A Scene Straight Out of Those Cute Animal Video Shorts
It was a scene straight out of one of those cute animal video shorts. Denying that the person on the screen was me, I silently handed the phone back. They say AI is all the rage these days, so it had to be a deepfake. There was no way that female was me.
“See? It’s driving me crazy.”
Mom, who had taken the phone back, tossed out a few words. To think the thing driving her crazy was my wagging tail.
“...I guess it just happens.”
Even though I was desperately denying it inside, my head had already accepted the miserable reality. Never mind AI videos—Mom was the type who struggled to even register her own card on a shopping app. There was no way she could have filmed me in that brief moment and stitched together a fake video.
Even after realizing the uncomfortable truth, dinner continued. Once I became conscious of it, the movement of my tail kept bothering me. Like how you notice your own blinking or breathing once it’s pointed out, now that it had been mentioned, my attention kept drifting there.
The instant I thought this is delicious, my tail would wag. This time I felt it myself. Ah, what do you even call this feeling?
“Again, again, again.”
“...I’m telling you, I can’t control it.”
As expected, Mom immediately started scolding me. I grumbled back at her continued nagging.
How can I stop this thing?
I turned my head for no reason to stare at the tail behind me. It really was something that kept weighing on my mind. In comics with beast people, they used something like a leg belt, right? They fixed it nicely on the thigh. I tried to gauge the tail’s length and mentally sketched out a plan to suppress its perky energy.
Probably won’t work.
But soon a clear realization hit me. The length was too awkward to fix on my thigh. If it was going to be long it should be really long, and if short then really short. It was stuck in this annoying in-between state where I couldn’t even tie it down.
“What are you doing instead of eating?”
“No, I was just wondering if I could tie it to my thigh...”
Mom asked when she saw me stop using my chopsticks. I answered and turned my body forward again as if in resignation. I couldn’t just let this go; I needed to think about it seriously. It would be a disaster if it got caught in subway doors or something.
A little later, after the meal that had given me all sorts of thoughts finally ended, Mom and I started wandering around the basement floor of a large mart.
“Is there something else to buy?”
“Are you the only one with a mouth? Hyunseo needs to eat too.”
To my casual question, Mom mentioned Hyunseo and lightly scolded me for thinking only of myself. I was just asking, but she always had to phrase it like that. More importantly, was that kid even home?
“Isn’t she out eating with her friends?”
I offered one possibility just in case. Mom stayed quiet for a moment, then stopped walking and said.
“...That could be. Call and ask her.”
Suddenly Mom was telling me to ask Hyunseo. A message would have been enough, but she wanted a phone call. It sounded like an order to anyone listening, but since I really didn’t want to call her, I asked again.
“Me?”
“Who else?”
Mom shot back three curt syllables as if to say obviously you. In the end I picked up the smartphone, but since I hated calling, I stubbornly sent only a text. The message was just four letters: “Did you go out?” Anything more wasn’t necessary anyway.
“I sent a message.”
“I told you to call. What’s with the message again...”
“She’ll reply if she’s home.”
As expected, Mom didn’t like it. She frowned and complained about me sending a text instead. I talked back to her grumbling while predicting Hyunseo’s easily guessable behavior.
The place we walked to together was the mart’s ready-to-eat corner. There was cold chicken gangjeong and fried shrimp, plus rows of sushi that always looked like they’d been stamped out in a factory. The moment we reached the sushi display—
I saw two short replies in the chat. From the looks of it she didn’t even know why I was asking. After checking the messages I didn’t reply. I just lifted my head, looked at Mom, and said.
“She says she’s home.”
“Yeah, got it.”
At the news that she was home, Mom quickly approached the display. Hesitation showed in her hand as she chose the sushi. This one? Or that one? Her fingers hovered back and forth. Then Mom straightened up and asked.
“What did Hyunseo like again? Eel?”
“That’s me. Hyunseo likes salmon.”
“Right, right, it was salmon.”
She seemed to have forgotten for a second. Mom bent down again after hearing my answer, then soon stood up with a box packed only with salmon sushi.
“This should be enough, right?”
“She can’t eat that much anyway.”
I answered Mom, who had asked just in case. Hyunseo was the type people said it was a waste to take to a buffet. The box only held about ten pieces, but from her standards that would probably be plenty.
We headed to the checkout with just that one box of sushi. We left the store with both hands full of paper bags. Whenever we stopped at the mart, we always took a taxi home. We smoothly climbed into the first taxi waiting at the stand.
“Welcome.”
The low-toned greeting came as soon as we got in. After Mom, I got into the back seat too, and I saw the driver’s smile in the mirror stiffen slightly. It must have been confusing for him.
“Please go to Onhwa Apartments.”
“Ah, yes.”
Regardless, Mom stated our destination without concern, and the driver tapped the navigation. His movements were a beat slow, so he clearly found me strange. The taxi soon set off after locking in the route.
“The young lady in the back must be really into that stuff too, huh?”
“Pardon?”
Around the time we stopped at a red light, the driver—who had been glancing at us in the mirror—spoke up. He suddenly said it looked like I was really into something. When I tilted my head and asked shortly, the driver gave a good-natured laugh and continued.
“Our daughter does a lot of that cosplay thing too. Last time she spent five hundred thousand won on clothes and I nearly fell over from shock.”
“Ah...”
I let out a hollow sigh of understanding at the driver’s sudden family talk. It seemed he was using the fact that his daughter did cosplay as a conversation topic with passengers to build rapport. I was naturally being treated as a cosplay girl. But I wasn’t cosplaying.
Explaining felt too bothersome, so I just let out an awkward laugh. Mom spoke up from beside me instead.
“This kid isn’t doing that. It’s a disease.”
“Aw, even so, it’s not a disease... It’s a hobby. I hear those kinds of tastes cost a lot of money originally.”
The driver acted like it was no big deal and tried to cover for my current appearance by calling it a hobby. The misunderstanding only grew deeper as the conversation continued. He probably thought “disease” meant mental illness. Unfortunately it wasn’t a problem on that level.
Since it seemed the misunderstanding would only deepen even if Mom explained, I—who had been keeping quiet—opened my mouth.
“It’s not that. I really caught a disease and ended up like this.”
“Pardon?”
When I stepped forward to explain myself, the driver finally seemed to realize something was wrong. His eyebrows shot up and his eyes filled with panic. After I explained about the Beast Disease, he—who of course hadn’t known it was a real illness—apologized repeatedly.
“Aigoo, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s understandable to misunderstand...”
I waved my hand in a “it can’t be helped” gesture at the driver’s attitude, which looked like he had committed a grave sin. Ninety-nine percent of people who saw me would make the same mistake anyway. First of all, the Beast Disease wasn’t that widely known. It was news that had spread like wildfire among people who watched comics or anime or among certain beast-person maniacs who called it a gift from the gods. Only a few dozen news articles had appeared domestically, and even those weren’t very popular.
In other words, it was a disease that only showed up majorly for people whose algorithms were tuned that way. Which meant most people who saw me thought “cosplay” and never once considered “disease.”
It was a fresh reminder of how the world saw me, courtesy of the driver. Perhaps because of the earlier conversation, he didn’t proactively start any more talks after that.
“It’s 6,700 won. Thank you.”
“Have a good evening.”
After paying and with Mom getting out and closing the door, the taxi roared off down the road. From getting out of the taxi and walking on foot into the apartment complex, I felt gazes on me the entire few minutes. I hoped it was just paranoia, but whenever I turned toward where I felt a stare, someone would always whip their head away with an “oops.”
There wasn’t any event nearby, yet here I was—an orange-haired, animal-eared, tailed cosplay-dyed girl. Even I had to admit I was a gaze magnet. With my head bowed in embarrassment, I walked quickly into our building where fewer eyes would reach.
I got on the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. When I arrived, I entered the familiar four-digit code and opened the door.
Huh?
A familiar, stimulating scent wafted from beyond the open door. I paused for a second, then opened the inner door and stepped inside to identify the smell that grew stronger with every step. This scent was definitely...
The aroma of that food that only gets more delicious as the night deepens. I hurried toward the dining table where Hyunseo would be and said.
“Hey, I bought sushi...”
“Ah, shit.”
The kid spat out a curse before I could even see her. What came into view at the dining table a moment later was Hyunseo, who had boiled herself ramen and was devouring it alone so I wouldn’t take any.