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A Portrait of Magnolias
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18240 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1990 |
6,606 Words |
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O Chong-hui
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See the preceding essay for commentary on this story as well as others by O Chong-hui.
Outside looked hazy, and I wondered if the wind had kicked up some dust. Wiping the condensation from the window with my sleeve and peering through the pane I found that snowflakes were falling in fits and starts like swirls of dust.
I wanted to use the light of the fleeting winter afternoon, so I continued working on my still life though I had to keep warming my hands in my armpits.
“Why don't you try another magnolia? Or a mandala?”
I flinched at the echo of the voice in the empty studio and suddenly felt a draft on my back. I turned, and there was Han-su, red-faced from drinking, leaning against the doorframe. He must have remembered the rash effort I'd put into painting magnolias before.
Painting magnolias! It was a fantastic thought.
Magnolias, purple magnolias, white magnolias - trees that in former times weren't planted in the family courtyard, but reserved instead to invoke the spirits of the dead. A spirit had blossomed from my mother's bones one night. Firm like an artificial flower, it had burst into bloom and bobbed in the air, white like an incandescent bulb, the soul of an undefiled maiden.
A cluster of mouths, it bloomed eerily till daybreak, a suction cup drawing in the secretions of the night.
“At this time of year it's impossible to find a flower to work from,” I answered Han-su. A poor excuse, but it was the best I could to. The real reason was that I couldn't picture a magnolia in my mind.
The white magnolias bloomed every night from Mother's accursed bones - bones that wouldn't turn white even after the grass shrouding them had turned to dust and floated away. Every night the blossoms that spewed from her bones would flutter up, filling the firmament, but still the bones remained dark.
I had tried to paint those magnolias, scattering dots of white color over a blue background. “A mandala!” Han-su had once exclaimed while looking over my
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