clumsy, precise, with that way he has of touching as if he knew where it hurts.
I came like that, standing, with the tail curled around his waist and the bulb flickering, biting his T-shirt so I wouldn't scream. When I raised my head, Jae-min had black eyes and an open mouth and he spun me against the water crates, yanked down my denim skirt and lifted one of my legs.
"Can you?" he asked. His hands were trembling.
"I can."
He entered slowly. I was so wet it was a hot slide, and even so it hurt in the good way, the way that opens you up inside. I gripped the edge of the crate and he gripped my hip and started to move, and the tail curled around his thigh and he pushed it aside with his free hand and held it, held it the way you hold a rein, and I burst out laughing and the laugh broke into a moan.
The storeroom filled with noise: the thud of the crates against the wall, the rustle of soaked clothes, the bulb. I bit his shoulder and he said "again" and I bit him again, without fangs, and he slipped his hand between the crates and my belly and touched me while he thrust, and I came again with my mouth open against his T-shirt and my legs weak.
He came shortly after, his forehead on the back of my neck and the tail clenched in his fist.
We stayed like that, breathing, rain water dripping from our clothes to the floor. The bulb flickered three times.
"Yu-ri," he said, his voice hoarse. "Is this what I think it is?"
"Depends what you think."
"I think you're a gumiho."
I pulled away slowly. I pulled my skirt back down. The tail gathered itself around my waist, satisfied, and for the first time in three years I wasn't embarrassed.
"And does that scare you?"
"What scares me is you leaving," he said. "The rest doesn't matter."
And there, in the storeroom, with the crates askew and the floor wet, I felt the second pull.
Tails: 1 of 9.
But the counter in my head no longer added up. There were two names, two tails, two men. Weren't there?
His flat
His flat was a rented room with a window onto a light well and a small fridge with two bottles of water and an empty tupperware. I went the next night, after the shift, at ten past eight in the morning, my hair clipped up and my heart in my mouth.
He received me with his coat on the back of a chair and a new bandage on his forearm.
"Another cat," I said.
"The pound one again. It's just that he lets me put my hand on him now." He closed the door. "His name is Oficio. It's a bad name, but I gave it to him and that's that."
We stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway. He was sleepy, you could see it in his eyelids, and even so he looked at me as if spring had just arrived.
"We can sleep," he said. "If you want."
"I didn't come to sleep."
"Okay."
I stepped closer and put my hand on his chest. His heart was beating fast, but not as fast as the first time. The second time is slower. The second time already has memory.
I kissed his neck. He smelled of soap and Oficio and antiseptic. I pulled his T-shirt down over his shoulder and bit him there, where the bone ends, and he let out his breath and grabbed me by the waist and carried me to the bed without stopping kissing me.
The bed was narrow. We fell onto it and laughed and he took off my hoodie and stared at my tail, which had already come out on its own and was curling around the bedpost.
"It's beautiful," he said.
"It's a tail."
"It's beautiful."
He put his hand on my back, at the base, and rubbed there slowly, with his thumb, and my arms went slack. Tails have a sensitive base, much more than the tip. He knew it right away, because he's a man who understands bodies, and he rubbed with that patience of his of opening an animal and knowing where the liver is.
He laid me face down. He kissed my nape, my shoulder blades, my spine, and went down. When he reached the base of the tail he bit me softly and I gripped the sheet.
"Again," I said.
He bit me again. Then he turned me over, took off what was left and opened me with his hands. He ate me slowly, with a flat tongue, unhurried, eyes closed, and I squeezed his head with my thighs and my temperature left me completely: cold feet, cold hands, the tail curled around his nape and I pulled him up.
He entered with his forehead against mine. He looked me in the eyes the whole time, and that's something people can't stand, and he stood it. I moved with him, animal, my nails dug into his back. I left four furrows and he didn't even complain.
"Sorry," I said.
"More."
I gave him more. I came with my mouth open and an ugly sound, and he followed with his face hidden in my neck, trembling, and stayed inside a long while.
Afterward, the tail gathered in on itself and lay still on the sheet, the black tip resting on my thigh. Jae-min looked at it and stroked it with two fingers.
"Does it get tired?" he asked.
"It gets tired." I looked at his back. "You have four scratches."
"I know." He turned and showed me his back in the wardrobe mirror. "Two have already closed. It's like with Oficio: I let him."
And I laughed, and my eyes filled with something silly, and I thought: it can't be. It can't be that this one is the last.
Tails: 1 of 9.
But the next morning, in his bathroom, a white strand came out in the brush. And another on the pillow. And the base of the tail, when I touched it, hurt like a loose tooth.
Her place
I have a flat on the third floor of a building with no elevator, with a window onto the bus stop and a neighbor who sings in the shower at seven. I've lived there eleven years. I'd never brought anyone up.
Jae-min came up on Saturday, with a shopping bag and a red satin ribbon he had bought "just in case." The ribbon was for the tail. The tail, in my house, no longer hid: it paraded across the floor as if it owned it, climbed onto the table, curled around the chair leg. It was no longer ashamed. The shame had stayed in the storeroom, with the bulb.
I sat on the floor, my back to him, and offered him the tail.
"Tie it up for me," I said. "At the base. With the ribbon."
Jae-min sat behind me. He pushed my hair aside, gathered the tail carefully and tied it, not tight, in a crooked bow. When he finished, he kissed my nape.
"There," he said. "Done."
I turned and kissed him. I kissed him with the tail tied up, my legs open on the floor of my house, and he laid me down right there, on the rug, and made love to me slowly, with the red ribbon pressing me against the sheet and the neighbor singing on the other side of the wall.
It was different. It was slow and warm and with his face very close, and halfway through I realized I was crying, and he wiped me with his thumb and said nothing. I came with the tail taut in the bow, pulling on the ribbon, and he came inside and let himself fall on top of me, and the weight of his body was the closest thing to a home I've had in four hundred years.
Later, in the kitchen, while he made rice, I looked at myself in the window glass.
My hair was white. Not a strand: a whole streak, from the temple. And the skin on the backs of my hands looked different, thinner, with a blue vein I had never seen.
"Jae-min."
"Mm?"
"How many tails do you think I have left?"
He turned with the skimmer in his hand.
"Didn't you tell me one?"
"Yes." I looked at my hands. "One."
"Then one."
And there, in the kitchen, with the rice steaming, I did the math again. And again. And it came out wrong, wrong the whole time, because I'd spent four hundred years counting men and had never counted the same one twice.
Eight tails. Eight men. I had them in my head like tokens: the Joseon one, the soldier, the baker, the sixth, the seventh. And then Jae-min.
But when I tried to put a face to the sixth, Jae-min came out in different clothes. When I tried to remember the baker from Busan's voice, Jae-min's voice came out asking for two tuna rice triangles. When I thought of the soldier who didn't come back, what came was Jae-min's coat on the back of a chair, waiting for him to come back from his shift.
Eight tails. And all of them, somehow, the same.
The bad math
I spent three nights at the shop counting on my fingers under the counter. Seo-yeon brought me a coffee and said:
"You're weird. Weirder than usual."
"I'm doing math."
"The register?"
"Life."
"So dramatic."
Dae-ho, stacking cans, said:
"Life's math never adds up. That's why people drink."
"Dae-ho, you don't drink."
"That's why I'm so sad."
And at twenty to four Jae-min came in, and for the first time I noticed something that had been in front of my nose for three years: that he always came at the same time because I was there. That he had made his night a route toward me. That the rice triangles were the excuse and the water was the excuse and the hour was the excuse, and that a man doesn't keep an excuse for three years if it isn't for something.
My whole count fell apart.
Nine tails. Eight loves. But what if it wasn't eight? What if it was just one, repeated, and I had been spending tail after tail on the same man without realizing, because every phase of him seemed like a new man? The one who came in tired. The one who laughed with half his mouth. The one who let cats scratch him. The one who offered to change the time. The one who bought a red ribbon just in case.
All the same. All Jae-min. And I, counting breeds of desire, had run out of tails months ago.
I gripped the counter. My back hurt in a new place, lower, in the bone. I went into the bathroom and lifted my hoodie in front of the mirror.
The tail was there, white, tied with the red ribbon he had put on me. But looking at it closely, in the mirror, it seemed shorter. And at the base, where there had been skin before, there was a pink, closed scar, like an old stump.
I touched it. I barely felt it.
"No," I told the mirror. "No, no, no."
But the mirror ignored me.
Tails: 1 of 9.
Then, that same night, the ribbon fell to the bathroom floor on its own. The tail unwound, stretched, and hung there, limp, the black tip brushing the tile. Like a leaf about to fall.
I went out to the counter. Jae-min was paying for the water.
"Are you okay?" he said. "You're white."
"Jae-min." I grabbed his wrist. "How long have you been coming?"
"What?"
"At twenty to four. How long?"
He went still.
"Three years," he said. "Three years and two months."
"And why?"
"Because..." He looked at his wrist, where I was squeezing. "Because at first I just wanted to buy something. And then I wanted to buy it here. And then I wanted to buy it from you."
"And why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you weren't looking." He smiled, tired. "And I know how to wait. It's the only thing I do well."
My eyes filled. I let go of his wrist.
"Three years," I said. "Three years and two months."
"Yes."
"Me too."
And he stood looking at me and understood, because he understands bodies, that I had just told him something I hadn't said in four hundred years.
What's scary
Mortality isn't a prize.
I learned that in the weeks that followed, when the tail hung by a thread and my skin started doing strange things. We gumihos have our temperature set wrong; humans have it worse. I started getting cold. Really cold, blanket-and-socks cold, cold feet at three in the morning behind the counter, and Seo-yeon brought me a blanket from the storeroom and told me I looked like an old cat.
I got pimples. Pimples, at four hundred and twelve. I cut myself on the edge of a can and the cut took two days to close, not minutes. My fangs went blunt: they no longer cut, they just got in the way. One night I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw a wrinkle. On my forehead. Small. A wrinkle.
"I have a wrinkle," I told Jae-min on the phone.
"Welcome."
"It's not funny." I pressed my forehead. "I'm going to die."
"Me too." There was noise in the background, Oficio meowing. "Yu-ri, do you know what I do all day? I open animals that have died. I know what I'm talking about. There's nothing more normal."
"But I'd gone four hundred years without dying."
"And I've gone thirty-three. I'm ahead of you in one thing: I already know what it is to be afraid." He paused a second. "Do you want me to come?"
"Yes."
He came. At twenty past eight in the morning, with Oficio in a carrier because he couldn't leave him alone. I sat on the living room floor with the cat in my lap and told Jae-min:
"If I run out of tail, I die. But not tomorrow. It could be in fifty years. It could be in five. The last gumihos who became human died of silly things. One of a cold. Another fell down some stairs."
"And that's what scares you? Falling down some stairs?"
"What scares me is forgetting." I looked at him. "Four hundred years of memory, Jae-min. And when I'm human, what? Is my head going to be thirty-three years old like yours? Am I going to forget Joseon? My mother? The eight times I loved you before I met you?"
He sat on the floor, opposite me, his back against the sofa.
"I don't know," he said. "But I forget things too. I forget my keys, I forget birthdays. And I don't die from it." He looked at me. "Yu-ri. Do you want to stay?"
"I want to stay with you."
"That's not what I asked."
I stayed quiet. Oficio kneaded my thigh with his paws.
"I don't know," I said. "I mean yes, but I'm scared to say yes."
"Then don't say it yet."
And that was the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me, because it left me all my fear.
Tails: 1 of 9.
But the tail barely moved anymore. It lay still on the bed, on the floor, hanging off the edge of the table. It no longer curled. Sometimes, in his sleep, Jae-min reached for it with his hand and found it limp, and laid it over his thigh like someone tucking in a child.
The last one
The last night was a normal night. That's the important thing: it was normal.
Two-to-eight shift. Seo-yeon arrived at ten past four and started telling me about some customer who had tried to pay with stamps. Dae-ho arrived at five and stacked the sodas and said love was a habit with good press. Jae-min arrived at twenty to four, as always, with his coat and his hair mussed from sleeping badly, and bought two tuna rice triangles and a water.
I stared at him. The tail, under my hoodie, hung, and I felt it the way you feel a tooth you move with your tongue.
"Yu-ri?"
"Come to the storeroom."
"Now?"
"Now."
I left Seo-yeon at the register. She raised her eyebrows to the ceiling and said nothing, and that, in Seo-yeon, is an act of heroism.
In the storeroom, with the bulb flickering, I lifted my hoodie. The tail hung, white, the black tip almost on the floor.
"It's going to fall," I said. "Today."
Jae-min looked at it. Then he looked at me.
"And what happens when it falls?"
"That I'm left with none. That I become human." My voice cracked. "That I die, Jae-min. Sooner or later. And I don't know how long later is."
He stepped closer. He put his hands on my waist and squeezed, and kissed my forehead, and then kissed my mouth, slowly, with that patience of his of opening animals.
"Okay," he said. "Then we die."
"It's not that easy."
"I know." He looked me in the eyes. "Yu-ri, listen to me. I don't love you for the tail. I love you for how you restock the rice triangles. I love you for how you tell me to stop coming at twenty to four and keep waiting for me. I love you for how you bite." He put his hand at the base of the tail. "And if tomorrow you're human and you get a wrinkle every year, I'll love you with the wrinkles. And if you fall down some stairs, I'll love you on the floor."
A tear fell. Then another.
"You're a sap," I said.
"I'm a vet."
I laughed, my nose full. He kissed me again and I grabbed his coat and pulled him close, and the tail, the last one, curled around his leg with the little strength it had left.
I unbuttoned his coat. I put my hand in his pants. He was hard and he let out a long sigh, his forehead on my shoulder.
"Quick," I said. "Before it falls."
"There's no rush."
"Jae-min."
"Okay. Quick."
He spun me against the crates. He pulled down my skirt. He entered with his hand on my belly and his mouth on my nape, and I gripped the water crate and the bulb flickered and he thrust, and each thrust moved the tail a little, and the tail twisted around his leg, and I felt it stretch, stretch.
"More," I said.
He gave me more. He gave it to me hard, one hand on my hip and the other in my hair, and I came with a long, ugly moan, and at the highest point, at the edge, I felt the final pull, the real one, the one that tears away.
The tail unwound from his leg.
It fell to the storeroom floor with a soft sound, like a wet rag.
Jae-min stayed inside, still, breathing on my nape. I looked at the tail on the floor. White, with the black tip, small, wrinkled, dull.
"There," I said.
And then I burst into tears. Not from sorrow: from cold. A cold came into me from inside, a cold I had never felt, a bone cold, and I realized my heart was beating differently, slower, more real, and that my hands were heavy and that the air smelled stronger than before, everything stronger, the cardboard, the floor cleaner, Jae-min's sweat, and that the bulb was flickering and it hurt my eyes.
Jae-min hugged me from behind. He covered me with his coat.
"Breathe," he said. "Breathe with me."
I breathed. One second. Two.
"I'm cold," I said.
"I know."
"I'm really cold, Jae-min. Human cold."
"I know." He squeezed me. "And I have a blanket at home."
I laughed, my face full of tears. I turned and hugged him and buried my face in his chest, and he held my head with his hand, and we stayed like that a while, with the tail on the floor, until Seo-yeon knocked on the storeroom door and said:
"Yu-ri, are you two okay? It's just that there's a line at the register."
Tails: 0 of 9.
After
I picked up the tail. I put it in a clear plastic bag and took it home. Jae-min wanted to throw it away and I said no, and now it's in a glass jar on top of the fridge, the black tip pointing down, like a dried bouquet.
Seo-yeon asked me about it the next day.
"Yu-ri, why do you have a fox tail in a jar?"
"It's from a fox I met."
"Girl, you're so weird."
Dae-ho said, from the shelf:
"People who keep tails in jars have lived a lot. You can see it in their eyes."
And I laughed and didn't explain anything to him, because I no longer have tails to explain.
Now I'm cold. I have a wrinkle on my forehead and two at the corners of my mouth, and I get pimples when I eat fried food. I cut myself on a can and the cut got infected and Jae-min treated it in his bathroom, with antiseptic, complaining that I hadn't told him sooner. Oficio sleeps with me in the bed and kneads my belly with his paws and Jae-min says he's gotten jealous.
I'm still on the two-to-eight shift. Jae-min still comes at twenty to four. He buys two tuna rice triangles and a water and sometimes, when Seo-yeon isn't looking, he gives me a kiss over the counter.
I'm scared of dying. I'm scared of the silly cold, the stairs, the bus, the body that is now only mine and is going to wear out. I'm scared of forgetting my mother, Joseon, the eight times I loved him before I knew it was him.
But this morning, leaving my shift, it was light out and Jae-min was waiting for me at the door with an umbrella and two rice triangles, and he said:
"One's for you. You eat things at this hour now."
And I took his hand, and his hand felt warm, his, and mine cold, and we set off toward his house under the umbrella.
Four hundred and twelve years. Zero tails. One wrinkle.
And a man who waits for me at ten past eight.