The Head

About

A woman is about to flush the toilet when a head pops out and says “Mother.” It was made, it explains, from the things she flushed — hair, waste, the discarded matter of her body. When she tells her family, they dismiss her: ignore it, it’s nothing. Bora Chung’s story operates on fairy-tale logic fused with body horror, and beneath its grotesque surface is something precise and furious: this is a story about what happens when women speak and no one listens. The head is abject, impossible, undeniable — and still everyone in the room manages to look away. Chung won the Yonsei Literature Prize for this early work, and it announces everything her later fiction would become: the uncanny as a vehicle for the truths that polite realism refuses to touch.