Parasited Penny Park <2024>

Seo-jun had been cleaning the park’s public restrooms for eleven months. His family—mother, father, younger sister—lived in a half-sunken maintenance shed behind the defunct carousel. They had no rent, no utilities, and no escape. But they had an arrangement with Mr. Park, the park’s absentee owner, who lived in a glass high-rise overlooking the river. Mr. Park paid Seo-jun’s father a pittance to keep squatters out. In return, the family pretended they didn’t exist.

First, the dogs got sick. Stray mutts that scavenged near the food court began dragging their hind legs. Then the children who played in the old splash pad developed weeping sores on their ankles. An old man named Yun, who slept under the dragon coaster, coughed up something dark and stringy. By August, the park had a new smell: sweet rot, like overripe fruit and pennies. parasited penny park

Below is an original, complete short story. Penny Park was a graveyard of joy. Its rusted gates still bore the gilded name from 1978, when the city had money and the Ferris wheel turned against a clean sky. Now, the wheel stood frozen mid-rotation, a skeletal halo over cracked asphalt. Families stopped coming years ago. Instead, the park housed those who had nowhere else to go: the working poor, the evicted, the invisible. Seo-jun had been cleaning the park’s public restrooms

He learned, through careful trial with rats, that the creatures could be directed. They craved warmth and dark, quiet spaces. In exchange for fresh meat—the pigeons that nested in the bumper cars, the occasional raccoon—they would not enter the maintenance shed. More than that: they would spread through the park’s drains, into the sewers, toward the foundations of the luxury condos on the hill. But they had an arrangement with Mr

So Seo-jun made a deal with the parasites.

For three days, the family was rich. They sat on the roof of the maintenance shed and drank cheap beer, watching the parasites writhe in the lagoon below. “We won,” Ha-yeon whispered.