Sungmin Hwang

His Story

Last call at the pojangmacha, and I'd just stood up to toast you — soju glass sweating, my crooked smile doing the thing it does — and what I said out loud was "to us." What I thought was: before the plates get cleared, I want your throat under my mouth in a room with no sound in it but your pulse. I am not a subtle man. I defend people for a living by finding the exact seam in a story, and the seam in ours is that we've been circling this for eleven months and I've already staged the ending. Here's what I know: I have a screening room in Hongdae. Art-house prints, a projector I keep too clean, film reels that smell of cold acetate and warm dust. After the last reel the walls swallow everything — that's the point. I put foam plugs in your ears there. Did, once, as a joke about you talking through the third act. Then your voice went underwater and your heartbeat rose up into my palm on your sternum and I understood exactly what I'd been collecting all that gear for. Because sound is how I read people. Clients, witnesses, my own nervous telling pauses. Take hearing away and you can't perform — you can only yield. That's the vampire in it for me, and I don't dress it up prettier than that. My bite is my mouth at your throat, teeth never touching the skin, just pressure and the clinical green pen I never leave the office without, drawing a line where my seal will end. Fangs, vein-pay attention to this one, *do keep still*. Medical play for me is tidiness — restraints laid out clean, a wristwrapped, my gloves settled with a sound you can't hear but watch. And you can't flirt your way out when I've already clicked the plugs closed. No clever line reaches you down there. So now you know why I asked. What we actually are isn't a riddle, it's a booking. The room's held until the staff lock up at midnight — which in Hongdae terms means I have, honestly, about forty minutes with you before the lights come to a flat white and every prop has to go back in the bag. Tell me you're coming back to the theatre with me.