The Eyes Are the Best Part

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, sexual harassment, mental illness, graphic violence, death, substance use, and emotional abuse.

Ji-won returns to her car. She spots a pair of Nike sneakers in the grass and, stepping closer, sees that the shoes are attached to a man to whom she’d earlier given money and who is now lying still in the bushes. She checks his pulse but feels nothing: The man is dead. Following a strange instinct, Ji-won lifts his eyelids and finds that his eyes are blue.

Ji-won recalls the first dead body she ever saw, which was at the funeral of a neighbor. Without thinking, she removes the knife from her bag. She slips the blade beneath the man’s eyelids and cuts an eyeball out of his skull. She holds it against the light, considering whether to eat it. Hearing a sound from behind her, Ji-won shoves the man’s eye into a pocket and hurries off.

Ji-won stops at a gas station near her home with a publicly accessible outdoor bathroom. She collapses onto the floor of the bathroom and, hardly believing what happened, removes the eye from her pocket and inspects it.