The Execution (처단)

The Execution is a short, furious political horror novella about a second martial law in South Korea, the crushing of civil society, and a supernatural revenge carried out by the dead. It begins as realism, almost reportage, and then turns into a ghost story of collective vengeance. Its first sentence says that this is a story recorded nowhere. By the end, that sentence has become literal: the people who could have recorded it have been murdered, and the revenge that follows belongs not to official history but to the dead.

The central unnamed character is a woman whose wife is in hospital. When the hospital is attacked, she is in a twelfth-floor room with her wife, who has recently undergone a major lung operation. Her wife is still very weak. She cannot sit up by herself, is attached to IV lines and drains, and needs help even to turn in bed. At first the woman ignores the noise in the corridor because hospitals are always noisy: patients come and go, medical carts roll through, emergencies happen. Then there are screams and an explosion. Armed soldiers burst into the room. When the woman asks what is happening, a soldier smashes her in the face with a rifle butt. The soldiers rip the wife out of bed, tearing away the tubes and drains from her body. Blood and fluid soak her patient clothes. The woman is beaten under soldiers’ boots while her wife is dragged away. This is the last time she sees her wife as a living person.

The story then moves back to explain who the women are. They met through queer and labour activism: at Pride events, marches for anti-discrimination law, and memorial protests. The wife works full-time for a labour union; the narrator is also a union member. The wife has lung disease, probably caused or worsened by years of precarious labour before she became a union organiser. She cannot walk quickly without becoming breathless. The narrator loves her intensely and once jokes that she would give her own lungs to her. When the wife decides to leave work and return to her parents, the narrator asks to marry her. They cannot legally marry as a same-sex couple, but they can still hold a wedding among friends and comrades.