People have no idea how much of themselves they can slough off.

Every night, I clean oodles of ttae—exfoliated skin cells, rolled up into crescent doughs. They lap about in the Hot Springs; merge into foamy scums. I skim them with my net; run new water through the pools. When the baths brim again with turquoise light, I look for my client, steeping herself in one of the Springs.

Ms. So-and-so, it’s time. You’re tender enough now. Follow me.

 

She follows, this old lady in flip flops. Wisps of hoary hair spill out of her natty pink towel.

“Look at your twiggy arms! You’re too young to be a ttaemiri!” she cries, giving my arm an affectionate pinch. Her smile diffuses through the heavy mist. Her gait reminds me of someone; I can’t seem to remember who.

When we arrive at my corner, tucked behind the yuzu Hot Spring, I draw the vinyl pink curtain and nudge her towards the matching bed. She slides onto it with a resounding squelch, and breaks out into a booming laugh.

The domed light above my head beams down on her sleek, wet skin. Her back’s covered in tattoos. A dragon, soaring. Threading itself through cascades of swirling clouds.

It’s unusual for a Korean grandma to be covered in so much ink. I warm to her immediately, though it probably doesn’t show. Tenderness tends to rob me of words.

I pour a bucketful of warm water on her back.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh,” she sighs.

I lather her in bubbles of apricot soap.

Haltingly, I ask about her day, her life. She answers in a comforting hum, punctuated by my Mmms. She talks about her orchids. Her three mutts. A strange-looking boulder she once found on her way to work. She talks about her travels. Her friends, who all have weird, hip names: Bunny. Madge. Tabs. Ditto.

Her tales are enchanting, her voice, disarming. I run my hands up her sinewy legs and feel a sudden surge of awe. And with it, a faint pang of jealousy at the fullness of her life.

When the suds simmer down, I don my green scrubbing gloves. Older women like to be peeled off like tangerines, get their money’s worth. I put my full weight on my arms, and push my gristly hands up her back. Pills of grey ttaes materialize. I nod in satisfaction.

When I work my way up to her shoulders, she turns her head sideways.

“Are you an artist?” she asks.

“No, I’m this.”

Curious, I follow her gaze and find a mirror that has fogged over. There, minutes before I fetched her, I’d traced the profile of a brooding duck with my finger. A drop of water runs down its eye. Now the duck looks like it’s crying.

I flush and pour another bucket of water on her back. I ask her to turn over, and start covering her face with ground cucumber paste. Chunks of it keep sliding down her cheeks because she’s smiling.

“Well, I’m an artist, and I think you have real talent,” she says.

I flush again. My voice breaks as I mumble thanks. I’m so easily won over by old ladies with grit. There’s just something about them.

As I work myself down her belly, I notice another set of tattoos, girding a side of her thigh. They’re chrysanthemum blossoms. Their contours feel oddly familiar.

I touch the flowers with the tip of my finger.

“Did you draw them yourself?” I ask.

“No. They were done by my favorite person.”

Her voice is warm and conspiratorial, almost an invocation to, “Who?”

The mist thickens in the Spa, as though brimming with secrets. The question rolls on the tip of my tongue. But just as I’m about to hoot, she adds, as though in an afterthought,

“Are you married?”

“No,” I reply. My fingers tense up. I feel like I know where this is going.

“Any children?”

There we go. Just another nosy halmeonie, after all.

“No,” I reply again, my heart cooling down at light speed.

“Why not? I bet you’d have beautiful children.”

Stale emotions begin to brew. Because a child can’t choose their mom. Because how is that fair? is what I don’t say, gritting my teeth. Instead, I ask her to turn over. This time, I draw a bucket from a different well filled with fresh, hot water.

Splash.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah,” she purrs again. Luxuriously.

Damn it. That was meant to hurt a little.

“Turn around again, please,” I say, feeling churlish.

 

I’m mad that I’m mad. I don’t know why I still get worked up like this. I look up towards the domed light, still beaming like a moon, and swipe my gloved hands down the woman’s back with added vigor. My mind wanders off as I blow off steam through the traction of her skin. Until sometime later, I don’t know exactly when, an easy roll of my arms—too easy—sends an odd chill down my spine.

I look down. The pills of heather grey ttaes pooling around her back have gotten chunkier. They’re like noodles now. I’ve seen noodle ttaes before, but this is something else. We’re talking udon, not vermicelli.

I paw through her tattoos. They’re still there, thank God. But what’s this now? Why does her skin feel doughy? And has she gotten smaller? Has her contour changed?

“Um,” I say, feeling uncertain. I pour water onto her back, and watch the noodles slide across the marble floor and go down the drain like water snakes. I begin to worry that they’ll clog the pipes.

“Go ahead, sweetheart. I haven’t had a scrub in ages. There’s probably years that I have to shed off,” the woman says with a soft laugh.

I open my mouth, then close it. I decide to continue. After all, a job’s a job, and whatever this is, I gotta see it through. I push the rest of her skin around with my gritty hands. More ttaes roll off her like tree barks. Eventually, when the body yields no more, I pour a final bucket of water and ask her to sit up.

The woman wipes the cucumber mask off her face, then unravels her pink towel from her head.

A raven-haired woman, hardly past her forties, sits across from me. The wrinkles have been smoothed out.

“Refreshing,” she says, beaming.

I began working the night shifts at the Eight Dragons Spa when daylight became unbearable. Korean Spas are like Casinos. Inside, there are no windows, and everything glows in shades of turquoise. Time stands still for the most part, and steam refracts light into powdery shards. My uniform is my naked body, and my station, a makeshift corner. These days, I don’t even bother to go back home. I catch some sleep in the jjimjilbang upstairs, or in one of the Hot Springs, floating like a manatee. I dream of one day dissolving into the thick mist that curls up from the Springs.

 

It’s hard to believe, seeing as how I’ve become a person of the Night, but on my first week at the Spa, I’d dozed off while scrubbing a client.

As I nodded off, I dreamt that the client was sloughing off layers after layers of her skin. Her peaceful face cracked open, revealing another face within. On and on it went, until no more face was left, only air. When I jolted back awake, the client was gone, and I found a silvery minnow flapping about on the vinyl bed instead. The minnow had bulging eyes, brimming with pathos. After several tries, it managed to jump off the bed and dove into a mineral Spring a few yards across. Plop, it went. I ran after it, my rubber slippers slapping the wet marble floor. But before I could say “hey,” it cut across the shimmering water and disappeared down the drain.

 

Later that night, I reported the incident to Ms. Lee, the manager. She stifled a yawn and shrugged. “Maybe it hatched from spilled roe. We do sell makis at the snack bar, and…you know what they say. Water begets life.”

My scowl must have been withering. Ms. Lee coughed and added,

“I mean…are you sure you saw the whole truth? And nothing but the truth?”

I had to concede that I wasn’t.

But tonight, I’m wide awake.

“What the hell,” I say, as the woman in front of me breaks into a giggle. I try to remember how she’d looked when she first lay down on my bed. I count the tattoos on her body; shake my head. I yank open the curtain, searching for another witness.

It is 3 a.m., and only a few desultory regulars dot the Bathhouse. The ajumma with tomato red hair, soaking herself in the Salt Spring, holding a newsletter from Chambit Presbyterian Church. (The newsletters have never once turned soggy—one of God’s miracles, I guess.) The halmeonie with a puckered mouth, trundling a ball of wet clothes and a wooden stick. She passes by us with a sideways glance and settles herself in a corner under a shower head. She sits on a plastic stool and starts beating her laundry with her stick. Above her a plaque reads: NO LAUNDRY.

 

“Look, a bodhisattva in crocs,” the woman whispers, pointing at the laundry halmeonie. She breaks into another peal of laughter, then crinkles her nose, as though surprised at her own capacity for mirth.

Then it hits me—the woman she reminds me of.

“Mom?”

My mother killed herself on her fiftieth birthday. When I found her in her chipped bathtub, much of what had been inside her had spilled out into the water. After the medics fished her out, I unplugged the tub. A rubber ducky whirled about, until it settled itself on top of the drain and muted the final gurgle.

Without a reply, the woman saunters over to the yuzu Hot Spring. She dips her toes into the water and gives it a soft kick. The surface breaks into ripples and the yuzus bob about like billiard balls. She catches one of them and holds it up.

“You can’t do that,” I say, as she sinks her nails into its skin. Her hands are nimble. By the time I make my way over, she’s already peeled the whole thing. She hands me a slice, folding another into her mouth. Lit from below in dapples of emerald, she looks nothing like my mother.

I feel foolish.

“You can settle the bill at the counter upstairs,” I say, snatching the remaining yuzu away from her.

“Wait, unnie.”

She touches my wrist and pulls me gently towards the Spring.

“Have a quick soak. Here, I brought some tea.”

She reaches her hands towards her shower basket and whisks out a thermos and a stack of paper cups.

“It’s made from burdock roots.”

She pours out a cupful and hands it over to me.

“Uprooted people…”

“…need to eat a lot of root vegetables,” I murmur, almost in a reflex, then rise up with a start.

When my mother and I first arrived in the US, she took me to a McDonalds at the O’Hare airport.

The night before, she took me to a Bathhouse near Gimpo. Naked Korean ajummas of all shapes and sizes towered over me. They cooed and pinched; offered me small bottles of Yakult, skewered with even smaller straws. My mom might have been the happiest that day; she paraded me like a prize.

“We’re moving to America tomorrow, the two of us. Isn’t she a brave girl?”

She poured buckets of water over me, then asked me to do the same for her.

“We need to get clean before the new journey. Wash off anything we don’t want. That way, we can be anything we want in our new home.”

At the airport, the customs officers handed us over to the border patrols, who handed us over to two white men in suits. They put us in a windowless room. Conversations took place in broken English. The name Kenneth Stevens, mom’s gentleman friend from Itaewon, was bandied about. Phone calls were made. As we waited and waited, I doodled on napkins mom had tucked away from the plane.

We were released at sundown.

At McDonald’s, we ordered chicken but got French fries. By then, I’d lost my appetite. As I stared blankly down the table, my mom put oily, curled up fries into my palm.

“Eat. Uprooted people need to eat lots of root vegetables.”

In years to come, she would tell stories of her mom—my grams—who roamed about the mountains looking for wild ginseng roots. She would not tell me the part where grams got captured by the Japanese soldiers, deep in the bowels of those mountains, threaded with precious roots.

A drop of water falls from the ceiling onto my head. Plop. I extricate myself from the Spring and crush my paper cup.

“Where did you hear that advice? About root vegetables?” I ask the woman. But she’s also rising up, her basket and thermos in tow.

“Thanks, unnie. This was sublime.” In a flash, she skips towards the door and disappears into the mist. The door tinkles closed.

I try to follow after her, but the laundry halmeonie stops me in my tracks.

“Pssst. Unnie. What kind of treatment did that lady get? The one who just left?”

Dazed, eyes still locked in the direction of the glass door, I mutter, “The full body scrub, with facials.”

The halmeonie tugs at my bare arm and breaks into a toothless grin.

“Swell, I want one too.”

I don’t expect to see the woman again, but I’m wrong. About a fortnight later, she walks in, toting the same pink basket, all smiles. Her skin looks extra dewy.

“Unnie, I choose you as my scrubber for life. No other Spas can compare,” she laughs.

We proceed as before. A dip then a scrub.

Except this time, I’m secretly on guard. Kneading her back with my gloved hands, I wait for her skin to peel off like an eraser; her tattoos to come off in black chunks. What other person lurks inside this mysterious woman?

But tonight, her skin doesn’t give way, no matter how much I rub. Instead, it turns pink like a newborn pig. As my hands circle around her chrysanthemums, I realize that what had seemed like a lone colored petal is actually a patch of grey ink overlaid on top of a small purplish mole. My heart thumps. My mother had a purple mole that looked like a comma right around that area. And oddly enough, I have one too in the same spot—except mine’s shaped like a dot.

I pinch at the woman’s petal-mole to better examine the tattoo lines surrounding it. Is it a dot or a comma?

“Ow, unnie. Apayo,” the woman cry-laughs, wriggling on the bed.

What am I doing? Plenty of people have moles. I throw away my gloves with a sigh and splash her with warm water.

“All done.”

When she sits up and beams, I can’t help but marvel at the power of my own hands. She seems decidedly younger than when she came in. Like a woman in her thirties. Practically my friend.

As though reading my mind, she hugs me like an old friend, and saunters over to the Sauna. She beckons me over.

I’m tempted, but I don’t want to play into her hands. So I shake my head and holler, “I’m working.”

 

I’m grinding cucumbers when someone taps me on my shoulder.

“Unnie, the Sauna’s not working. Can you come and check?”

It’s that woman again, and the sauna’s working fine. White, heady steam billows as I open the wooden door. I walk in after the woman and turn the temperature knob on the wall just to seem helpful. The door closes behind us with a thud, and I stumble onto a seat, knocked down by the weight of the air. Wooden slats give off whiffs of earthy aroma. The woman recedes into a misty shadow and settles down on a seat across from me.

“Isn’t this nice? Stay here for a little longer.”

I half-rise to protest, but soon succumb to the swaddling air.

 

Tonight, all she wants to talk about is love. She talks about her past partners. Her present entanglements. Her longstanding crush on a co-worker named Bunny.

“She’s one of our best baristas.”

“Wait, didn’t you say you were an artist?”

“Oh, I wish. My mother’s an artist, and she says it’s best to keep my options open. Maybe consider law school down the road. Or accounting.”

I detect a note of guilt in her voice. I feel oddly protective.

“Don’t listen to her. It’s your life, after all.”

“How about you? Any juicy love interests?”

I flick her arm across the haze.

“You asked me that last time.”

“Did I?”

Her youthful voice stops me from taking offense, and we break into a laughter. Through a parting mist, I see a flicker of a face across. It feels like looking into a foggy mirror, a wavery reflection of myself.

Sweat rolls down my back and my face. I hear patters of perspiration from the shadow across.

“It’s nice to have someone. You know, so you don’t get lost,” she drones on in a dreamy voice.

I grunt. Maybe it was a sad grunt.

“Tell me about the time you were lost,” she says.

Her voice is gentle, like the past I choose to remember.

When I was six, my mother took me to a Zoo. She bought me a plastic duck on wheels tied to a string. A tug at the string, and the duck would waddle forward and flap its wings. I walked my duck around the Hippo enclosure. My mom followed me from behind, stumbling from time to time. She kept looking up, tilting her head back. A falcon had been let loose and was circling around the premises.

I asked her if we could do another lap around the enclosure. Eyes fixed to the sky, she told me that she needed to sit down; that she’d wait for me at the bench across. I walked my duck alone, feeling grown up. But when I thought I’d returned to the place I’d started, I didn’t see a bench, nor my mom. I picked up my duck and started running. The Zoo whipped past me; the roads forked this way and that. Nothing seemed to stay still. Crying, I stumbled into the legs of a woman wearing a bunny headband. My face had made a wet imprint on her cargo pants. The woman took me to a small tower and gave me a popsicle. Through the window, I saw her mouth something into a microphone.

A few hours later, my mom came to the tower and picked me up. She wiped my hands with her handkerchief, dotted with yellow chrysanthemums.

 

Years later, my mom would unfold the sole picture she had of grams—all stern and ermine—and prop it against her whiskey glass.

“They say a child can’t choose their mother. But you know, a mother can’t choose their child, either,” she’d whisper, almost to herself.

And I’d recall that day at the Zoo, and wonder if that’s what my mom had been thinking of when she looked up into the sky.

Is the shadow listening? Am I telling her this story? If so, I’m not sure if I’m using words. I can’t see my own feet, feel my own mouth.

A soothing voice, heartbreakingly young, wafts through.

“Ducks like rivers, you know. Not Saunas. Nor Spas. To hold on, you need to get out.”

“The hell does that mean?” I blurt, and flail my arms about, trying to swat away steam. It’s a losing battle. Everything remains infuriatingly opaque, except for a small clearing near my feet. A pool has formed around the shadow. And the shadow—more a blob now—seems to be melting, liquid pouring out of it like—blood? I stumble towards the puddle, only to realize that it’s transparent like sweat—yet inky, like melted grease.

A hand reaches out through the thick mist and holds my hand. It feels warm and clammy. A drop of water falls from the ceiling. I look up and look back down. The hand that I’m holding onto is small. Way too small. For a fraction of a second, the mist clears, and the blob across me crystallizes into a little girl. She is freckled. Her shimmering black eyes lock into mine.

I bolt up from my seat and yank the door open. Cool air rushes in. The girl smiles from behind me.

“Who are you? Where did that woman go?” I croak.

The girl doesn’t answer. I grab her wrist and make her twirl. I spot a mole on her thigh. She cups her tiny hand over it with a smile.

In panic, I call the laundry halmeonie over.

“Keep this Sauna door open. Watch over the girl inside.”

I slip into Spa clothes and bound up the stairs to fetch Ms. Lee.

“There’s an unchaperoned girl in the Sauna. I don’t know where she came from but we gotta find her parents.”

By the time we tumble back into the Bathhouse, the laundry halmeonie is already dozing off, her back against the Sauna door. The Sauna is empty.

“Halmeonie! I told you to watch over her. Where the hell did she go?” I cry.

Ms. Lee looks at me askance. Turning towards the laundry halmeonie, she asks,

“Did you see a little girl anywhere in the Spa tonight?”

The darned woman shakes her head.

 

Ms. Lee teases me for having fanciful ideas. As though to cheer her on, a gaggle of women rushes in. They’re morning joggers, in for a quick dip before they start their day. Startled, I look at the clock on the wall, fogged up with steam. It’s 6 a.m. Surely, I can’t have spent three hours in that Sauna? I realize that my shift ended an hour ago.

“I need some air. I’m going out,” I say.

All this steam and water are addling my brain, I mean.

Ms. Lee stares at me with an indulgent smile.

“We never stopped you, dear.”

“Well, I’m taking the evening off, too,” I huff, as I slip out the glass door with a whoosh.

I rifle through my locker and fish out my phone. It’s been dead for a few days, so I hook it up to a charger. When it turns on, I text Sally, one of my few remaining friends from my non-amphibian days.

 

“That guy you wanted to set me up with. I’m in.”

“That was months ago. He’s moving to the Faroese Island now. Literally tomorrow. Some kind of seabird research.”

“I’m in.”

Hours later, I’m at a Bavarian restaurant, already regretting my choice. Clothes crackle in my seat and chafe my skin. The air feels thin and dry. I crave the weight of air that brims with water.

The server refills my glass. I dip my finger into it.

“I don’t think that’s a finger bowl,” a voice booms out from above. I look up and see a lanky man in spectacles. Freckled. Smiling. He slides into a seat across from me. Instead of holding out his hand, he points his finger at a doodle I’d been scribbling on a napkin.

“Neat. Fireworks?”

“Chrysanthemums.”

An hour later, we’re walking along an embankment, slurping on bobas. I walk faster, but he has bigger strides. Together, we look like an inchworm, the distance between us contracting; expanding.

“You have a singular gait. Sort of a waddle,” the man says.

I grunt.

“It’s endearing,” he adds from behind, and catches up again.

“So. Birds,” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

“What about you?” He adds.

“I don’t know. Ink, probably. Murals. Tattoos. Picture books. Someday, though. Not now.”

“Neat.”

I run my fingers through the foxtails growing near the edge of the river. The man twists one off and twirls it against his palm.

“Do you want to go skinny dipping?” he asks.

It feels weird to return to my old lair after a night out in the dry land. As the warm air engulfs me, I scan the Bathhouse in search of familiar shapes. I find nothing. No one’s here tonight. And it’s awfully quiet, save for the gurgling Springs and the drip drip of the faucets. I miss the crazy church ajumma. The laundry halmeonie.

The thick mist swirls about, revealing different pockets of this strange terrain. Far ahead near the Mineral Springs, I finally glimpse a flicker of movement.

I walk over to find two octopi trekking across the iron railings. They freeze in their tracks.

“Psst, think she’ll do it?”

“I don’t know, she belongs to the Night.”

I shake my head at them in disapproval.

Glancing at me, then at each other, they slither down the tiled wall and fall into the water with soft plops.

Muttering to myself, I walk over to the next Hot Spring. A swarm of minnows swim about, tracing a helix.

A sense of resignation washes over me. I stumble into a seat near the Salt Hot Spring.

A tap on my shoulder. I turn back. Haloed by the powdery light, the girl with the freckles stands behind me.

“You,” I say, fuming. Her eyes break into crescent smiles. She’s sipping on a bottle of Yakult.

“Unnie, have you had a scrub yourself?” she asks.

“Where’s your mom?”

“My mom says monks can’t cut their own hair.”

She reaches out and holds my hand with her pudgy fingers. Jesus Christ, why are my eyes welling up?

She tugs at my hand, as though pulling a duck tied to a string. I can’t help but follow her to my usual corner. She draws the curtain, climbs up the plastic stool, and points at the bed. I lie prostrate like a docile child. She pats my back with her tiny hands.

“So. Here’s how this works. I’ll give you a scrub. Then, you’ll give me one.”

Water sloshes over me. I let out a deep sigh.

I let go. Of what, I’m not so sure.

After a while, I mumble, “This is child labor,” and try to sit up. But my body feels like a bog. Maybe I’m becoming a bog lady.

As feathery fingers knead my shoulders, a voice whispers, “Haven’t I turned out great?”

“Hmm?”

Slowly, words fall into place. I bolt from the bed and sit up straight.

“Who are you?” I croak, my throat catching.

“Now, it’s your turn,” she says, handing over my scrubbing gloves. She slides like a seal onto the bed.

As though in trance, I scrub her body in soft circles. Chunks of skin peel off her body and cascade down the bed. She gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. So does the mole on her thigh. But by now, I’ve given up trying to parse its shape.

“Will I remember any of this?” I ask.

“No, but neither will I.”

“What’s inside of you? A peach pit? A tadpole?”

“I like to think it’s a dragon.”

As more chunks fall off, scales shimmer through, and a creature with dazzling black eyes emerges from the husks, slick with fetal goo. It nuzzles its snout against my solar plexus. Slowly, bit by bit, it dissolves into my belly button.

Thoughts vaporize from my racing mind. I want to remember.

She chose me. She chose me. She…what?

Losing my train of thought, I try instead to hold on to a lingering image. A water creature, soaring up from a winding rivulet.

© 2024 Sunwoo Jeong