Mantis

A world where fullness means beauty and power, thinness lack. Nareba, thin from birth, grows up mocked. Oren loves her as she is, but marriage cannot hold off the standard everyone lives by. At a party thrown by Belka, the beauty who sets that standard, Nareba is humiliated again and Oren cannot protect her. To make her happy he buys a home machine that moves his fat into her. As the transplants repeat, mockery turns to praise, and approval becomes more necessary to her than love. Oren thins and weakens, calling her recognition his happiness, and his sacrifice feeds her hunger. Grown large enough to rival Belka, she wins her approval, then hears the room laugh at what is left of Oren. He refuses another transplant, so she gets him drunk and lays him on the machine. While it runs she dreams of pulling Belka down and standing above the world. The dream ends. Oren is dead, drained of fat and life. She swallows the last drop of him. The most beautiful creature alive, she is now too vast to stand. As she crawls, the shadow of a giant female mantis that has eaten her mate spreads over the ceiling. Beyond satire of the worship of looks, Mantis traces how sacrifice offered as love rots a relationship, and finds the cruelest predator in the desire that takes the standard for love. The world's values are reversed and its language with them: dialogue built from Korean phonemes turned backwards, spelled in English, spoken with Spanish pronunciation, a tongue of no country.