Choi Junhong- "The Mirror"

Junhong would never forget that day. That day he went against human nature and re-crafted his own face. Sure, lots of school kids in Korea did it— it was normal to come to class after holidays to see your friends with new faces. Stronger jaws, perkier lips, smaller noses— perfection. Fake, plastic, perfection. He was so excited. He even managed to get a job after school just to earn the funds to pay for it. He was sick and tired of being bullied, being the 'ugly one'. It just wasn't fair! Why should he be uglier than everyone else? Why can't he be handsome like all of his classmates? It was his turn to be the swan.

He had even bought this brand new mirror from a second hand shop that was closing down near his house. It was a standing mirror that rose from the ground at an impressive 6 and a half feet. Dark wooden pails were framing the outside of the actual mirror piece, with a strange carving on the top face of the wood. It was an old, shriveled woman that sold it to him with a crooked smile. "It'll see what you yourself don't." She had said, and it intrigued the young boy more than it should have.

September 11th— 10.30 am— back straight, confidence booming, he was ready to go under the knife.

September 15— 10:30 am—chin held high, shoulders raised with the excitement of finding out his new face, now resting stiff on the tips of his consciousness.

But when he finally returned home and stood in front of his new mirror, he slowly unwrapped the bandages, and ..... Cried. He cried so hard that it made his woulds sting from the salty liquid streaming down his face. He didn't want to see his face, or anything beautiful ever again. Beauty itself was mocking him. Junhong wasn't blind, but since that day he wished he were.

When he returned back to school on Monday, the bullying was far worse than he had expected. Loser, Weirdo, Psycho, Ugly, Ugly, Ugly, Ugly.

Junhong.

Ugly, Junhong.

"Why do you look so ugly, Junhong?" The word hit him hard like the touch of a hot metal iron. He hated that word; he loathed it with a fiery passion similar to the thousand star-shaped fireworks illuminating the dark sky on New Year's Morning.

New Year's Morning. That's the first time he tried it.

His reflection haunted him. He sees himself in the mirror but he doesn't see him. He sees a jaw that needs to be wider, lips that need to be more pursed, a stomach that needs to be flatter. The longer he stares at the mirror, the more faults find his eyes. His head is racing at a thousand miles per hour and all the things he's never thought of, think. The wonders he's never wondered, wonder. His imagination imagines. But is it his imagination? Or is it reality? He can't tell the difference, all he knows is that he has to change it quick. He has to change it before someone sees such an ugly person like himself.

He'll make himself look prettier before he goes outside again.

Luckily there's no one in the bathroom when he tries. He's already got a finger shoved down his throat and his lunch spilt down his shirt before he's even thought of shutting the door. His head is still spinning, he's got an astringent taste on his (too) thin lips, but he feels.. Empty. But he likes it. If he can't make his body look more beautiful, then he'll reshape it. Meal by meal. Pill by pill. Cut by cut. Now that he's started he can't stop. He won't stop. Not until he's the prettiest of them all.

It's Thursday now. Two weeks after the incident and he still hasn't left his room. He refused to eat— the only thing allowing to pass his lips is the spearmint gum he has stashed in his backpack. Spearmint because it's got 01.7 less calories than the peppermint flavored. Sometimes his mother forces him to eat, which is fine because then he has an excuse to purge it back up the next time he goes to the bathroom. Small yellow stains bleached his once white teeth, and every time he exhales it's like a mist of toxins and cancerous fumes are seeping out of the hole he calls his mouth. But he doesn't not like it. Oh, no. He's proud of himself, actually. It's getting easier for him to empty his stomach each and every time.

But whenever he looks in the mirror, things are different.

He's grotesque, fat and ugly. His refection is the size of three people. It weighs him down, he suddenly feels heavier, the knife looks much prettier when the light is reflecting off it, doesn't it? He wants to take it in his fat, stubby hands and draw pretty patterns along his arms and legs. Or maybe he could draw a nice picture to match the one he drew last night. Or maybe he could just end things now. Outside. He could find a friendly truck to walk into. He'd be dead before he could even think, because by then his head would have been separated from his ugly body and the things that holds him best would be gravity. Just gravity. He'd come home to the ground and be ugly no more, because in the afterlife you don't need to be beautiful. You don't need to be liked.

Taeyeon.

She's the unlucky one that finds him with his lunch spilt along the front of his shirt. "Oh dear god, what in the world is that smell—.. Oh."

Junhong's on the bathroom floor sitting in a puddle of yellow chunks and salty tears. He doesn't know why he's crying. He really doesn't. He doesn't feel sad, he feels, oddly... Angry. How dare she walk in on him at a time like this?

"Why are you here?" His words come out in a harsh mumble. The pang of annoyance is evident in his voice, and the girl reels back in surprise. "I—I'm just with y-your sister. I went to go to the bathroom.. A—And saw.. You."

Junhong doesn't know why he's getting so mad. His fists are clenched so tight that he can feel his knuckles going white. He can feel the tingle of wrath filtering past his dirty arms.

"I—I, you know.. You don't need to do that. Y—Your sister told me that you're..." She pauses for a moment, debating on whether or not she should let the word filter past her (perfect) lips, but much to her misfortune, she chooses to do exactly so. ".. Bulimic. You don't need to be, I mean.. I think you're really beautiful the way you are.. A—And.. You're getting too thin, ssaeng. Your arms are like twigs."

This is what sets Junhong off. How dare she call him beautiful? How dare she call his fat logs, twigs? Twigs. Could she have such a cold heart to feed him such lies? It's because she's pretty, he concludes. No, that's an understatement, it's because she's..

Beautiful.

Beautiful always people have a tendency to feed the less fortunate with such false lies. They don't know what it feels like. What it feels like to be ugly, to be the second choice. He needs to make her feel that. He needs to make her feel his pain. He's not beautiful— he never was. He can see her secretly staring at the plastic surgery scars, he can see her staring at how fat he is. 'Twigs' She had said. 'Twigs' are not what he sees in the mirror. He sees logs, big, fat, thick, ugly, logs.

He stands, his now over-sized shirt flowing back over his stomach. It's hollow, like he doesn't have a stomach at all. He does though, he knows it. He can see it all the time in the mirror. His bones are weak, so it takes him a good few seconds more to shut (and lock) the bathroom door than it does for a normal person.

"W—What are you doing?" She stutters. He can hear a shiver of fear mix in with her pastel voice, and it makes him smile— the first smile he's smiled in weeks. "Making you feel how I feel."

She's confused, scared, and doesn't have a clue what's going on— so that's probably why she stumbles back, shivering with that pale (beautiful) face. "J-Junhong-ah.. W-What..?"

The boy reaches out to the edge of the bathtub, where he keeps his razor neatly tucked in-between the broken floorboards underneath. His arms are the color of bruises— striped like a zebra's skin. But instead of black and white, it's red, purple and blue. They glow off onto his face, constantly reminding him that no matter how much he tries, he still can't make himself look beautiful. Sure, the patterns look nice with they're a deep, trickling red, but once it heals it's all bruised and.. Ugly.

Like he's going to make her.

He grabs a towel off the rack and opens the medicine cupboard. He can see his reflection mocking him from the mirror in front of him, but he tries his best not to look. Instead focusing on the cabinets situated beside it. After a few seconds of rummaging, he manages to find half a dozen half-empty bottles of various poisons. From cleaning liquids, to anesthetics, to some of the drugs his father used to use before he left them, he had a fine collection indeed. But he didn't have the slightest clue as what to use— which would be more effective? His goal right now was to knock her out, so that when she'd wake up she'd see what he first saw when he first looked into that mirror. He wanted her to regret lying.

"Stupid, pretty, ." The hiss of his tongue was more unholy than it should have been. "I'll make you pay."

He spots the sink's plug pushed to the side of the sink, so he grabs it with his (fat) bony fingers, and shoves it onto the drain. Soon enough, he opens all of the chemicals he's got at his whim, and pours it down into the drain, the plug stopping any of the deadly chemicals from draining down into the sewerage. Blues, blacks, monochromes— it mixes together to form a sickly green. It's the kind of green that makes you cringe— like curdles of rotten milk, or the small dash of mold an expired tangerine has. It's disgusting, but it reassures the boy all the more.

He extends his arm to grab the small handtowel that's hanging on the side of the bathtub, and after slipping his hands into a pair of thick cleaning gloves, he then proceeds to dip the towel into the puddle of chemicals, being extra sure to coat every possible inch of it with the liquid death. The more, the better, he thinks.

He wrings the excess chemicals out of the towel—(just so it wouldn't spill, he was quite the clean man, you see) before he decides to use it, and after a few seconds of inspecting, he turns to Taeyeon with his lips curled up into a cynical smile. Sinister and evil, as only the youngest Choi son could be.

Taking his leisurely time, he walks over to Taeyeon— she's curled up in a ball in the corner of room. As if he can't see her. "J-Junhong.. Please.. D-Don't." Unlike most girls, Kim Taeyeon looks pretty when he cries. Or, more so, cute, in Junhong's opinion. But right now it's that quality that's making the boy all the more angrier.

When he crouches down in front of her with his free hand tightly gripping her shoulder, she's trying to fight him back with a set of eyes filled with tears. Her arms are flailing around harshly, (and it knocked Junhong in the face two or three times), which is probably why it took him so long to restrain her. That, and also the fact that he's been feeling really weak lately. But, nevertheless, he manages to hold her down securely and shove the chemical-soaked cloth over . Her arms and legs are still flailing around uncontrollably— like some crazy animal— but slowly, oh so slowly, the movement begins to cease.

Slowly..

Slowly..

Oh, so slowly..

Her arms and legs fall limply to the ground.

Junhong smirks in satisfaction as he lowers the girl's head gently onto the cold, bathroom floorboards. "Shh," he coos softly, his thumb caressing her golden tendrils. "It'll be all over soon, noona. Just gimme a sec, okay?"

He leaves her body to avert his attention to the bathroom cupboard. "Where are they.. Where, where, where.." he hums in a soft melody as his eyes scan the contents of the small drawer. There's a mess of bottles, toothbrushes, soaps, razors,

.. Razors.

He takes that, placing it on the bench beside the bottle of bleach he had pulled out a few moments prior.

"Is that enough?" He thinks to himself, unsure if the items would play their part well. He's never done something like this before, he's only seen it on tv. But then, he remember the situation he was in. His parents would return home soon, and his sister was sure to notice that her best friend had gone sooner or later, so he had to do this now.

He walked over to Taeyeon's slim body and began to clean her face with a clean, wet towelette. Once that was done, he picked up the small razor he had nested in-between his thin (fat) fingers and positioned it at the top of the young girl's forehead, just at the start of her hair line. It didn't take him a second to even consider what he was doing, before he proceeded to cut a thick line around the side of her face. He went past her ears, down underneath her chin, and back up the side of her face to perfectly meet up with the first cut he had made. After this he made a few more cuts— he cut the flap of skin where her cheeks are, he cut around the eyes as wel as the nose. And finally, being careful not to make any necessary 'rips', the blonde headed boy tucked his fingers under the sides of the cuts, and slowly, and oh so carefully, he tore the woman's face off of her own body. Blood was seeping out of the cuts like crazy. He hands were a messy hue of red, but he didn't care— he was going to get his job done and make her look just as ugly as he was.

He was going to remove her beauty, and replace it with something ugly.

Something amazingly ugly.

— his own face.

It hurt when he sliced the blade along the sides of his face. Oh, it hurt so ing much. He was standing in front of the bathroom mirror at the time, which reassured him all the more. The mirror never lies after all, right?

.. Right?

With every cut he made, if was as if he could see his looks drastically improve. When he cut off his cheeks, he saw an attractive young boy with perky lips and a wide jaw. When he cut the flap of skin that connected his jaw to the skin on his face, he saw a body with wide, sparkling eyes and golden blonde hair. At this moment he felt his head start to spin, he was feeling dizzy, sick and lightheaded all at the same time, but it didn't stop him, he willpower was far too strong for silly urges like that. He was going to do this. He wasn't going to back down.

He picked up the cut of Taeyeon's cheek and positioned it over the part where his own cheek was meant to be. He looked up at the mirror, and luckily, it fit perfectly.

(Or did it?)

He had prepared his mother's sewing kit on the bench a while ago, along with some of the material that looked familiar to what they used for stitches. Carefully, he began to sow the girl's cheek onto his face. Slowly. Carefully. Precisely.

Up next was the other cheek.

Slowly. Carefully. Precisely.

It hurt like hell. But he didn't care. He was finally going to achieve his dream.

He was going to be beautiful.

 It took him a good twenty minutes to sow the remaining pieces of skin onto his face, it was a twenty minutes that was filled with pain, blood and tears. But hey, beauty is pain, right?

He tried to sow the parts of his (former) face onto Taeyeon's, but he didn't think it turned out well. She had no pulse.

— "You ing died on me, ." He cursed, kicking the dead blonde girl's corpse with all his might. It didn't do anything to change the situation he was in, but it allowed him to unleash his wave of frustration.

At least he looked good.

It took him a good few weeks to recover from the 'face transplant', which he spent nested away in the bathroom of his. He found out during an experimental 'feed', that if you eat the flesh of beautiful people, it doesn't make you ugly and fat. Even if the flesh was rotting! He didn't mind that fact that it wasn't cooked— (he was always a fan of sushi, anyways.)— besides, he needed a way of ridding her body. And she tasted nice.

Every time he looked into the mirror, he saw a new person.

He wanted to go to school, to show everyone how great he looked.

But when he walked through the gates, everybody's jaw's dropped.

All eyes were on him.

Girls were screaming, boys were trembling— the teachers even looked at him with (fascination) terror. Sheer, blatant, terror.

Why?

Because he was beautiful.

They were jealous.

All of them.

(How dare they?)

Yes. How dare they.

(You should make them pay.)

I will.

Evil, ungodly, sin, sinner, satan, demon, pretty, cute, attractive, beautiful.

— beautiful Junhong.

"You're beautiful." His reflection says to him, and he smiles. Lips curled up, the color of bruises. "I know."