In May, the husband sees bruises on his wife’s body. He stops looking at his newspaper to ask her about it, but she says she doesn’t know where they came from, though they don’t hurt. The husband then reflects on his fourth year of marriage with her, how he feels withdrawn from this strange circumstance and feeling nothing of her face. He feels as though, after four years, she has grown tired-looking from her youthful self. The husband then asks his wife to undress, though she wonders if anyone will see through the windows of their apartment. She reluctantly does, and he still feels nothing.

Over time, the bruises get bigger and darker. Whenever the wife goes outside, she feels the urge to undress again. Other symptoms include her not wanting to eat, though she drinks more water. The husband finally tells her to go to the hospital, and his wife starts to cry. He thinks about how she never used to cry, that she was more of someone who laughed instead. He remembers how, once, she lamented about living in an apartment complex where countless people are lumped together in identical boxes. She feels like, as the result of living such a way, she may wither away and die. As such, her first year in the apartment complex, after marrying her husband, is filled with illness. She dreams of living by moving from country to country, never settled in one place.

One day, after the wife goes to the hospital, the husband greets her at the front door. She says the doctors said she was fine. Later, he thinks back to more conversations they had after moving to the apartment complex, like how he was fond of plants and decided to plant them on their windowsill. However, the plants keep withering and dying, without fail. Some say that it’s because of bad energy, while others chalk it up to the position of their high balcony. The wife asks her husband if they can move away, to another country where things don’t die so easily. Angrily, the husband asks her why she feels so uncomfortable, though they accidentally break a flower pot, which injures her leg.

From then on, the wife starts speaking less. The husband wonders what she wants. He feels like life has been going smoothly and without fault until now, and he doesn’t know what could burden his wife so. Before his business trip, he sees that his wife is covered in bruises. He tells her that he’s going to phone her mother, to which she protests. He simply demands her to go to the hospital again.

Upon returning from his business trip, the husband returns to a seemingly empty apartment. He unlocks the door himself, rather than having her open it. He walks in and is disgusted by the state of everything, how filthy and disheveled things have gotten. He calls out his wife’s name, but there’s no answer. Finally, he feels lonely and angry with everything, but his wife soon breaks the silence, weakly. He finds her on the balcony, where she’s kneeling, naked, covered in green. She begs for water, and he fetches her some. He splashes her with it, and she feels rejuvenated—like a plant.

Before her husband returns from the business trip, the woman thinks of her mother. She wears her orange sweater but then takes it off on the balcony. She calls for her mother. Time no longer registers to her. Over time, the husband nurtures the wife in flower pots and mineral water. She feels more alive as she grows, and she feels as though her dream has come true. She thinks of her youth, up until the death of her mother. She realizes that she never wanted to end up like her mother, hence all of her anxieties about moving rather than staying put in one place. She admits that she has never been happy. She thinks back to when the bruises started, when the doctors didn’t know what was going on but she did: the deterioration of her organs. She dreams of growing tall, but with time, she starts to wither away.

At the end of fall, the husband grabs a fruit that her wife, now a plant, bore. He then buys a dozen flower pots and plants her wife’s fruits in them. He wonders if she will bloom by spring.