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Where do precious pets, born of heart and raised with wallet, go when they pass away?
A place without collars or cruelty, where nothing they eat makes them sick, a world where rivers flow with pet milk, and treats grow in abundance—maybe it’s a beautiful paradise.
Until I came here, I thought the same.
Scrub, scrub, scrub.
As I scrubbed the dirt off a potato, it felt like washing the gloom clouding my heart, so I pressed harder with my hands.
“Oh, that one seems a little off today.”
“Seems so. He’s really tense.”
“Has he gone a bit mad from being cooped up here for a couple of months?”
The kitchen staff stole glances and muttered, scattering quickly the moment they caught my eye.
Yes, it’s already been two months.
I’ve been in this spot, on the far end of this supposedly high-end restaurant’s kitchen, for two months now.
I started peeling the now-clean potato skin.
The kitchen, once buzzing with whispers, was now focused on preparing lunch, with the sounds of chopping and the clattering of cast-iron pans filling the air.
Amidst it all, I scrubbed potatoes and onions alone, lost in thought.
It felt like eons had passed, yet it had only been two months.
Half of it had slipped by already.
I first came here during the winter of my twenty-eighth year.
That day, there was a work party I couldn’t skip.
I returned home, singing “Around Thirty” at the top of my lungs.
My family—nine-year-old cat and everything to me—was taking his last breaths in our tiny 6.5-square-meter studio.
“Kamangi! Kamangi!”
My dear little one.
Still so small and baby-like, yet the world called you an elderly cat, and your illness grew without mercy.
I, Baek Rodam, whose birth dream had been of snow-covered mountains, and you, Kamangi, the cat rescued from a trail in Hallasan National Park.
We met by chance and became family, but it felt like we shared a fate as if it were preordained.
And yet, even though I begged you to stay just a bit longer, nature’s way separated us so easily.
I dressed Kamangi’s stiff body with my own hands, then drove him to my parents’ house in Gyeonggi Province.
I buried him in a sunny spot in a corner of their small yard, then returned to Seoul, where the snow-laden branches glistened under the sun, melting into glittering sparkles.
Our final journey was so beautiful. I cried all the way, clutching the steering wheel.
Then, after falling asleep without even clearing Kamangi’s belongings, I woke up to the loud ticking of a clock that didn’t exist.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting alone in a lobby of some institution called the “Management Center,” waiting my turn.
“Baek Rodam, Mr. Baek Rodam!”
The clerk’s irritated call snapped me out of my daze, and I responded, “Yes, yes,” like an idiot, hurrying over to a small room separated by a glass partition.
“We’re busy, so let’s get this over with quickly.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry.”
The clerk barely glanced at me, pressing his mask into place, flipping through papers hurriedly as if he were in a race.
Seeing the faint rabbit ears above his head, I wondered idly if this was some sort of bizarre dream.
“Answer yes or no. Your previous owner was ‘Baek Kamangi,’ correct?”
“What? No, Kamangi was my cat.”
At such a strange question, I instinctively nodded but quickly corrected myself.
The rabbit-eared clerk clicked his tongue impatiently.
“No, you’re the cat, Rodam. Now hurry up; we have people waiting.”
When he repeated the question—’Was Baek Kamangi your previous owner?’—I shrugged and muttered “yes, yes” to move things along, as if thinking, “It’s just a dream, what does it matter?”
Then a few more strange questions followed.
What was your previous address?
What was your previous owner’s occupation?
They were like job interview questions.
Kamangi was a cat, and I was his previous owner.
But, for some reason, these people had it the other way around, and I figured, “Since it’s just a dream, I’ll go along with it,” reciting all the information about human Baek Rodam.
“Now, one last question. Was Baek Kamangi a good owner?”
Pause.
I hesitated, unable to answer easily, and the rabbit-eared clerk raised his glasses.
“No need to ask more. If he’d received plenty of love from his owner, he wouldn’t be here as an ‘incomplete being.’”
Tsk. He clicked his tongue in disapproval.
After scrawling something on a form, the clerk handed over the paper and a “Beast Registration Card.”
“From now on, your memories of your previous life will start to fade. It’s natural, so don’t be alarmed.”
“Previous life? Then, will my memories of Kamangi disappear?”
Startled, I asked, and the rabbit tilted his head, adjusting his glasses.
“I’m sure it wasn’t a great memory anyway. Forgetting is probably better for you, too.”
I could hear his muttering, frustrated and sarcastic, about me acting like I had any claim to ownership here.
The document I was handed, with instructions to follow up at the Welfare Office, was marked clearly with “Stray Cat, Incomplete Species.”
Wait, my Kamangi may have been born on the streets, but he was definitely a house cat.
I hadn’t even had a chance to ask them to correct it before the officer impatiently tapped on the desk, saying, “Next!”
I turned to leave in a daze, only then noticing the stares from the crowd around me.
Some people avoided my gaze, others looked on with pity.
And a few… they stared at me with such sharp disdain, as though stabbing me with needles.
It was a blatant look of contempt.
I stood there, feeling frozen, until I finally left the building and realized just how terribly wrong everything had gone.
As Kamangi used to curl up on my lap, warm and trusting, I’d often imagine what his next life might be like.
I’d pictured him reborn in a wide-open field, under a bright blue sky beyond the rainbow, a place where he could run to his heart’s content without anyone scolding him.
I’d prayed for him to live a happy life, not to wait for me.
But beyond Kamangi’s death, there was only a gray city lying in wait.
The unfairness of it made me want to scream.
Even in death, they say Koreans can’t find peace—so is that also the fate of our pets?
In this desolate place that looked like a copy-pasted suburb of Seoul, I pounded my chest in frustration.
Still, no food appeared.
Though there was a small government subsidy for “incomplete species” like me, there were limits.
This wasn’t paradise, nor was it a dream.
I was alive, as a beastman—albeit an “incomplete” one with distinct cat ears and a tail covered in fur.
In the end, I was forced onto the streets, searching for work, learning through experience what it meant to be an “incomplete species.”
Most beastmen looked almost identical to humans, so they were uncomfortable with people like me, those of us with visible animal traits like ears and tails, or wings and scales.
The reasons varied—because our bodies weren’t complete, or our minds weren’t stable, or they thought we had dirty blood.
And as if that wasn’t enough, I was a black cat—a sign of misfortune, some claimed.
But I loved this sleek black fur, as fine as a sable coat.
I even loved my tattered ears, which reminded me of monstera leaves, and my short, blunt tail.
Yet here, all of that was just considered a symbol of bad luck.
At first, I argued, asking what the problem was, but it only ended in further conflict.
Even meeting anyone’s eyes would bring bad luck, they claimed, and no one stood by me.
After enough unfair insults and humiliating encounters, I, too, began hiding my ears and tail, sticking to the shadows.
So I gradually adapted to this cold, unkind city.
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