You are outside of your body, looking down at yourself on the hospital bed surrounded by family and strangers alike with smiles too eerie, too joyous, for the airlessness of the suffocating atmosphere.
Next to you, Mother stands, eyes rimmed crimson, lids both above and below swollen, purple veined, pulsing, twitching, bluing lips holding back their quiver, but the quakes are apparent none the less if you look close enough. Father, behind, stoic as always, teeth clenched beneath thin-pressed lips, hands clasped in front of him.
“My darling, my darling,” whispers a woman who’s not your mother, and you wonder who she’s speaking to when she’s a stranger, yet she’s looking directly at you. Until—“You’ll be perfect, perfect, for my son. He will be so, so, happy to have you.”
A throat clearing, hidden in the crowd of gathered faces.
“My son would love her as well,” says a man with his hands folded behind his back, chest tilting forwards as he regards you with narrowed eyes and a sly smile.
“Twenty thousand, if we can take her right now,” says an elder as she prods aside those in front of her with a cane, the fractured design of the aged wood seems on the verge of splintering save for the fact the elder’s birdlike frame holds only skin and little flesh beneath.
“Thirty-five,” the woman who’s not your mother says.
The man with the folded hands clears his throat. “Forty.”
“Sixty.” The elder.
“Seventy-five.” The woman.
“A hundred.” The man.
“Two-hundred and fifty.” The elder.
A hush. A dead silence. A single shuddering breath from Mother and a disgruntled grunt from Father. The price is higher than the bridewealth Father offered Mother’s family for her hand: a hundred and fifty, which was far past a modest sum.
The elder, self-satisfied, prods the side of your hospital bed, wood clanging against metal, a gavel struck at the end of an auction.
“I will send for her at midnight,” the elder says, then, in a whisper, “That should be enough time for you to say your goodbyes.
Before midnight, Mother and Father stand next to you, hovering above, your hand is enveloped in Mother’s, and Father’s settle overtop. You wonder what they’ll be doing with the money, if they’ll sell your belongings or keep them and make a shrine. You wonder how long they’ll mourn you before they refocus their attention on your sister, less than two years of age, left at home with Grandmother. And you wonder what they’ll tell her when she’s older, how you’ll be remembered.
The doctor arrives to pull the plug, expression hidden behind a mask they don’t need to have pulled up, spectacles glaring so you can’t see if they’re bored or pitying, but before they do, Mother shows you a picture of a young man no older than you, maybe a year or two different, max. Couldn’t have been a graduate, maybe halfway through undergraduate studies, like you.
“I heard he’s a nice boy, and I know he’ll treat you well.” She strokes slow circles on the back of your hand, under Father’s warm, clammy palm.
There’s no way Mother could know that for sure, but she seems convinced, or rather, these words are for her own comfort, to convince herself her choice is correct.
When the heart monitor flatlines and the doctor offers their condolences to Mother and Father, your heart halts, as do your breaths. But you know you’re not dead. Not yet. Not yet.
Minghun. You’ve heard about these. Weddings, marriages, that usually occur between the dead, though there have been forbidden cases where the living are forced, though not always and sometimes willingly instead, to marry the dead—sometimes to appease angry and lingering ghosts, other times to accompany them into their afterlife the way joss paper money and items and homes are burnt and sent to spirits in the netherworlds. Forbidden, because—
A matchmaker hands the elder your death certificate. She receives a more than a satisfying commission from the smile you see on her face, as she waves to the elder who is helped onto the car in which you’re already resting inside a cushioned coffin—cushioned in appearance only because it felt as though you were laying on cement.
At her home, an antique-decorated manor with elaborate floral-patterned wallpaper and dark wooden floors, the handlers the elder hired treat you as though you’re alive, but you can tell, even with their faces held expressionless in the elder’s presence, that they want nothing more than to be finished with rubbing your cooling body with sweet chrysanthemum oils, redressing you in fine red silk embroidered with gold, painting your colourless lips with rouge and brushing a similar coloured powder onto your pale cheeks so you look as though you’re in a deep slumber rather than an unawakening death.
The elder’s hand roams across your cheek, your closed eyes, as she whispers, voice a grating rasp, “Beautiful…”
You thought your parents might be present, but they aren’t, and neither are your husband’s. After all, who would want to be present during such a ceremony to see their children dead?
Tassels sit dangling from the sides of your headpiece, a thin red veil thrown overtop. Your husband is a wooden effigy carved in what you think is a caricatured version of the photo of the young man Mother showed you—eyes larger, lips longer, thinner, cheekbones and jawline sharper. In your hand is a ribboned, fabric bouquet of a large crimson flower, the same is strapped over your husband’s effigy’s chest as a sash. Your wedding dress is a pool of scarlet; your husband’s effigy sits in stiff garments with colours that match yours with midnight accents and gold.
You and your husband are facing the elder, seated in chairs that prevent your corpse from flopping over, behind a table filled with bowls of apples, oranges, pears carefully sliced and plated, steaming dishes with chopsticks set. Red candles, wicks lit, rest on each side of the table, wax dripping down the side like thick perspiration slowed by the dense breaths released into the air by the elder as she regards you both, separately, then together, her gaze scrutinizing, as though the two of you are still alive.
The elder lifts your veil with two steady hands, and that is when you feel yourself blink, and the elder, bewildered, jerks in her spot, your veil fluttering back down, the elder’s hands resting on her lap, trembling.
Still, you cannot move. Your eyes do not blink again no matter how hard to try to will them to.
Next to you, a whisper floats with each vow the host announces. And appearing by your own hovering ghost is your new husband’s—lank hair hanging into eyes with deep shadows beneath like soot crescents, lips cracked, cheeks gaunt—not at all like his photo: vibrant, alight, alive.
“My . . . love . . . ” his voice is a harsh scrape against your eardrums, pitched as though he’d lost use of it and is only now relearning the feeling of sounds and the way each word wraps around the tongue, contorts in the shape of its will.
At first, you thought he’s referring to you, but he wasn’t looking at you but past you at someone who wasn’t there.
“Help me,” he says.
You don’t know how—you can’t even help yourself.
Parents fear that their children will die before them, and others fear their children will come back to haunt them, and some worry that their children will be lonely in the afterlife. There are a few who might even want to join their children, finding it too difficult to live with their own failure as parents, and yet, they’re too afraid of death themselves to follow. But it’s believed that certainly the dead would appreciate being loved, being needed, even after they’re gone.
With this elder, this isn’t quite the case. She’d wanted to appease her grandson, yes, because it seems he’s been causing quite the haunting ruckus in her home—torn edges of portraits, overflowing sinks, ashes in the fine weavings of rugs and carpets, bulbs exploding after flickering like firecrackers—which she seems unamused about and lacking in patience for, rather than the mournful sorrow she should have been displaying for the recent death.
After the ceremony, the elder returns you to your parents in that same coffin you arrived in. A closed casket funeral followed by your lowering into a graveyard outside the city, up a lush mountain near an collapsed mine that took the lives of too many youths. Plots of lands have been diminishing in number and you’re surprised your parents didn’t cremate you instead. Apparently, it was the elder’s idea, and she even funded part of the money for that expensive plot you now rest in beneath the soil.
It should have been obvious why. But you don’t realize until later that night when the elder with hired handlers, the same ones who dressed you for the minghun, come to dig you back up from your grave, throws your body into a preservation coffin, the timeline of it all perfect for her wicked plans to resell you while you’re still fresh, still complete, for two, three, four times the price she’d bought you at, and had a wooden effigy made to take your place in the cheap coffin she commissioned and returned to the gaping mouth of your empty grave.
A mistake.
And your husband’s ghost laughs with you.
You have never fallen in love in the short years you were alive—your mother and father might have been the closest things to this foreign feeling, the nanny you had a close second, because she seemed to care more about your own childhood than you yourself, until she disappeared without a word, and you’ve always wondered if it was because your mother was jealous.
“What did he look like?” you ask your dead husband about his lover when you’re loaded into the back of a truck with many other bodies halted in various states of decomposition—some missing a limb or two, some without eyes, some slightly bloated, some bearing scars that reveal their cause of death, unnatural. Surrounded by dead darlings, you feel as though you are being shuttled away like livestock in number yet treated like exotic species in price and packaging.
You and your husbands’ ghosts sit cross-legged, facing one another, on top of the lid of your shut coffin.
His love is a young man from the mining community where your wooden effigy now rests. One that he has been waiting for, who had been already buried, only, it is in a place your dead husband cannot reach. Not like this, tethered to you.
You’re about to ask if there might be a way to sever your bond, though it felt better to be together than alone, or at least better to wallow in the loneliness together, when an alive girl thought unalive begins to sing at the back of the truck—collapsed and wedged between two coffins with her broken limbs like a rag doll. You’re surprised that the handlers haven’t sewn her lips, though it might be for the sole reason of fetching a higher price since she cannot run anyhow.
She laughs, delirious, eyes locked on us both. She can see us. And after the song, she tells of how she had been buried alive, then dug up before death kissed and marred her skin, before the blood in her veins had even dried, where her makeup still sits fresh on her face—supple: alive. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again—a fish gasping for air, a bird with broken wings and talons drowning in water—
Minghun—forbidden because there have been those kidnapped, murdered, dug from graves, ashes stolen from funeral homes and graves, sold on the black market.
Unsettled ghosts rise like vapour, like wafting steam from their coffins, some stacked, within the truck to join in the chorus of vengeful voices like the unalive alive girl’s—
Some were targeted because they were rejected by society, abandoned by their families, for the cruel reason of physical and mental imperfections.
Some were injected with heavy sedatives by those hoping to have them at the ceremonies alive, half conscious, only to have them pass away because of overdose.
Others were bullied into committing suicide—both before and after the minghun so they could not be wedded to another.
Improper burials—all.
All our ghostly heads turn to the only one among us still alive, as though this might be the only chance we have at escape, at least this way, both us and she would have a choice, no matter how limited, even if it feels as though we are choiceless.
“Will you marry us?”
Before reaching the black market, the doors to the back of the truck are flung open, rattling the ghosts of dead darlings, among which your husband and you drift. Each ghost weaving themselves into our living vessel, the unalive alive girl, mending her broken body, half-tethered soul.
Our vessel rises, starts crawling, then walking, jerkily, a puppet yanked forth towards the elder at the yawning opening of the truck.
We sing, “My darling, my darling.”
We sing, “You’ll be perfect, perfect, for us. We will be so, so, happy to have you.”
With hands folded behind our back, chest tilting forwards as we regard her with narrowed eyes and a sly smile, we hum, “It is midnight. That should have been enough time for you to say your goodbyes.”
And as her cane falls from her hand, clatters onto the ground, and her mouth falls open, a maw from which drifts the scent of rot and musk and sour fear and bitter death, we smile, and smile wider, and whisper in a rasping voice, “Beautiful . . . ”
The elder’s scream resounds, but we swallow each of her echoes.
Then, together, we head into the night for the mountains, for the mines, for the graves—marked, unmarked, filled, emptied, empty—with a song for dead darlings trailing from our lips, words rattling like trains over tracks, the clicking of bone against bone, the dribble of blood like rusting tears coating our tongue:
Feet cold
Toes numb
Fingers bloodless
Expression fraught-less
Lapis veins
Iris lips
Eyes open
Eyes closed
Breaths held
Breaths gone
Whispered gasp
Gasped whisper
Dead darlings
Darling’s dead
Undead dead
Dead undead
Originally published in The Earth Bleeds At Night, edited by Holley Cornetto.
