Before the first word I uttered, before my lips even bloomed, before my brain was anything more than a collection of cells the size of a fingernail, I remember dangling from the hole at my mother’s back, sweeping left and right, left and right, my umbilical cord a flesh-and-blood swing. Mother would sing me a nursery rhyme, and when fingers sprouted from the stumps that became my palms, I learned to grasp her hair and hold on, swaying to her tempo as she danced a circle around her grave. We had the best home: right under a kemboja tree and by a huddle of jasmine shrubs, so fragrant I never knew the smell of blood or rotting flesh.
Mother said her grave released her because she promised to raise a good girl. She was dead, then she breathed anew, her unaborted shame becoming new flesh, new hope: me.
She carried me for nine months, like any good woman would. When I was too big to nest inside her, she let me crawl upon the velvety ground of the graveyard. She taught me to cross myself and give thanks for the heartbeats in my chest—give thanks to God and the grave pit that released us. We made a pilgrimage to the gravestones of the men who killed her. Which of these gravestones was my father, we didn’t know. Mother said it didn’t matter; what mattered was that we got a second chance, and they didn’t.
She was the one who put them in their graves. Murder paid with murder, terror with terror. She used to walk the streets at night in her long white robe, hunting down the men who hunted her, to all eyes a beautiful woman right up to the second she spilled their guts.
She wouldn’t do that anymore since I was born. “From now on, we are good girls,” she said. “We are a good, respectable family. We are humans.”
But the truth was, we weren’t really humans. She was a ghost, a living dead. I was half a ghost only by virtue of the promise Mother made to her grave pit. I’d be more human—in spirit if not in physique—if I grew up to be a good girl.
When Mother said we were good and respectable, this was only a vow, not yet a statement of truth.
“This is how you become human,” Mother said on the day we were to leave the graveyard. She was gone for a few hours and returned with a shopping bag, which she hid behind her back like thieves would hide the things they stole. “I’ll pay for everything later,” she mumbled.
She cast off her white robe, baring her ashen skin and the bloody hole at her back. I stared at it—the window of my fetal months—and glimpsed back into her, at her spine and the coils of her intestines. Maggots feasted in the hole as if her flesh never ran out.
All that disappeared behind the white shirt she pulled from the shopping bag, layered with a stiff black blazer that concealed her hollow. A black pencil skirt completed the look, and when she turned around, I almost didn’t recognize her.
“This is how you become human,” she repeated. She sprayed perfume all over herself, though it barely concealed her jasmine-and-funeral balm smell. Next came a bottle of foundation, smeared all over her skin until she was the color of a ripe sawo fruit, not death. A lipstick came last, blood red but not bloody. “Look alive,” she whispered.
Then she wiped smudges of dirt off my face and helped me with my new dress. I understood dressing up was to be a ritual, and I was never again to crawl on the graveyard ground, or play hide and seek with headstones, or learn to read by spelling the names of my mother’s rapists and murderers. Those were things that the child of a sundelbolong would do, but I? I was to be human. I was to be a good girl, a second chance made good, a promise fulfilled.
She took my hand, and together we walked toward a new life.
For the first day of school, Mother packed three stabs of satay with rice, some leftover karedok, and a slice of papaya. No milk, because we weren’t perfect, and Mother already worked too hard to wrest the satay from the street hawker. “There has to be some meat,” she declared, and no matter how we were doing, it must never be her own meat. She carefully portioned her meager shopkeeper’s salary for proper meat.
She taught me many kinds of smiles and ways to introduce myself (“But never tell anyone what your mother is, remember that.”) I dreaded handshakes, fretted over the coldness of my ghostchild skin, but Mother said at least I was warmer than her. If anyone ever asked why I felt cold, I should blame the air conditioning, or just bat my eyelashes and blush, like their presence was so radiant it made me nervous.
“To be human is to have friends,” Mother said.
I did all she suggested. I tried to be kind and make friends. When I learned origami, I folded cranes for every kid in the class, each in their own favorite colors. I must’ve folded a thousand cranes throughout elementary school, but none of them flew. Most ended in the trash bin, a colorful flock of failed friendships. I never understood what I did wrong; truly, all I ever did was be a good girl.
Nothing made me feel more misplaced than the end of each semester, when our parents must come to pick up our report cards. Most of my classmates would come with both of their parents, and there I was, wringing my cold hands and dreading the moment my teacher would shake my mother’s colder hands—or worse, when someone would ask where my father was.
I always said my father was dead, which was not a lie, but not the whole truth either. They didn’t question me—until the end of the first grade of junior high, when Mother came to pick up my report card. We waited outside the classroom with the other parents and students, and when my teacher finally called my name, Mother stood and walked toward the classroom door.
My classmate Raka crashed into her back in the middle of his sprint down the corridor.
Shock stilled his face as he peeled himself off Mother’s back. Mother turned ashen, more death-like than usual. A deeper black bloomed on her stiff blazer, the taut fabric that covered her hole. I knew if Raka were to crash into her again, there would be a smudge of red against the white of his uniform shirt.
When the summer break was over, I returned to school amidst a storm of whispers and snickers directed my way.
“Her mother’s back is hollow,” Raka said, forever the unruly child.
“Her mother is a sundelbolong,” the rest of them said. “A ghost, a monster.”
“No wonder her father’s never around. She must’ve killed him.”
“Hey, ghostchild! Do you walk okay? Are you floating?”
“You feel cold. Gosh, it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Sundel—”
“—a prostitute—”
“—bolong!”
“—with a hole on her back!”
“Your mother is a whore!” Raka jeered.
I snapped. Of course I knew what sundelbolong meant, but when he said “whore,” he didn’t say “used to.” He wasn’t talking about the past; he was saying she was a whore now. He didn’t know—wouldn’t care even if he knew—about the insult he threw at the vow my mother made to give me life. From now on, we are good girls. We are a good, respectable family. We are humans.
I screamed and lunged at him. My fingers like claws, my legs floating off the ground like I was the ghost he wanted me to be. I landed upon him wielding nails as my weapon, drawing blood from his cheek, leaving a long trail of torn skin down his cursed leg.
“My mother is a shopkeeper!” I shouted. A shopkeeper at the shop from where she stole my first clothes. She was someone trying to pay for sins that weren’t even her fault. She wasn’t a whore.
Raka’s friends jumped into the fray. We were on the floor, a tangle of limbs. Cold floor, warm limbs. Hard floor, vicious limbs. But I was only a pair of arms and a pair of legs, while they were many; I was still trying to be a good girl, while they hated me with the boundlessness of children who were born unconditionally.
Our teacher lectured us about fighting, but did nothing else. I cried, partly for the pain, partly for the guilt and sense of failure blooming in my ribcage. Raka told me to shut up and pinched my arm until it turned red then blue. The bloody scratch on his cheek now sat upon the corner of a sneer, and his eyes glinted with vengeance.
The next day, his father came to school and demanded my expulsion. My teacher arranged a mediation. I begged her not to go, but she went anyway. Our cheeks burned under the jeers my classmates hid behind their palms, but Mother just drew her blazer closer around her and held my hand.
I was suspended, but not expelled. When I returned, everything got worse. Whore, sundelbolong, bastard girl, ghostchild—these were my names now, scribbled by my classmates on the blackboard, carved on my desk and chair, shouted across the classroom and the school yard. They stretched out their legs before me and feigned surprise when I tripped—“Why aren’t you floating, ghostchild?” I became the color of blue bruises and red-hot shame.
Mother noticed. She said, “Be patient, my good girl.”
So I was. And because of that, the bruises never had the chance to disappear. They grew blacker and more numerous, and Mother noticed this too.
One night, I was woken up by the front door clicking softly closed. Mother was no longer in bed next to me in our cramped room. I flipped the light switch on and saw the drawer of her vanity gaping open—the drawer that held her long white robe from her ghostly years.
Ice slithered down my guts. No, Mother, no. Didn’t you promise?
I ran out and called for her, but she was gone. I ran back to our room, turned the lights off. Hid under the blanket, closed my eyes shut. I counted the seconds and minutes and hours against my trembling breath, praying she wasn’t doing what I thought she was doing.
It felt like forever before the front door rattled open again.
No footsteps. Tears rolled down my cheeks, but I kept my eyes shut. The bedroom door opened. Still no footsteps. A whispered swish, the sound of a long robe being shed to the floor.
A weight sank at the foot of the bed. A long silence, and then, a muffled sob.
I couldn’t help myself, I cracked one eye open. Mother was sitting at the edge of the bed, facing away from me, the maggots in her back wriggling under the pale moonlight from the window. She cradled her face in her hands, surrendering her sobs to the secrecy of her palms. But I heard those sobs all the same, and I wanted to answer with a scream.
She’d tried so hard. I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, she’d said when I was born. But here she was anyway.
She picked herself up and shuffled to the bathroom. In her nudity, I saw the blood on her hands. I had to suppress a gag.
She was in the bathroom for hours, her sobs muffled by the shower. When she was done, she sat at her vanity and frantically smeared foundation all over her, as if being the color of a living human would erase her ghostliness—her monstrosity—off her body.
In the morning, our bedsheets were streaked with the brown that had rubbed off her as she tossed and turned in the wee hours of the morning. I pretended not to see. I couldn’t stomach another reminder of what my mother was—what I’d forced her to be.
At school, I heard that Raka’s father had been murdered in his bed.
The cross pendant glittered under the sunlight when Mother held out the necklace for me. “Wear this under your clothes,” she said. As a reminder to be good, she didn’t say.
After the murder, Mother became obsessed with going to church. But we never actually went inside the church building; we’d come late when all the pews had been taken, and sit outside in the overflow area with plastic folding chairs. There was a kemboja tree in the yard, and it reminded me of our old home, the graveyard. Mother prayed ardently, but would sneak out before the pastor came to give the sacrament. Whenever we passed the church’s open doors, I’d catch her looking longingly at the confessional booths. I suspected she never entered because she was too ashamed, feeling too dirty to step foot in a holy space.
But it was plain she craved absolution. As she should, I thought. And I should too, because that was what good girls would do. Perhaps if I prayed harder, became purer, no one would hurt me anymore.
After her father’s death, Raka never bothered me again, too absorbed in his own shock was he. And because there was another sensational gossip they could obsess over, my classmates left me alone. I spent the last grade of junior high with my chin tucked neatly to my chest, being quiet as a dead mouse, praying they wouldn’t notice me or remember anything about my sundelbolong mother.
Graduation meant freedom. For nine years, Mother had worked her bones to death to support my education, but after what happened, I had no interest in returning to that cage and letting people throw more rocks at me.
Over a dinner of a fried rice portion split in two, I told Mother I would leave our small town and find a job in the capital, in Jakarta. She grew wordless and contemplative, chasing shreds of chicken and fried shallots around her plate.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I’ll come with you.”
She said it almost like a question, timidly, like she was asking for my permission. I glimpsed at her face, at the sadness of abandonment painted on it, even as she carved me an encouraging smile. The rice in my mouth turned dry like sand. When I finally swallowed, I swallowed also the glimmer of possibility that maybe, maybe I’d rather go alone.
“Of course, Mother,” I said.
We booked a one-way ticket to Jakarta and packed our belongings. We were already a few steps out of the front door, dragging our heavy secondhand suitcases, when Mother staggered, stopped, turned around and went back inside.
She returned with her long white robe. She had left it in her vanity drawer, but now she smiled sadly and said, “To be human is to make peace with yourself. Even if you’re still trying to be better.”
We found a tiny home in a kampong at the edge of the city, where the houses leaned close against one another, trying to hold their bricks together. The street was barely wide enough for a motorcycle, and always at the threat of flooding from the narrow, clogged gutters. Mother found a job at a nearby restaurant. I was hired as a cashier at a department store in a shopping mall, closer to the city center.
I carefully budgeted my incoming salary. Near the mall, I found a room that I could afford: a cramped one, just enough for a bed and barely anything else. To Mother, I said the commute was too long; I should rent my own place.
“I’ll visit you often,” I promised. “We’re still in the same city, but it’ll save me a lot of energy and some transportation money, compared to if I make the trip daily.”
I said this gently and with a twinge of guilt, but I held firm. With the same sad smile she gave me when I told her about moving to the capital, Mother nodded her permission. “You’ve grown,” she said wistfully. “You’re a good girl. I’m proud of you.”
I couldn’t help but think her words still sounded like a wish, not yet a statement of truth. But I must admit this, if only with shame: the first night I spent in my new room—my own room—and found none of her jasmine-and-funeral balm smell in the air, I felt a little more human.
Her name was Anisa, and she worked in the makeup section of the department store. I spent most of my first day at work staring at her from behind the cash register, trying hard not to gawk. She seemed to glitter under the store’s fluorescent light.
She noticed me around lunch time, giving me a cheerful wave from across the floor. “New girl—hi!” I frantically rubbed my palms together when she strolled over, and when I took her extended hand, I prayed I was warm enough for her.
She brought me to a warteg in the alley behind the mall, and paid for my modest portion of jackfruit curry over rice. “This will be my first and last time treating you,” she said with a laugh, oblivious to how this was my first time being treated by anyone. “I don’t have a lot of money to throw around.”
She complained about her long commutes in trains so packed she could barely breathe, almost being swallowed by the platform gap multiple times as the crowd carried her mercilessly. Without thinking, I offered to share my new bedroom. Half the rent, help each other out. She took my hand and held my coldness between her warmth. “Really? You’d do that for me?”
I never had a friend before. I remember Mother said this was one of the things that made you human.
Anisa took me mall-hopping. The malls were the different chambers in the city’s heart; they thumped with life, and they let you breathe in a light, soaring way, unburdened by the weight of heat, humidity, and pollution of the city’s open air. We romped through a dozen department stores. She showed me how she’d visit different makeup counters before her late afternoon shift, trying out new shades of lipstick or mascara brands so she’d arrive at work looking like a polished model, without having to spend a penny.
Dressing up was a ritual. This time, it was a merry one, and we didn’t even have to steal like Mother did with our first clothes.
In the room we now shared, I watched Anisa do her prayers, wondering at the soft texture of her prayer mat and the pristine white of her mukena. Her bows and prostrations looked like a dance, her recitations a song. I fiddled with the cross pendant Mother gave me as I memorized Anisa’s choreography.
I watched her perform her ablutions too, every time before she prayed. With her lips tracing the shape of a prayer, she cupped her hands under the running tap, pooling water in her palms and splashing it over her face, then rubbed her arms and legs under the little waterfall. The ritual of washing one’s body, it looked comforting, I thought—reassuringly carnal.
I wondered if this would be a better way of cleansing my sins than the confessional booths at the church that Mother longed for. I had no sins to confess through the simple abstractness of words. My sins were inscribed in my flesh: the sins of being conceived through impurity, of being born to a sundelbolong.
Anisa had no sins, I was sure. She moved through life with the resourcefulness of a kindhearted pauper, finding ways to survive without resorting to misbehaviors. Five times a day she washed off any impurities she accidentally picked up; there was no time for them to accumulate.
This was what a good girl looked like, I was sure; this was what it meant to be human. Anisa knew it better than I or Mother did. She became my religion; I loved her with all my convictions, and copied every one of her footsteps. In the morning I’d wake up before her so I could hold my finger before her eyes and feel her lashes brush against my skin when she woke.
She died a year after we first met, stabbed with a knife in a robbery, in that alley where we lunched for the first time.
What was the point of being human, when the monsters got you anyway?
I wished I’d never tried to believe that the world would be good to you if you were a good girl. Why was Anisa dead, then? She didn’t deserve it.
Maybe the sundelbolong that was my mother was right, after all. She was full of sins; she was more monster than human. But at least, here she still existed, while Anisa lay dead in her shroud of purity.
After Anisa’s burial, I stumbled to the train station and boarded a train home. The world swam around me, as if I was moving through shifting fog. I vaguely noticed a sense of disappointment when the platform gap didn’t swallow me. Bodies pressed against me from all sides, and I welcomed breathlessness.
I had only visited home intermittently since I started my job, and never for more than one night. In the past month, I hadn’t visited at all, so caught within Anisa’s orbit was I.
The door opened with a long creak, and I realized none of the lights were on even though it was getting dark. I called out for Mother. She answered, faintly, from the bedroom. I found her under the thin blanket, reduced to hollowed bones wrapped in deathly skin.
“What—what happened?” Her knuckles felt as sharp as cliff edges when I held her hand. I wanted to roar in grief and guilt both.
She smiled. “Nothing. Just a cold, I’m sure. Don’t you worry. I’m so sorry for your loss. Are you okay?”
I choked out a laugh. “Mother, when have things ever been okay?”
It wasn’t just a cold. Mother remained weak for days, then weeks. We didn’t dare go to a doctor because of her hollow back, so instead I brought her to a shaman.
He knew immediately that Mother was a sundelbolong. Still, he laid her on a bamboo mat and examined her. It was then, as I stared at her fragile bones through the faint smoke of a burning incense stick, that I realized I never stopped loving her, even in her failure to be human, even as I longed to know a world beyond her ghostly shadow.
“She’s losing power,” the shaman said. “She’s gone too far from her grave, for too long. It’s too late to take her back, I’m afraid—she wouldn’t survive the journey.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Mother said before I could lose my breath. “I followed you of my own volition. You needed to start living. I was always already dead.”
No, Mother, you never died, I wanted to cry out. Even in your death, you were always very much alive. But I didn’t say it. I held myself tightly coiled, lest I unraveled completely.
“What will become of her?” I asked instead.
She’d grow too weak to maintain her human form, the shaman explained. It took a lot of discipline to be human, and a lot of energy to be disciplined. When she could no longer muster enough energy, she’d become a sundelbolong once more, whether or not she wanted that. She’d roam the streets at night and kill people for their flesh, flesh that would replenish her. She might become human-like again once her energy was restored, but never for long. And so it would repeat.
“Unless you want me to exorcize her,” the shaman offered. “A litany of prayers, and she’ll disappear.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
Mother protested. “Just let me go. You’ll be”—her voice broke—“you’ll be more human without me, anyway.”
I shoved down the guilt from ever thinking that myself. “I want to spend my time with you, for as long as I can,” I said firmly.
We went home. I made her as comfortable as possible, all as I watched sanity fade from her eyes. I kept a knife on her nightstand, just in case. I held myself tightly coiled still.
I was there when the light in her eyes finally blinked out. She rose from her bed, her white robe suddenly on her, her feet not touching the ground. She floated toward the door with a bloodthirsty sneer on her face, but I held her with my ghostchild arms.
“Mother, don’t you remember your promise?” I exclaimed. “You said you’d be good. We’d be a good, respectable family. Won’t you try, try again?”
I unraveled there and then, and with this, all the power I’d been conserving in me spilled out. Once again I had the strength that I had when I fought my classmates, only now it was my own mother I fought, the sundelbolong. She snarled and thrashed against me. I held on, but she finally shook free, though I still clung to one of her hands.
With my free hand, I reached for the knife on her nightstand, and plunged it in my belly. I carved a lump of my flesh and offered it to her.
This must be what children felt like, when they let a stray kitten eat from the palms of their hands. I love you, little one. Mother, aren’t I a good girl?
Good girls wouldn’t feed themselves to others, would they? Such an abomination that would be, inhuman. But I no longer cared if I was a good girl—if we were good. Pretending to be human would never save us, not when it didn’t save Anisa. All we could do was preserve as much dignity as we could for ourselves, and sometimes, that meant becoming monsters.
Mother was right, that time when she embraced who she was and went to kill the father of my bully.
She ate, and it replenished her. Light returned to her eyes, and before she was fully conscious, I made sure she was back in her bed and cleaned, no trace of my blood on her lips. I found a dark loose-fitting shirt that hid the hollow in my belly. It reminded me of Mother’s stiff black blazer.
She fell asleep, and when she woke, she smiled like she never was a sundelbolong. She never regained enough strength to walk around, spending most of her time asleep. Often, she only woke to hunt for flesh. That was my cue to pick up the knife once again and play butcher for myself.
When I fed Mother my own flesh, I became an abomination, but it kept her from becoming one. That was the only grace I could give her. She’d fought so hard for a second life as a human, so I’d give her that for as long as I could. My belly became the only door she had left to humanity.
Sometimes when she gained enough strength, she became lucid and able to converse. In one such moment of sanity, she held my hand and asked, “Have I raised you to be a good girl?”
A lump grew in my throat, and around it I choked out, “Yes, Mother. You made a promise, and you’ve fulfilled it.”
I didn’t tell her it was a lie. She didn’t realize I’d been feeding her my own flesh; she didn’t need to know what I’d become.
“Good, good,” she said. Her smile glittered like Anisa’s did, and for a second I truly believed we were good.
Maggots started feasting in the hole in my belly as if my flesh would never run out—and I knew it never would, because I was never fully alive in the first place. Never fully human, always half a ghost.
And that is all right. To be human is to make peace with yourself.
To this day, I still feed myself to my mother, shamelessly, like she fed herself to me in my fetal months. When I become so thin and small I have nothing else to give, I will once again crawl into the hole at her back, and curl up into a period. I won’t tell her I wish I hadn’t been born, but Mother, I so wish to come home.
Originally published in Ghoulish Tales, Issue 3, November 2024.
