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This isn’t a ghost story.

It might seem like it is, sometimes, but it isn’t. A ghost story is something false, something told around the campfire to scare people. And this story might be frightening sometimes, and it might even have ghosts involved in it, but this is not a ghost story.

This is a story about a dead child.

Please try not to be scared.

The story starts with a haunted penthouse.

(The story starts fourteen years ago.)

(The story starts twenty-four years ago.)

The story starts with a haunted penthouse. It’s in one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai, owned by one of the richest men in China.

One of the richest men in China is dying.

He is not a particularly good man. You don’t get to be one of the richest men in China by being good, or even by being kind. You become one of the richest men in China by having rich parents, and from there by having wealthy connections, and from there by being a shrewd businessman.

But even the richest of men have to die.

(Even the poorest of children has to die.)

His wife, his son, and his pregnant daughter-in-law are attending to him, in his final moments. His son is a filial son, and his pregnant daughter-in-law is a kind woman. They wouldn’t leave the rich man alone while he dies.

His wife is enjoying the schadenfreude of watching her husband die.

She is also not one who could leave her husband alone while he dies.

Technically, there is someone else in the apartment.

But it’s not like anyone but the rich man has ever noticed him.

The rich man’s name is Jin Guangshan. His son’s name is Jin Zixuan, and his pregnant daughter-in-law’s name is Jiang Yanli.

Jin Guangshan and his family have lived in his penthouse for more than ten years now. He moved out of his previous home, a somewhat oversized country estate in Shandong, the year after this story began.

(Technically, there’s no way to tell why he moved out. He told his business associates that it was for better economic opportunities, and he told his wife it was so their son could go to a better school. He didn’t tell anyone that it was because he was afraid of the sound of footsteps in the hallways at night, or because he kept seeing shadows of a child when he turned his head.

There’s no way to know for sure.)

Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan are only visiting. They’ve been living in that old house of Jin Guangshan’s, the one that he still owned but had moved away from all those years before.

Jin Zixuan sleeps poorly in that old house. He has nightmares, and wakes up with his stomach tied in knots and his eyes beading with tears. His appetite has suffered, and he finds himself fretting over everything. His heart beats too loud, and he finds himself forgetting to breathe.

Perfectly normal anxiety, for a first-time father. His doctor recommends sleeping early, maybe making himself some tea if he’s feeling anxious. Of course, he could recommend a prescription, but—

Well. People will talk.

It had been a relief, when his mother had asked him to come home to the apartment. No more late nights, no more early mornings, no more eyes twitching at the thought that, in the five minutes that he’s been out of the bedroom, his wife has died. The penthouse should be safe, right?

(Right.)

The penthouse is spotless, gleaming with wealth and empty even of fingerprints. The building was only built twenty years ago– there’s no way that there are any ghosts involved here. The architect even hired a feng shui expert before starting construction, as old-fashioned as it might seem. That sort of classical thinking had been in vogue, when the apartment building was being designed.

There are no ghosts in any of these apartments.

(Weren’t you listening? This isn’t a ghost story.)

Jin Guangshan is dying, but Jin Zixuan tries to deny it. Even if it is true that his father was an unkind man, and occasionally a lecher, and frequently had unkind rumors circulating about him—

Even so. The man is still Zixuan’s father.

And he still loves his father.

As he stays in the penthouse with his family, his heart retains the heaviness of his marital home. Now, he attributes it to his father’s soon-to-come death, his mother’s poorly-hidden joy at the fact, and the fact that his wife is still pregnant. It’s not good for a pregnant woman to spend so much time around death.

This is not, in fact, why Jin Zixuan’s heart is so heavy. His heart is heavy for the same reason that his father’s is, and for the same reason that his mother’s is, and for the same reason that the air itself is so heavy.

There is death in the air, but it is not that of Jin Guangshan. The death that hangs heavy in the air of the Jin home is a decade and a half old, and it has been festering. Molding. Rotting.

This is not a ghost story.

The end comes when Yanli excuses herself to go and buy groceries.

(The end comes when a young boy gets sick on the way home from school.)

(The end has already come. Remember?)

Jiang Yanli leaves the penthouse to buy groceries. She could get them delivered, as her mother-in-law encourages, but she likes to test the vegetables herself, likes to see how fresh the meat is.

Seven minutes after she leaves the apartment, Jin Zixuan realizes that she’s forgotten her umbrella. It’s not supposed to rain, but Zixuan worries. If she gets caught in the rain, she could catch a cold or worse. Zixuan’s heard stories, about children who walk home without umbrellas and get so sick that they end up dying before they can start middle school. Zixuan hates that idea, but he hates even worse the idea of his wife getting sick and dying before their child can even be born.

But when he goes to open the front door to give his wife her umbrella, the door doesn’t move.

Zixuan wiggles the doorknob, first. He doesn’t entirely understand it, and he’s been away from the apartment long enough that he’s forgotten whether or not the front door sticks.

But he wiggles the doorknob again, and flicks the lock mechanism back and forth, and the door still doesn’t move. He shoves at it with his shoulder, and it still doesn’t move.

“…Mom?” he calls. His mother has been spending more and more time with his father, lately– more than she ever spent with him when he was healthy, in fact– but Zixuan needs to give his wife her umbrella. “Hey, is there a trick to this door?”

His mother does not answer.

The penthouse might be big, but not so big that his mother, in the master bedroom, wouldn’t hear him at the front door.

Zixuan half-turns. “Mom?”

The penthouse is dark. Only the entryway light is fully bright, while the living room is now lit only by a floor lamp and the hallway light fixture is flickering and unsteady. Past that, there is an impenetrable darkness, the kind that usually makes its home in dark caves or darker forests.

Jin Zixuan’s heart feels so heavy that he fears it might sink out of his sternum.

He’s scared.

He didn’t hear that this isn’t a ghost story.

“Mom,” Zixuan calls again, because he loves his mother as much as he loves his father, “are you okay?”

Jin Zixuan walks into the dark.

Jin Guangshan has been spending most of his days lying in bed.

(“Like it’s a change from your usual activities,” his wife scoffs, sitting next to him in bed.)

He can barely heave himself out of bed, these days. Even forcing himself to sit upright is a trial.

He’s fully aware that he is dying, and he is terrified. He’s only fifty-one– isn’t that too young to die? His father had been eighty, and his mother eighty-four. Isn’t fifty-one too young? He won’t get to see his own grandson be born, won’t be able to properly guide his son into taking over the family business, won’t even be able to see his son turn twenty-five.

When the lights in Jin Guangshan’s bedroom go off, he barely even notices. His eyes were already half-shut, and the distant buzzing of the television didn’t go anywhere.

Or, wait. Had it? There had been an interruption, but no longer than half a second. He’d been watching some late-eighties soap opera, something about an orphan boy who had finally met his father and was going to go on to do great things, but now there was a talk show of some kind on. A woman who’d had sexual relations with a married man, and now she needed money for her son. Should she call the father? Or try and find some other way to take care of him? Her baby boy was sick, and she could barely afford rent, and the married man was wealthy enough to own his own apartment, she knew that much.

What a whore. If she was seducing a married man, then she got what she deserved. If you can’t afford to have a child, then get an abortion. Especially if you’re messing around with a married man.

“Change the channel,” he mumbles. He has no patience for women like this.

His wife should be sitting next to him. Attentive, for once.

But the woman on the television keeps talking about her son.

“Change the channel,” Jin Guangshan demands.

But when he opens his eyes to glare at his wife, the room is dark.

His bedside lamp is off, but even so he can see that his wife isn’t sitting next to him.

The television is off, too.

“He said not to call him,” the woman on the television whines. “But my son, he’d gotten so sick that he wasn’t going to school. What if he’d died?

“I had to call. I just had to find him.”

His medication makes him lethargic, sometimes, and even the shock of adrenaline to his system from whatever is happening in his home isn’t enough to shake him from the semi-coma in which he so frequently finds himself. He is fully aware of himself, but he cannot force himself to even move his arm.

“Was it so wrong for me to try to find my son’s father?” the woman on television whines. “He said not to contact him until my son was eighteen, but it was important.”

The television still isn’t on. None of Jin Guangshan’s medications cause auditory hallucinations.

There is still a woman talking about her bastard child.

“Was it so wrong?” the woman asks again.

There’s a murmur of approval from the studio audience.

There’s someone standing next to Jin Guangshan again. When he heaves his head over to look, it’s a small figure, cloaked in darkness, with only two golden eyes visible, staring accusingly at Jin Guangshan.

“And what did your son’s father say, when you finally met him?” the talk show host asks, voice as calm and encouraging as ever. Nothing to suggest that the woman might be in the wrong, nothing to displease any advertisers or viewers.

The ghastly figure next to Jin Guangshan takes another step forward.

“How did that man react?”

Jin Guangshan’s wife is in the washroom when the power goes out.

It’s at least partially a relief. As much as she enjoys watching her wretch of a husband die to the tune of poorly edited soap operas, she can’t make herself do the same thing day-in and day-out

A woman needs stimulation.

She’s washing her hands when the power goes out. Her hands are still lathered with lilac-scented soap, and the bathroom is so dark that all she can see is her own reflection in the mirror. She only knows that she’s raised her hands out of the sink when she catches sight of her mirror image doing the same.

She glances towards the window. She should be able to see the skyline, the sun above the skyscrapers that surround their building like a defensive wall.

The window shows only pure darkness. It’s as though someone has snipped it out of existence.

She curses under her breath. It must be a problem with the apartment. She’d never wanted to move, but she couldn’t avoid the fact that their old house had something uncomfortable in the air. Almost like it was built on a graveyard.

She turns back to face the bathroom mirror. She’ll finish washing her hands, then go check on her husband. He can spend five minutes on his own.

After she rinses and dries her hands, she turns back to the mirror and adjusts her hair.

Standing in the mirror behind her is a little boy.

He looks a bit like a-Xuan used to, and she nearly mistakes the boy behind her for a portrait of her son.

But Guangshan would never keep a portrait of his son in the master bath.

The boy is wearing an eye-searingly yellow T-shirt, and his hair– lighter than Zixuan’s ever was– hangs lank and greasy all the way down to his shoulders.The boy is clearly ill, with his eyes red-rimmed and dark-shadowed, not to mention the glassiness of his eyes. Good lord, he almost looks like a corpse.

She’s seen him somewhere before, hasn’t she…?

Even though she knows that there’s no portrait in the bathroom, Jin Guangshan’s wife turns to look anyway. She’s never been prone to hallucinations, or anything.

There is– of course– no one there.

When she turns to face the mirror once again, the boy is gone.

It must be the stress of her husband dying. It must be.

She turns to the door, places her hand on the doorknob. She tries to turn it.

The door, of course, does not open.

Jin Zixuan walks down the hallway.

The hallway of his father’s penthouse isn’t this long. Maybe fifteen meters, in its entirety? At the very most?

Jin Zixuan has been walking for at least half an hour, now.

It’s all a bit dreamlike. He’s in the apartment he grew up in, but everything is so dark, and he has to find something, and he’s still carrying the umbrella he was going to bring to his wife.

It’s all a bit dreamlike. He hasn’t even realized yet that he’s being haunted.

(This is still not a ghost story.)

He doesn’t want to look over his shoulder. He doesn’t want to see how far he is from the light of the entryway and the living room, doesn’t want to know what might be behind him, in the blinding darkness of his father’s home. He clutches the umbrella like a baseball bat, like it’ll protect him from the shadows. Even with his eyes blinded, and himself only guided by his hand on the wall– something the housekeeper, Miss Mo, would probably scold him for, leaving fingerprints all over the place, but she’d been fired three months ago.

(Jin Zixuan only knows Miss Mo by word of mouth. She worked for his parents for five months, and had been fired approximately a month after his father started going downhill. She’d been younger than Zixuan, and his mother had only scoffed a little bit about her work ethic.

She’d been pregnant, when she had gotten fired.)

He can hear noises now. His father’s television, maybe? It sounded like one of those soap operas that he liked. A woman crying, begging for someone to wake up, please just wake up, everything would be okay.

His father loved soaps like that, tragic cliches where someone died and whoever loved them best kept trying to shake them and wake them up.

“Dad?” Zixuan called. “Dad, are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Dad?”

Zixuan froze.

“Dad, are you there? Can you hear me?”

Behind him, Zixuan could feel someone standing.

And all he could do was take another step forward.

“Dad?”

Jin Guangshan’s wife is trembling.

She is not typically the kind of woman to begin shaking and trembling when she is unnerved– she is more the type to try and shout the dead into submission, to scream at interlopers until they recognize their faults, to shriek the world into what she considers its proper order.

But she has already shouted, and today the dead do not falter.

She’s sitting down on the cold linoleum floor, now, leaning against the still-unmoving bathroom door. From this angle, she cannot see the mirror reflecting anything but the ceiling and the top of the opposite wall.

Every few minutes, she shifts, pushing herself upward just a bit, and every time the mirror’s reflection shifts downwards, she sees, once again, that greasy, sick-looking little boy.

She had screamed at him, earlier, but it’s been nearly an hour since then. More? She’s lost track of time, in this cut-off world with no clock and no sky. The only constants are her and the boy in the mirror.

“What do you want,” she mumbles, voice dry and cold.

Like always.

“Why won’t you let me go.”

There is no answer. The only sounds in the washroom come from her own voice and her own hands.

She should have divorced Jin Guangshan years ago, after the first bastard child came to light. The prenup had had a proviso for adultery, so it wasn’t like she would lose any money.

But that had been years ago. Back then, divorcing your husband just because of a little indiscretion just wasn’t done. Not to mention, her parents would have killed her, ruining the beautiful match that they had made for her. She had decided to just wait him out, wait for her husband to die.

She regrets that, now. Obviously. Damn her parents, and damn her son, too, at that. She’d always known that children of single parents were rather ungroomed, unintelligent, nearly uncivilized, but Guangshan could have handled Zixuan just fine. No one would’ve even known that she had left her son behind, and Guangshan had the means to take care of Zixuan and then some.

It’s not that she doesn’t love her son. It’s just that she’s scared.

(That’s how she always is.)

She should have divorced her husband. Then this curse– this vengeful spirit, this little demon, this whatever– wouldn’t be tormenting her.

She leans up again, and catches a glimpse of the sickly looking boy in the mirror again.

His eyes are no longer glassy and unfocused, staring at nothing. Now, he’s making direct eye contact with her, staring with an intensity that frightens her in a way that she’s only been once before.

She slams down against the bathroom door again. She’s almost cowering.

From this perspective, she can’t see any image of the sick-looking boy in the mirror. He’s too short.

She’s so thirsty. Her eyes trail down to the gleaming stainless steel spigot of the bathroom sink. It’s the same as the water in the kitchen, so it’s surely potable, if not the most hygienic.

She stretches her fingers up to the knob, trying her best to avoid the boy’s reflection in the mirror.

Reflected in the spout of the sink, instead, is the distorted visage of a sick-looking little boy.

He’s still staring into her eyes.

The story begins with a mother and a son.

(The story begins in fourteen years.)

(The story begins ten years ago.)

Her name is Meng Shi, and his is Meng Yao. They live in a basement apartment in a suburb of Beijing. There’s no heating or air conditioning, so it’s boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. The water from the kitchen sink needs to be boiled before it can be drunk.

Meng Yao is sick.

(Meng Yao is frequently sick. The apartment is moldy, and poorly ventilated, and he’s had pneumonia twice in the past year. Antibiotics aren’t expensive, but when you have to worry about rent, and the electric fee, and school fees, and buying clothes for a boy who just keeps growing—

There’s always more immediate concerns, than finishing an antibiotic treatment.)

Meng Yao is sick enough that he can’t go to school. If there’s one thing that Meng Yao prides himself on, it’s his academic performance– he doesn’t need to attend every day of school, he’s too smart for that, but his mother always looks so proud when Meng Yao gets a perfect attendance stamp on his report card, along with full points in all his academic subjects.

But Meng Yao has already missed two days of school.

He’s feverish enough that he can’t even roll out of bed. He’s dizzy, and nauseous, and all he can manage to keep down is his mother’s ginger tea.

Meng Shi wants to stay home and take care of her son, but she has to work. If you don’t work, you can’t afford any antibiotics.

She carries her son to her neighbor’s basement apartment, so that she can keep taking her clients in their own.

It’s no good for growing boys to see things like that.

A-Yao is just so sick.

After work, after she’s carried her son back home– he’s burning up in her arms, and sweating so hard that his oversized shirt is sticking to his skin. He mumbles disjointedly, and he can’t force his eyes open.

Meng Shi sits at the kitchen table, tapping her fingers anxiously on the fake wood. There’s a phone number in her hand, written on the back of a jewelry store receipt.

She had promised not to call the phone number, not until her son was eighteen years old.

But her baby boy is so sick.

She just has to find a phone to borrow.

The apartment hallway is freezing.

The apartment’s been cold before, but Zixuan’s parents have always run cold. They usually keep the temperature at about twenty-five degrees, but it can’t be more than five or ten degrees, right now. His hair is standing on end, and he could swear someone is watching him. It feels the way it did when he’d gone on that stupid camping trip out in Nowheresville, Guanxi with his parents’ friends’ kids, when that damn Wei Wuxian had insisted on telling scary stories around the campfire in the middle of the night while the unfamiliar howls of wolves– dholes?– filled the air. Stupid Wuxian had insisted that it made good atmosphere, and Zixuan hadn’t wanted to be the one to ruin the fun.

Just like back then, Zixuan feels like he’s being watched.

Not necessarily by a person, not like a stalker, just… watched. Watched like morning glories must feel for a kid’s summer observation diary, or like a bird must feel when it’s getting photographed for Wildlife, or even how it used to feel when Zixuan had to go over to Lotus Pier when he was a kid, and he would feel like he was being watched and then when he turned around, one of Wanyin’s dogs would be there.

Not like he was being watched for real. Not like a person was glaring at him, or trying to figure out where they knew him from, or like his stalker was behind him.

Just like he was being… seen, maybe. Seen was a good word for it. Seen, or viewed, or even just perceived. Not necessarily scrutinized.

He knows that someone’s behind him. He’d heard them speaking, earlier, in a morbid echo of Jin Zixuan’s own words. He’d known they were there since the lights had gone out, in the back of his mind, an animal instinct trying to warn him that there was something wrong here.

Jin Zixuan is afraid.

He has been followed before. He has been alone in the dark searching for his parents before. He has even been scared before.

Never before has he felt such bone-heavy dread. Never before has he been so certain that his home is full of death. He is certain, in this moment, that all the members of his family that he cannot see are dead. If only he could find them, if only he knew for certain that they were still alive, then everything would be alright.

But that’s not the way this story is meant to go.

“Who’s there,” Jin Zixuan says. He is afraid, and he might even be a bit of a fool, but he is not one to allow things to happen around him without getting in his two cents.

“Who’s there.”

The air around Zixuan feels both humid and cold, as though he’s on the shores of the lake that his wife grew up on, with the wetness in the air coating his lungs and making him feel as though he’s drowning on dry land. It shouldn’t get humid when it’s cold out– something about the atmosphere, how the coldness makes it impossible for the water to coalesce in the air– and yet Zixuan can nearly see snowflakes dancing in the dark fog of his father’s apartment.

It is cold, and it is humid, and Jin Zixuan is afraid.

He lets his eyes fall shut. He is too afraid to continue seeing the nothing darkness, and yet the view with his eyes shut is exactly the same as what he had seen with his eyes open, down to the frozen humidity on the inside of his eyelids.

“Please,” Zixuan says. “I’m so tired.”

There is a sudden air of malevolence around Zixuan. He can feel someone’s glare on his back, and now he is being scrutinized, not just seen. Someone is glowering at him.

“Please. I’m. So. Tired.”

The story starts in a bar, with a man and a woman.

(The story starts in ten years.)

(The story starts twenty-four years from the woman in the bar.)

She’s a beautiful woman, and well-aware of it. She likes to go out with her friends and feel men and women both staring at her, whispering to each other about how gorgeous she is. She’s a jiangnan beauty, which isn’t that rare in her city, but she so perfectly embodies jiangnan beauty that it seems to be nearly perfection. Not only are her proportions all exact, but she is also confident in herself and her movements– well-trained movements, as well, with orchid fingers and her hand just barely covering her mouth when she smiles so wide that her eyes shut.

All of this to say: she is a beautiful woman.

She is also a kind woman, and so no one begrudges her for her beauty.

(Well. Not much.)

The man is a wealthy man. He’s inherited his wealth from his father, along with his attitude.

He wants the beautiful woman. At least for a bit.

The beautiful woman is young. She’s never really been in love before. She’s definitely never been seduced before. She’s easy prey, for wealthy men who are used to dealing with more cunning women.

This, more than anything, is where the story begins.

And yet.

The story begins in ten years, and the story begins in twenty-four years.

This is the prelude. This is the music that plays before the story begins.

Really, this is the actors applying their make-up backstage.

The man looks at the woman as a tiger does a rabbit, and she only sees the kind acts, not the uncaring eyes.

The story begins in ten years.

Jin Guangshan has fallen out of bed, by now. It had been a struggle, lifting his frail body up off the bed. When he’d swung his feet onto the carpet, though, his legs had only trembled before he’d collapsed.

All he can see is the feet of the shadowy figure that had been standing next to the bed.

“It must have been hard,” the talk show host says, sympathetically. Jin Guangshan’s eyes won’t stretch all the way to see the shadowy figure’s eyes, but he is certain that this beast is staring down at him with nothing but cold murder. “But, please. How did your son’s father react? What did he say?”

“Get away,” Jin Guangshan mumbles. “Stay away from my family.”

“I see,” the talk show host says.

The shadowy figure squats down. All Jin Guangshan can see on its face now is its bright golden irises, shining out of the dark shape that must be its face, staring curiously at Jin Guangshan’s prone form.

He feels nauseous. He feels, in fact, afraid.

“Wasn’t he happy to know he had another child? You and he have such a great relationship, right?”

Jin Guangshan’s medications don’t cause hallucinations, right? Lethargy, joint pain, dulling of emotions, brain fog. Nothing about hallucinations.

He doesn’t even like talk shows.

“What is this,” he rasps. “Who– who are you. What do you th-think you’re doing.”

“Wasn’t he happy to know he had another child?”

Jin Guangshan scoffs. “Is that– is that what this is about? Th-that whore? Didn’t I already t-tell you to leave m-me and my family alone?”

The shadow tilts its head, its eyes still wide open and nearly glowing.

“Wasn’t he happy to know he had another child?”

“No,” Jin Guangshan spits. “No, I w-wasn’t fucking happy. Is that what you wanted to h-hear? Hah? That I– that—”

His sentence is cut off by coughing, his body spasming on the floor. He is, well and truly, dying.

The shadow– impassive as always– straightens its head and continues staring at Jin Guangshan. The richest man in China has been dying for a long time now, and the shadow has been dead for longer. The balance of death will hold, at least for a while, as Jin Guangshan struggles to live and the shadow holds its morbid homeostasis.

Jin Guangshan eventually stops coughing, and begins to breathe raggedly. He stares stubbornly up at the shadow. In his own mind, he is the hero of this story, standing true against the dark forces of the dead who cannot stay quiet. He is a knight defending his fief, a patriarch defending his clan. His resistance here is noble.

The dead, as impassive as ever, only continue staring.

“Wasn’t he happy to know he had another child?”

She had tried to dress a-Yao in his nicest clothing, and then in his school uniform, but he’d vomited on both. That was when she gave up and just put him in his pajama pants and the shirt from his school’s last sports day.

(He’d vomited on her skirt suit, too, the one that she had worn back when she had been applying for office jobs with no high school diploma. She’s settled for a black dress, one that falls just below the knee. It’s her next-best option.)

They have to ride two subway trains and three buses to get to her son’s father’s home, and Meng Shi can feel the other riders’ eyes on her. She wants to stand in the center of the train car, wants to scream that she’s a good mother, that a-Yao has never, ever been this sick before, and that she had tried to get him in proper clothing. She’s a good mother. She wants to grab the old auntie who had scoffed when Meng Shi had sat beside her son, wants to shake her by the shoulders and scream “We’re going to see his father! I’m a good mother! My son has a father and a mother, and he’s just got the stomach flu, and we’re going to see his father! I am a good mother!”

But that wouldn’t do anyone any good. Meng Shi and Meng Yao both know that she is a good mother, and Meng Yao’s father will know that too, soon. She doesn’t need to justify herself to strangers.

There’s a radio station playing over the tinny speakers of all three buses. Not the same one– though that would be nice– but all along a similar theme. Call-in shows, mostly. The one on the first bus seems to be a financial advice show, but much of what’s discussed goes over Meng Shi’s head. She’s never really been one for traditional school. On the second bus, it’s some health show– about how daikon cures cancer and pears cure astigmatism and the number one cure for pneumonia is actually clove tea, not ginger. She understands most of the concepts, but a lot of the words– pneumonia, astigmatism, palliative– are ones that she has, at best, only half-heard of. On the third bus, it’s one of those romance call-in shows that was so popular back when Meng Shi was in middle school. It’s the same as ever, little squeaky-voiced teenage girls calling in to say “Um, my name’s– well, I guess you can call me Lin Daiyu, and I had a question about my boyfriend?”

Meng Shi herself had never called into one of these shows, though she frequently daydreamed about it. She’d never been very lucky in love, and she’d also never had any friends that she could easily vent to about it, and she’d never had a good enough phone to call into a radio show. Daydreaming about it was really all she had ever had, about love advice.

Now, when she’s a grown woman sitting on a bus with her sick little boy, Meng Shi sinks back into her old comforts. She updates it a little bit– it’s a talk show, now, like The Jin Xing Show or maybe even A Date With Lu Yu. Something where the host talks a little bit about how her next guest has gone through so much and has some very interesting stories to tell them about being the wife of one of the richest men in China, it’s Meng Shi!

There’d be applause when she came out, and she’d have some small talk with the host, exchange compliments, and then the host would do that thing they do, where she leans in and the music goes all sad and she says “Ms. Meng, really, how did you do it?”

Meng Shi would explain, would cry a little prettily– not the way she usually cries, sitting in the entranceway with its one flickering bulb, fist pressed against her mouth so that she doesn’t wake up a-Yao while she sobs about how much everything costs every month, no, she would be pretty on television– but she would say that she was strong, that she saved money, that she shopped at secondhand stores and discount grocers. Being poor would be noble, when she’s on television, instead of pathetic.

The host would ask why Meng Shi couldn’t ask her son’s father for help. Surely, as long as she didn’t come see him in person, he wouldn’t mind? Unless it was a-Yao’s half-brother who would have a problem, or a-Yao’s half-brother’s mother? Because Meng Shi is such a lovely mother, so surely it wasn’t her fault.

No, Meng Shi would say, no, of course not, it’s just– it wasn’t—

But when Meng Shi’s mind tries to figure out who to blame, it stutters, skips, and stops. She doesn’t want to hurt or blame anyone– in this fantasy world where Meng Shi is being invited onto the television show, she and her husband’s ex-wife have a polite but cool relationship. They both want what’s best for their children, and sometimes what’s best is divorce, no matter what anyone says.

(Meng Shi might be a bit shallow– she might even be a bit stupid– but she is not cruel. Kindness is one of the few things she has never had to work to embody.)

Meng Shi doesn’t have a good answer for this pretend television host. She scratches the question from her fantasy and starts over.

She would explain how she wasn’t supposed to contact her son’s father until her son was eighteen, so that her lover’s other child wouldn’t feel hurt. That way, a-Yao and Meng Shi would make one big happy family with Meng Shi’s lover and a-Yao’s half-brother. The host would nod kindly, would pull up one of those beautiful family photos, like the kind that are already in the frame when you go to the store– but this time, it would be Meng Shi’s family, all four of them dressed nicely and smiling. The audience would coo in appreciation and Meng Shi would duck, embarrassed, but secretly pleased.

The host would ask Meng Shi if there was anything else that she wanted to talk about that day, and Meng Shi would say well, I was hoping to show off my kids a little bit—

(In the fantasy, Meng Shi considers both her son and her stepson to be her kids.)

The host would agree, of course, and the studio audience would burst into applause as both boys walked onstage. A-Yao’s half-brother looks like a-Yao– since they’re brothers– but he’s older by a year, if Meng Shi is remembering what her lover told her correctly, and so a bit taller and a bit stronger. They wave to the crowd, and sit down on the couch next to Meng Shi. The host makes a few shallow compliments of the boys– what handsome young men, what a good pair of brothers, they look like very obedient sons!

And then the host asks, but where is their father?

On the bus, Meng Shi frowns. No, the host shouldn’t ask that kind of question. That’s too difficult for her to ask. Especially on a daytime talk show.

Meng Yao coughs, and Meng Shi absentmindedly rubs his back.

The radio is still going on. The radio host is telling the so-called Lin Daiyu to break up with her high school boyfriend while she goes to college. If it’s meant to be, it’ll still be meant to be after college– and if it isn’t, then it never was.

Meng Shi can’t make the television host stop asking the question. Where’s your husband? Couldn’t the rest of the happy family make it?

Meng Shi would say something clever in the moment, she’s certain, but if she can’t even think of it now, while she’s on the bus, then the studio audience would probably laugh. Something about a fake version of I Love my Family would be trending on Weibo.

Meng Shi also can’t make her husband– her future husband– appear in her daydream.

It’s lucky that there’s people waiting to get on the bus where Meng Shi and a-Yao get off, since Meng Shi had already forgotten to pull the stop wire. As it is, she barely remembers to get herself and a-Yao through the door before the bus closes.

It’s coming up on evening by the time that they arrive at the street of her lover’s home. It’s very grand, and much nicer than their own street– it’s all houses, for one thing, and not towering, scrap-built apartment buildings– and all those houses have their own yards.

“Mama,” a-Yao whines, uncharacteristically needy, “I don’t feel good.”

Meng Shi shushes him gently. “It’s alright, sweetling,” she murmurs, rubbing her son’s back. He’s almost as tall as she is, already. “Everything’s going to be alright in a few minutes. Okay?”

“Please,” a-Yao groans. He leans heavily against Meng Shi’s side. “I’m so tired.”

He’s burning up.

“Just a few minutes,” she says again. “Your papa will help us, and a-Yao will get all better.”

She wasn’t supposed to contact him until a-Yao turned eighteen, but a-Yao was so sick. Surely he wouldn’t mind– he had been so kind to Meng Shi all those years ago, so doting. Such a kind man wouldn’t turn away his own son.

Meng Shi looks down at the jewelry receipt. Beneath the phone number is an address, this one written in Meng Shi’s own handwriting. Not the refined handwriting of a company president.

It’ll all be okay, soon.

The wife is not cowering.

She is afraid, yes. This is not a context that she has ever expected to have to act within, and she is aware, with bone-deep certainty, that the dead are here.

And she has not been able to shout down the dead, today.

She stands up, although she is afraid of the reflection of the boy beside her own.

She plants her hands firmly on the granite countertop, leans forward until her forehead is nearly touching the mirror.

(Nearly.)

(She is still afraid of that greasy young boy in the mirror, but she’s done having a breakdown.)

“Why the hell are you in my home,” she demands, voice only barely wavering. This may not be a creature she understands, and it may be a phenomenon with which she is unfamiliar, but she knows more than enough about intruders and trespassers. Like at Zixuan’s birthday, all those years ago, or even when Cangse’s son had burst into one of their evening parties, shrieking about workers’ rights.

Which birthday had that been? His tenth, eleventh? He’d been far too young for whatever human garbage Guangshan had invited over to their home, at least. What kind of person interrupted a child’s birthday party with their petty squabbles?

That day had been a nightmare. She’d had to call 110, after that woman of Guangshan’s had shown up.

But—

It hadn’t been a call to the police for trespassing, had it? Or for causing a scene– which she had been doing, certainly, but it hadn’t been enough to call the police. Because it hadn’t been the police that she’d called, when she’d dialed 110. Maybe the police had come after, after the money had been dispersed to seal people’s mouths.

It had been an ambulance that had come.

She drags her eyes up to make eye contact with the ghastly reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“You,” she spits.

The reflection– which has, up to this point, been still and half-comatose, with its eyes drooped and its mouth slumped in a frown– finally smiles.

“Me,” it agrees.

It’s the middle of Zixuan’s eleventh birthday party when the doorbell rings.

He’s grateful for the interruption. Yanli hadn’t been able to come today, since she had a cold, and Wanyin and Wuxian were being mean ‘cause they didn’t like Zixuan, and Huaisang was on their side ‘cause he liked them more, and Wangji didn’t even like going to parties in the first place. Zixun had kept getting mad at Wuxian and Wanyin, and had even thrown a punch, which was when Auntie took him back home, so now Zixuan is alone with a bunch of people who don’t like him.

Miss Qin told Zixuan to wait in the living room while she got the door, which he tolerated for about five minutes before Wuxian started throwing popcorn at him and Zixuan left before he decided to throw something back.

Miss Qin is standing in the doorway, and Zixuan collides heavily with her, seeking comfort. “Auntie,” he says, “who is it? You’re missing the party.” Wuxian only behaves when there’s an adult besides Uncle Jiang in the room.

He turns to look at the people in the doorway. It’s a lady, a little younger than Mom, and she’s standing with a boy who looks like he’s a little younger than Zixuan.

“H-hey there,” the woman says, sounding nervous. She leans forward, the way grown-ups always do when they want to seem friendly. “You can call me Auntie Meng, okay? I’m a friend of your father’s.”

Oh, okay. Zixuan’s met a lot of his dad’s friends, and most of them are way more awkward than this lady is. Plus, she brought a kid who’s almost Zixuan’s age. Maybe they’ll get along.

“Don’t talk to him,” Auntie Qin snaps, moving Zixuan behind her.

Zixuan steps away from her side.

“Why not?” he asks. “Auntie, if she’s one of Dad’s friends, why can’t she talk to me?”

“If who’s one of my friends?” Dad asks, coming out of nowhere. He’d gone to his office a while ago, leaving Zixuan and his guests to watch a movie in the den, and Zixuan had kind of figured that he’d stay there for a while.

“…Oh,” Dad finally says. “It’s… Mai something, right? Mai Su?”

It’s never good when Dad forgets someone’s name. It means he doesn’t actually care.

“Meng Shi,” the lady corrects, quietly. She pulls the boy closer to her side. “I– I called the other day, Guangshan, you told me to come over?”

“Dad,” Zixuan says, “they can come in, right? You said I could invite whoever I wanted.”

“No, a-Xuan,” Dad says. “Just let me take care of this, okay?”

“Take care of what?”

The lady in the doorway looks like she’s about to cry, and Dad looks like he’s about to start arguing with her, and Auntie Qin always takes Zixuan away when Mom and Dad fight, so wouldn’t it be best that Zixuan take at least the boy back to the party with him? Just to finish the movie?

Zixuan thinks that the boy in the doorway might be glaring at him, but it's hard to tell. They're kind of hidden in his bangs. But it's not like he could be any worse than Wanyin or Wuxian or even Huaisang, and there's plenty of cake and it might be nice to have someone to hang out with who doesn't gang up on him.

"Nothing," Jin Guangshan says, sharply. "Go and play with Wanyin and Huaisang."

"But, Dad–"

"Zixuan, leave. This is a conversation for adults."

Zixuan scowls. He looks back at the boy in the doorway once– he’s still glaring, and Zixuan would insist if only the boy would stop glaring at him– before stomping down the hallway.

(This is the beginning of the story, for Jin Zixuan. He doesn't know that the story started several days ago, and ten years ago, and fourteen years in the future.)

(That's not his fault. You can't start a story from when you weren't there.)

Mrs. Jin stares at the woman in her entryway with open disdain.

She's never been blind to her husband's dalliances, but usually he's at least smart enough to use a condom. Or to make sure that his partner is on the pill, or to at least buy a day-after pill for her.

But the woman in the entryway is dressed like she's going to go to a nightclub, not have a business meeting with the CEO of a company. Her son, standing next to her, is dressed like he's about to tuck himself into bed– and he looks it, too. What kind of mother is this woman, to have dragged her plainly ill son out without even bothering to make sure that he looks respectable?

"Guangshan," Mrs. Jin says, "I see that your indiscretions have finally caught up with you."

The woman in the entryway stiffens upright, then slumps.

"I just wanted to work out the logistics," the woman says. "I won't fight you on the– the paternity test" –she stutters over the words, like she's not used to saying such technical terms– "but, a-Yao is just– he's really sick. I only need a little bit of money, just enough to buy him some antibiotics and some traditional medicine. And then, after the results get back, we can– we can work out child support? And– custody, and everything?"

Jin Guangshan scoffs, which spares Mrs. Jin the effort.

"I'm not giving you one red cent until I've seen some evidence that this is my child," he declares. "After we have the paternity test, I'd be willing to loan you a small amount of money. Until Meng Yao recovers."

The woman hunches her shoulders. She’s a classical beauty, the kind of woman that Guangshan’s always thirsted after. Timid and restrained, as opposed to his wife’s fiery Sichuan disposition.

The boy standing next to her stares up at both of them. It’s almost– almost– accusatory.

“Please,” the woman says. “He’s sick, we just– just a little money, just to get medicine…”

“Go beg from the neighbors,” Mrs. Jin suggests. The woman in the entryway slumps even more.

(The end is coming. Just a few more minutes.)

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Meng Shi was supposed to be confident, and seductive, and Guangshan was supposed to be happy to see her, and even though his wife wouldn’t be, she would understand. That was the whole point. Everyone was supposed to understand.

Instead, Meng Shi is a pathetic twenty-eight-year-old who barely graduated high school, with greasy hair and her son in pajamas, begging for money from a rich man and his wife.

Meng Shi hadn’t wanted anyone to be a villain.

“Please,” Meng Shi says. “He’s sick. And– and, Guangshan, he’s your son, you told me, you said everything would be fine, you told me—”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Guangshan snaps. He’s being so cruel, nothing like he was way back when he was seducing Meng Shi, before a-Yao was born. When Meng Shi had told him she was pregnant, he’d seemed so happy. He’d explained things to her, about prenuptial agreements and his wife and how he and his wife were only together for the business sense of it, so Meng Shi would have to wait for them to get together. She’d understood, then, why couldn’t Guangshan understand now?

“Please,” Meng Shi begs. This isn’t how things were supposed to go at all. It was meant to be a romantic reunion, not this. This isn’t something that Meng Shi would ever want to recount to anybody.

It’s not even sunny out anymore.

This isn’t the reunion that Meng Shi had believed in.

“How many times do you have to be told to leave,” Guangshan hisses. “I keep telling you to get the paternity test done, and then you’ll get your money.”

“But–” Meng Shi is reaching her breaking point. “He needs medicine today, Guangshan. I can’t afford the antibiotics…”

“If you can’t afford medicine for your child, then what kind of mother are you?” Guangshan’s wife demands.

Meng Shi breaks.

“I am a good mother!” she shrieks. “I took care of a-Yao alone for eleven years, and I never asked for anything until now! A-Yao is a good son who gets good grades, and he is as good a person as he is because I am his mother! I am a good mother!”

“Shut up,” Guangshan orders, glancing over his shoulder. “What kind of mother are you, if you’re going to start arguments with your child’s father, huh? Especially right in front of the boy!”

Meng Shi breathes heavily. That’s right, she shouldn’t fight with Guangshan in front of a-Yao, not when he’s sick. She’s setting a bad example for her son.

(It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Guangshan was supposed to be happy to see her. He was supposed to remember her name, at least.)

“Get the paternity test,” Guangshan says. “If this boy is really related to me, then we can talk about child support. Okay?”

“Please—”

“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” Guangshan interrupts. “It’s my son’s birthday, a-Shi. You don’t want to ruin things, do you?”

Meng Shi stares. No, she doesn’t want to ruin things. She’s never wanted to ruin anything. In her mind, no one is the villain. They’re just… everyone has their own circumstances, but Meng Shi just wants to get along with everyone.

No one is the villain in Meng Shi’s mind, especially not herself.

(The end is coming soon. Don’t worry.)

Jin Zixuan has always hated power outages.

Back when he was a little kid– still living out in the stupid country, three buses and two subway lines away from the mall and school and the city & society as a whole– there’d been dozens of power outages. It’d been years ago, back before the infrastructure was really in place. At the slightest wind the power lines would be down. It was worse in storms, with how poorly constructed the pylons out there were, the slightest hint of static electricity in the air would knock out their power.

It was the darkness of his home turning it into something unfamiliar, something alien. He would call out for Auntie Qin, searching for someone who knew that the house hadn’t changed, who knew where he was and how to get to him. Someone safe.

The hallways always seemed so much longer when the power was out. With Zixuan needing to keep his hand on one wall in order to ground himself, even though Auntie Qin would scold him about it after the fact.

His was a home that was never meant to look lived in.

The power outages of his childhood, of course, were so much easier than this one. Those power outages were expected, at least a little bit– that was part of the trade-off, for living out in the country. And since they were expected, Zixuan also knew that they would end.

(Even now, with the more stable powerlines, Zixuan is so paranoid about power outages in his home that he keeps a flashlight in every room, along with extra batteries. Yanli teases him about it, says it’s just like when they were little and a-Xuan was scared of the dark, but it’s not the darkness that frightens Zixuan. It’s the not having a choice in the darkness.)

The last power outage that Zixuan remembers happened at his childhood home. They’d moved out shortly after that– it must’ve been the straw that had broken the camel’s back, that last power outage. Even now, Zixuan remembered that last power outage. Wanyin, Wuxian, Wangji and Xichen had all been over– which is probably why he remembers it so well, considering how rarely Zixuan had friends over.

(Hadn’t someone else been there, Zixuan?)

It had… it had been his birthday, hadn’t it. That was why that particular straw had broken the camel’s back so thoroughly. Power outages were one thing, but on someone’s birthday? Ruining the party?

Zixuan’s breath catches in his throat.

It hadn’t been the power outage that had ruined the party, had it. Not even the thing that had ended the party.

His parents had been fighting, like usual, but not with each other. THere had been someone else there, someone who wasn’t invited. And it had been so dark in the house, when Zixuan had been slowly moving through the hallway from the den to the front door, searching for Miss Qin and his parents, that he couldn’t help but see the full scene out on the street.

The lady who had said she was Dad’s friend. Mom and Dad, bracketing the front door. The thunderhead finally breaking and drenching their neighborhood with a torrential downpour.

The body of a boy lying on the street, not moving.

That was what had ended the party. Dad had insisted on getting Zixuan’s guests out of the house through the back door, and had confined Zixuan to his room, where he couldn’t see the front yard and the stairs down to the street and the woman kneeling desperately next to the body of the boy who looked to be about Zixuan’s age, if not younger, and the blood being washed away down the sewer like nothing had happened.

“Oh,” Zixuan says.

“Oh.”

“No,” Jin Guangshan says. “No, I w-w-wasn’t. Not at all. When she’d told me she was p-pregnant, it was– it was all I c-could do to not f-f-force her to ab-bort. Like d-during the O-one Child P-policy.”

The words are coaxed out of his throat like he’s been hypnotized. That’s a convenient excuse for whatever’s going on, isn’t it? Hypnotism would handily explain all of this nonsense, with a false shade that knows too much. Guangshan is a child of technology, he’s not some backwater fool who believes in ghosts and spirits. That kind of thing belongs in Hong Kong cinema. Even if this isn’t a ghost, if it’s some kind of delusional attempt at vengeance, it’s not the kind of thing that happens to men like Guangshan. He’s immune to the consequences of these things.

The talk show host clicks their tongue. The bright amber eyes won’t let go of Guangshan’s own.

“That’s a shame,” they say. “Did he have a change of heart? Once he realized the depth of his illness?”

Jin Guangshan can’t breathe. He’s been struggling with his lungs, lately, but that’s not why he can’t breathe just right now. Just right now, it’s the miasma of death that’s keeping the oxygen from his throat, now.

“I-is that wh-what you w-w-want to h-hear? Sure, fine, I reg-g-gret it. I w-w-wish I ha…had b-brought them both into my f-f-family. Adopted the b-bastard.”

The glowing yellow eyes– for the first time since they’ve been staring at Jin Guangshan– narrow. Instead of the open, voyeuristic curiosity of a talk show host, it’s the sort of naked hostility that Jin Guangshan has seen on beggars on the side of the road. People who would kill him, if they lived in one of those uncivilized countries on the edge of the world. His heart is tightly gripped by terror, beating in his chest so loudly that he can barely hear himself think.

“Is that so?” the talk show host asks, so gently. “Do you really mean it, sir?”

Jin Guangshan chokes out a cough. “Of c-course. Whatever.” He means whatever the talk show host wants him to mean, will say whatever they want him to say in order to end this ghastly encounter.

“Do you– do you want me t-t-to say so? To t-tell the p-p-p-public ab-bout my s-son?”

The shadow cocks its head. Its eyes are still narrowed in pure resentment.

“I’ll d-do it. Whatever you w-want me t-to say, I will.”

The shadow’s golden eyes film over with a blood-red crimson. A bright white, crescent-moon smile cuts across the plain black face.

“Promise?”

She had had nothing to do with her husband’s little dalliance. She always tried to keep herself out of the way of her husband’s extramarital affairs, avoided thinking about the way that she could have been a happy wife if only she was someone else’s wife. She was always fine with it, as long as she didn’t have to face it. As long as she had her own son.

As long as Guangshan managed to keep his bastards off her doorstep.

He had managed it until Zixuan was eleven. That was when everything started falling apart, with that tart and her offspring showing up on their doorstep. In the middle of Zixuan’s party, at that. The boys had already been squabbling, and that harlot showing up had done nothing to improve the day.

(A distant, long-buried part of her balks at how she remembers the woman. No matter how improper, no woman deserved—

She throws more dirt over that long-buried part of herself.

Still. No woman deserved to watch her child die.)

She had had her son with her, her son who had looked like Zixuan and who had looked so angry and who had stumbled towards her and Guangshan until Guangshan had shoved him away—

That son is staring at her from her bathroom mirror. He looks even angrier than he had that stormy January day all those years ago, when he’d been standing in front of the door swaying feverishly from side to side.

He stands perfectly still, now, next to her own reflection.

“What the hell is it that you want,” she demands. She’s braced herself on the granite countertop, glaring down the malevolent entity that’s invaded her home.

(She doesn’t think about how really, she’s just glaring down a twelve-year-old.)

(Twelve? All those years ago, he had said that it was his birthday, too, so if he was older than Zixuan—

But if he was younger?)

She slams her fists on the granite countertop. “I said, what the hell do you want!”

The child in the mirror doesn’t answer.

Maybe– maybe that’s part of the curse. He’s trapped in reflections, so he can only repeat what other people say. That’s a silly rule, more something out of some imperial ghost story or some Hong Kong horror flick, but this is a silly situation. It’s right out of some American ghost flick, the kind of thing that she hasn’t really watched since she was in college.

“What,” she says. “Are you seeking retribution? Here to slay my family for how we wronged you in life?”

The reflection says nothing.

She spits. It’ll leave a stain on the mirror, like when Zixuan was young and just starting to brush his teeth by himself, but she doesn’t care.

“You’ll have to kill me before you touch my son, you bastard,” she spits. “You can’t fucking touch him. I’m his mother, you son of a bitch. I won’t let you hurt my son.”

The reflection smiles with all its yellow, mildewing teeth.

“Good.”

Jin Zixuan swallows drily.

"I know who you are," he says. He keeps staring into the darkness ahead of him. He doesn't want to turn around, doesn't want to see those accusing eyes from his eleventh birthday party, the woman who had appeared at the door with his father's business phone number scrawled on an old receipt and the little boy, just Zixuan's age, who had stared at all of them as though he were already dead and knew exactly when they all would die, too.

Or maybe he doesn't want to see that, in fact, that wasn't how the boy had stared at all of them at all. Maybe Zixuan isn't so much scared of the ghost of a dead child as he is of having been wrong about the dead child, before he died.

"I know."

Jin Zixuan is scared. And he is sad, and he is guilty, and he is ashamed. He is all of these things, and he feels like a child besides, the way he had at that birthday party when he was confused at the sudden appearance of two intruders, when none of the adults would explain anything to any of the children there, even after his father had sworn and cursed at the surprise guest.

The surprise guest always seems to find his way to Jin Zixuan's father's homes. Last time, he had been with his mother.

His mother isn't here now. Nor is Zixuan's.

"I'm sorry," Jin Zixuan whispers. If he could, he would've said this at that long-ago birthday party. Perhaps he should have, perhaps not– Jin Zixuan bears the guilt of his parents' actions well, even if perhaps he doesn't deserve to. When Jin Zixuan was a child, he had only wanted to celebrate his birthday, to have one day without his mother and father quarreling with each other, one day to invite his friends over instead of the children of his parents' friends. Perhaps that was selfish of him, or perhaps he deserved a break.

He didn't get it, of course. He barely gets it now, even after he's come to understand that there is a little boy behind him who never got the chance to grow up.

Jin Zixuan squeezes his umbrella handle tightly. It's like that story he'd heard once, about that child who'd forgotten his umbrella and so never even got the chance to attend middle school. A cautionary tale. Not something that happened to real people. Not something that happened to brothers, half or otherwise.

"I know."

The shade behind Jin Zixuan doesn't say anything else.

Zixuan should take another step forward. Should keep moving. He has to get to his father's bedroom eventually, right? And when that happens, he'll demand to know the truth, insist that his father tell him the full story of what had happened that day, more than fourteen years ago already. Insist on knowing the truth of that woman in the dress and the boy in the pajamas, and the truth of what had happened to Miss Mo, and the truth of his father's business associate's daughter, the one who had the same infirmity of the joints that had run in the Jin family for generations. Zixuan would demand the truth from a dying man in order to assuage the already dead. Would insist on ending the long streak of lost causes from the Jin family.

"I wish," Zixuan says, remaining perfectly still in the perfect inky darkness of the hallway, "that I had gotten the chance to know you. To– to get to know you."

There's an icy breeze in the hallway, but it doesn't raise Zixuan's hair on end anymore, doesn't cause him any gooseflesh. It's a bit like a laugh.

"I know."

Zixuan sighs shakily, relieved. He'd been frightened again– of what? Of not being forgiven, maybe. For having been a selfish child, or for having had the chance to grow out of it, or for having had a mostly charmed life living with both his mother and his father. Of not having noticed that the boy had been dwelling in the same halls that Zixuan had been living in with Yanli for the past few years.

Or maybe he'd been frightened of being forgiven, but being cast aside. Of the shade not caring to have had the chance to get to know Zixuan the way Zixuan had wanted.

(This isn't a ghost story.

But Zixuan isn't afraid of ghosts, anymore, of creepy-crawlies and things that go bump in the night.

That's good.)

"I– I wish I had invited you to the party," Zixuan adds, awkwardly. He's never been good at this, at apologizing or at telling people that he'd been the one to invite them somewhere. "You and the woman you came with. If I had invited you, then I don't think my dad– our dad– would've said no. It was my birthday, y'know?"

"I know."

Jin Zixuan's shoulders relax half an inch.

"Mine too."

Jin Zixuan's shoulders hunch once more.

"Yours too? Like" —his breath catches in his throat— "It wasn't your birthday too, was it?"

"Mine too."

The ghost is more insistent, this time.

"Oh," Jin Zixuan says, feeling small. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't– I didn't know, I swear."

"I know."

Jin Zixuan swallows again, and forces his fingers to flex around the umbrella.

He wants to take another step forward. Wants to demand answers from his father. His fear and his guilt and his shame and his sadness are being eroded beneath a sudden wave of anger, at the fact that this is a child who had died on his birthday because Jin Zixuan's father was too proud to admit to having had an affair.

"I'm sorry," Jin Zixuan whispers, once more.

"I know."

Jin Zixuan takes a deep breath. Slowly, slowly, he turns around– each foot inching minutely into a hundred-eighty degree turn– and stares back at the flickering light of the entranceway and the lamp in the living room, neither more than three meters from Jin Zixuan. He's barely a step into the hallway, no matter how long it feels like he's been walking.

Standing in the entranceway, wearing those pajamas from so many years ago– his t-shirt proudly proclaims "SPORTS DAY 2010"– is that greasy-haired boy that Jin Zixuan remembers.

Or, not quite. Jin Zixuan remembers a frightening looking boy, one who looked like he might get into fights at school and one who looked like he was glaring everyone into submission.

But Jin Zixuan is twenty-five, and this ghost is now and forevermore eleven.

This ghost is a little boy. The glare that Jin Zixuan remembers now comes across more as a fierce determination to stay upright, combined with the sort of red-eyed awareness that comes from non-drowsy cold medicine. His skin is washed-out and pale the same way that Zixuan remembers, not just from the years that he's been dead. From here, Zixuan can spot the similarities– the boy has his father's dimples, even if they are hidden by a frown, and his limbs are Jin-gangly in a way that can't be explained by adolescent awkwardness. His eyes have a bit of the Jin heaviness, but the rest of him is the spitting image of the young lady that he'd been with that day.

Ah, that’s not quite right. From here, Zixuan can see that the young boy’s eyes are flooded with tears, a wetness that almost makes him seem to still be alive.

The dead do not weep. The dead do not sniffle. The dead do not hold childish grudges that more evoke whiny complaints than blood-soaked vendettas.

But there is a dead child in front of Zixuan. What other kind of grudge could he bear, than one that is tear-soaked with snot running across it?

"I'm sorry," Jin Zixuan says again. The words seem almost engraved in his tongue, but what else can he say to his dead half-brother?

"I know."

Jin Zixuan takes a step towards the ghost, despite every instinct in his body screaming at him not to, begging him to keep running down that hallway, no matter how infinite it seems, to run to his mother and his father and away from this sickly dead creature, this ghast this spirit this curse this haunting—

Jin Zixuan takes another step towards his dead half-brother. The afterimage of the boy barely passes Zixuan's belly button, and Zixuan kneels down in order to try and compensate for the height difference. At least so that he could see the boy's eyes, instead of the boy staring resolutely at Zixuan's waist.

Zixuan's dead half-brother's eyes are a dark, watery brown. Watery beyond the tears beading at his eyelashes, watery in a way that makes the irises look washed out. Lighter than most peoples' eyes, that was Jin.

…Usually. Zixuan didn't know enough about his dead half-brother's mother to know if that ran in the family, too.

"I'm sorry," he says, again.

(He doesn't know what to say. Even if his half-brother were still alive, he wouldn't know what to say. Zixuan's never been good with words, but this is a bit of an extreme scenario, with his half-brother already more than ten years dead– and dead at eleven, at that.

Or. Dead on the day of his eleventh birthday. Did that count, as eleven? Or would Granny Meng erase that little extra numeral, keep Jin Zixuan's dead half-brother eternally ten years old and eleven-twelfths, since she couldn’t get him to cross the bridge to his next life?

How many hours had kept Zixuan's dead half-brother from being properly eleven?)

"I know."

Jin Zixuan tries his best to keep breathing. It's difficult, when you're face-to-face with the dead come back. Every instinct in your body is screaming, begging you to flee from whatever monster it is that you've encountered, and every instinct outside your body is trying to force you to join the dead in a sort of morbid inertia. Objects that are alive tend to stay alive, until acted on by a force outside the living.

"I wish you hadn't died," Jin Zixuan says. It seems the proper thing to say, considering that this boy doesn't have a place on the Jin family altar. And besides that, Zixuan doesn't know if he can really honor an eleven-year-old who died on his birthday, especially after he'd been cast out by his own father.

(An alive thing should remain alive. Unless it is acted upon by an outside force.)

"I know."

Jin Zixuan takes another deep breath. It smells empty, like the apartment always does. He'd been expecting the scent of graveyard dust, maybe, or incense. Even ozone. In ghost stories, in horror movies, the dead always smelled of something.

But this isn't a ghost story. Remember?

"Can you tell me your name?" Zixuan asks.

Silence.

"I guess– well, I don't know if you know," Zixuan says, awkwardly, "but my name is Zixuan. Family name is Jin."

“…Yao."

"Jin Yao?" Zixuan considers. Would 'Ziyao' do? The characters didn't flow well together, but Zixuan was no expert in telling the fortunes of a given name. Maybe it was one of the luckiest names this side of the Yangtze.

"Surnamed Meng. Given name, Yao."

“…Ah." Zixuan should've realized. Yao had never had the chance to be accepted into the Jin family. "Meng Yao. Of course."

Jin Zixuan's dead half-brother keeps standing there, staring at nothing.

Jin Zixuan keeps kneeling in front of him, staring into the ghost's eyes.

"I'm very happy," he eventually says, "to have been given the chance to know your honorable family name, Meng Yao."

Finally, some awareness comes into the ghost's eyes. Instead of the same washed-out stillness that Zixuan has come to expect, there is a spark of being. It almost makes the ghost seem alive, and almost makes everything that's happened seem real. It almost seems like the way the ghost might have looked, back when it was alive and back then, before he had gotten sick. The way Meng Yao might have looked in school, the way he might've looked if Jin Zixuan had ever gotten the chance to meet his half-brother when his half-brother was alive, if they'd ever crossed paths in school or if they'd ever even seen each other on the street. A chance encounter, not one arranged by illness and birthdays and fathers.

"It's very nice to meet you, Jin Zixuan."

Finally, one of those tears falls.

Jin Zixuan– despite the anger and shame and sadness and fear, despite the base animal instinct shrieking for him to turn and run and to leave the unquiet dead to the unquiet wastes, despite the fact that he still does not know whether or not he will live through this encounter with the people that yet dwell beneath the Yellow Springs– smiles.

This was never a ghost story.

Remember?

“Mine too,” Meng Yao says.

His supposed father stares at him, something like disgust crawling across his face. Mom had said that his father would be happy to meet him, would be proud to have such a bright son. Meng Yao hadn’t ever completely believed her, really– not that he didn’t trust his mom, but she could be kind of naive, sometimes. Meng Yao knew that a father who never contacted his son or the mother of his child would never be happy to meet his son.

He’d still hoped, though.

“Your what,” his father’s wife demands. Is she his wife? She could be his sister, or something. Meng Yao doesn’t for sure know everything that’s happening right now. He just wants to go home.

“My birthday,” Meng Yao says. “I’m eleven years old today.” It is the twentieth, isn’t it? He’s been losing track of days, lately, but he’s pretty sure. Mom always says that birthdays are important, in order to thank someone for being born into this world. No matter how hard that month is, no matter how much Mom cries while she looks at the bills, no matter how many times Meng Yao has to go trade in cans and bottles just to bring home ten yuan, Mom always makes sure to get a cake and a present for Meng Yao’s birthday.

It’s important to celebrate people’s birthdays.

“It is not, you little liar,” Meng Yao’s father snaps. “Meng Shi, if you’ve told this child to lie just to try and get some money—”

“He’s not lying!” Mom shouts. “It is, it is a-Yao’s birthday. He’s just– he’s been sick, it slipped my mind. He’s eleven.”

Meng Yao takes a step forward, and the woman standing next to his father flinches. Maybe Meng Yao’s contagious, that would be funny. Or maybe the woman just thinks that Meng Yao is filthy.

That’s less funny.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” Meng Yao asks. He has to force his eyes to focus on his father’s face, and the smile he pastes on makes him feel even more nauseous. “Aren’t you– aren’t you—” Meng Yao loses his sentence as he breaks into a flurry of vicious coughing. It feels like his throat is coated with blood, even though he knows it’s just phlegm. “Aren’t you happy to meet me?”

Meng Yao’s father just looks even more disgusted.

Meng Yao takes another step forward.

“A-Yao, stop,” Mom says, but Meng Yao doesn’t care.

“Don’t tell me you never wanted to meet me?” Meng Yao asks. “Mom said– Mom said—”

Meng Yao starts coughing again, and this time he can’t stop. He can’t breathe, either, not with how heavily he’s coughing and with how little time he has between clearing his throat and choking on his phlegm. There’s people who are yelling, and Mom is trying to rub his back, but Meng Yao can’t hold still long enough for that to make him feel better.

Meng Yao takes another step forward, still coughing, and that’s when his dad shoves him.

For just a moment, gravity stops affecting him. He even stops coughing, as his eyes meet the sky and he topples over backwards.

And then he hits the stairs, and he can’t get his bearings enough to stand up, and he keeps rolling and there hadn’t been this many stairs when he and Mom had climbed up to the front door, had there?

Everything hurts. Everything hurts.

A-Yao just wants to go home. When he goes home, everything will be okay. Mom will wish him a happy birthday, and everything will be okay, and they won’t even need Meng Yao’s stupid dad.

Someone screams.

A crack of thunder rings out at the exact same time that Meng Yao’s skull finally cracks against the pavement.

Finally, everything stops hurting.

Finally, everything stops.

(This is the end.)

(This is barely the beginning.)

Jin Guangshan is sobbing, now.

It’s the first time he’s cried in who even knows how long. He didn’t cry when his son was born, he didn’t cry when his parents died, he didn’t cry when he got diagnosed. He’s not the kind of man to whimper and cry at every little thing.

He’s sobbing now, though. Like an infant.

Jin Guangshan is, more than anything, terrified.

“P-please,” he begs. “Please, I’ll d-do anyth-th-thing. Please.”

The incarnadine eyes smooth up into two slender crescents.

“I think we all know that!” the talk show host says, and a lighthearted laugh echoes through Jin Guangshan’s room. Most talk shows are filmed in front of a live studio audience, aren’t they. Who’s watching him?

“But that’s not the question, Mr. Jin,” the talk show host says. Its crescent mouth opens and closes, but that’s the only proof there is that the shadow is speaking at all. “The real question is, what should you have done?”

Jin Guangshan sniffles wetly. “I d-don’t know.”

The talk show host hums, and there’s a disappointed chorus from the audience.

“That’s alright, that’s alright. It’s very simple, okay? You just have to die, Mr. Jin.”

Jin Guangshan stares, wide-eyed.

“No,” he says. “No, please—”

“You just have to die, Mr. Jin.”

“D-dammit, I said no! I won’t– w-won’t—”

“You just have to die, Mr. Jin.”

“Please, please, I’ll d-do anything—”

“You just have to die, Mr. Jin.”

Jin Guangshan coughs out a sob. “P-please. I’m n-not r-ready…”

The shadow’s smile vanishes, and its eyes narrow into anger.

“You just have to die, Dad.”

It’s not the voice of the talk show host anymore, not the voice of some studio-refined celebrity asking polite questions in order to tease out the truth. It’s a child, scratchy and stuffy like he has a cold, something like one of Zixuan’s classmates, or maybe Zixuan himself, even, or—

Or like that child at the front door, all those years ago.

(The story started fourteen years ago.

The story ends.)

(Remember, it's not a ghost story. This is just what happens when a father kills his son, when a son loses his mother, when two brothers never meet.

This is just revenge.)

In one moment, the story ends. The story ends with Meng Yao’s tear hitting the floor, with Jin Guangshan’s heart stopping, with his wife’s reflection being abandoned in the bathroom mirror, with light flooding in through the bathroom window, with the hallway lightbulb bursting, with Jin Zixuan’s legs collapsing beneath him, and with Jiang Yanli walking back into the penthouse.

The moment after the story ends, Jin Guangshan’s wife slams out of the bathroom, forcefully enough that the doorknob leaves a dent in the drywall. The moment after the story ends, Jin Zixuan is standing back up. The moment after the story ends, an illegitimate son is recognized by his father.

(Only on television, of course.)

The story has, finally, ended.

(The story ended fourteen years ago, when Meng Yao’s skull collided with the pavement.)

(The story ended just before a man and a woman met in a bar, twenty-four years ago.)

(The story has been over since before it began.)