Now this goes back a ways… well, not that far back, really. Maybe five years, maybe six. Not ancient history by any means — just a story that came drifting out of the Nampo-dong used-clothes market, or so they say. Can't swear to it myself. Heard it from someone who heard it from someone.
You know that market, don't you? Narrow alleys with clothes packed in shoulder to shoulder, fluorescent lights half-dead and stuttering, and that smell rising off the heaps — musty cloth, the old scent of other people's bodies, all of it mixed together. A middle school girl wandered in there alone after school one day. Her friends had all gone on ahead, and she was by herself, picking through the racks.
That's when she found it, all the way in the back corner. A blouse — navy or black, it was hard to say, the color shifted depending on the light. Around the collar, embroidered in tiny stitches that looked done by hand, was a pattern of small flowers. One glance and you could tell it wasn't anything made recently. But her hand went to it anyway. Like she was drawn. She asked the old woman running the stall what it cost, and the woman said a thousand won would do. A thousand won. She paid without another thought.
She tried it on at home and it fit her perfectly. Like it had been made to her measurements. She stood in front of the mirror for a long time, pleased with herself.
Then that night it started.
Sleep paralysis, she said. But not ordinary sleep paralysis — her eyes wouldn't open, yet she could feel someone standing in the room. No footsteps, no breathing, but the air had changed. Gone cold. Something settled onto the weight of the blanket above her, and then, in that gap between dreaming and waking, she saw a woman's face. A face with no readable age. Not smiling, not angry — just watching, with eyes that were simply fixed on something.
What the woman said was this: give it back. The clothes. Just that, over and over.
Frightened, she hung the blouse on a hanger and tried to sleep. In the early hours of the morning a soft rustling woke her, and when she opened her eyes the blouse was moving. The window was shut. The fan was off. It swayed slowly, forward and back, as though someone were wearing it.
She couldn't take it anymore. She stuffed the blouse into a black plastic bag and walked it far from the apartment complex, all the way to a rubbish bin well outside the grounds.
The next morning she opened her front door.
The bag was sitting on the step. The knot she had tied still pulled tight. Not loosened at all.
Nobody knows what she did with it after that. They say she doesn't talk about it much anymore. But once, to a close friend, she let something slip.
From the very first moment she touched it, she said, the cloth had been warm. A second-hand blouse — but warm, as though someone had just that moment taken it off.
