The Ghost Bride

by Yangsze Choo

I liked the moon, with its soft silver beams. It was at once elusive and filled with trickery, so that lost objects that had rolled into the crevices of a room were rarely found, and books read in its light seemed to contain all sorts of fanciful stories that were never there the next morning.

Piled up in rigid pyramids, this largesse looked uncomfortably like funeral offerings.

Life was followed by death in the endless cycle of rebirth, if one believed the Buddhists. We were all nominally Buddhist I supposed, although my father, as a strict Confucianist, reserved a certain contempt toward them.

The problem with the dead was that they all wanted someone to listen to them. Each ghost I had encountered had a story that it was only too ready to share. Maybe it got lonely in the afterlife. Or perhaps those who lingered longest were the ones who could not bear to give up.

Being half-dead, despite its drawbacks, had been far more interesting than being constrained to my limited social circle.