She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

Memories mar the wood, pencil in the heights of children, and wear the scuff marks of well-loved feet. There are echoes that do not stop echoing, trapped in nooks and old curtains, until they’re found again—still screaming or laughing, voices dead or gone. What parts are undigested lie waiting.

The body becomes full of things it did not ask for. So, when a door opens, it is this: the first page of a menu.

I don’t know how to say hello or I miss you in Vietnamese.

The house surrounds us like a cocoon, and I wonder if Ba believed it would birth us as something new and precious.

This is probably what I’d planned all along in my secretive heart, the one that hides thoughts from me and simply wants instead.

I know this is a dream because I am not afraid of my father.

I imagine the hydrangea blooms under a bright moon, passing the house’s eyes and spying on me. Mistaking my silent mouth as a pot to fill, reaching in and planting another friend.

It’s the type of disappointment that clogs your lungs, and it’s here.

look at Đà Lạt, at Vietnam, and think Europe. What I see is a version of the place Mom and Ba left behind, and also where I could’ve grown up, with a language that I would know fluently, paternal family to possibly love me, and a history that would finally be known. All these things were taken from me, before I was even born.

The nostalgia is desperate to entrap me with hope.

History has left its mark among these sights, and erased others.

Here I’m cut too sharp. Here I’m a wound.

In daylight, a house is meant to be less menacing, but these walls are tall and patient, seemingly in want of a good dusting. It grows unease.

Us, lying in the dark. Me, wishing she’d tell me the pain will go away. Her, telling me I’m grown in ways that need to be guarded. It doesn’t matter, in the end, who’s opened who—just that you’re a girl and no one should touch you.

How does it feel to leave the things you love behind? Mom knows. Ba knows. My great-grandmother knows. It’s not like I want to go through this terrible thing, but I’ll never fully understand the intimacy of a home rooted in soil.

Something tells me our family never sat here to eat, but we are, and that is what matters: this place as ours, this place as healing. I know no other word to describe it.

listen at the door, ear pressed to wood. There’s a noise like pincers clicking. Wake up.

Alone, I can unspool the dream as memory.

Hope, longing for all the things I’ve already sworn off. This is why I need these acts of defiance, little hauntings that echo all that’s happened.

We are meeting somewhere between our worlds because if I am certain of anything, she is not of the living.

Each syllable cleaves into another. “C’est sa maison.” She breathes hard, desperate to be heard. “This is her house, and she’ll never leave.”

Our parents save such stories for the most random and disorienting moments to share, like while peeling hột vịt lộn. You learn to eat the whole fertilized egg that way. I’m lost for words over the million little ways we can still hurt for family we hardly know.

When I fall asleep, without her hand squeezing mine, it is a wandering darkness.

The house cradles me so I don’t scream.

The past can’t take more than what it already has.

Anything can be done before the fear sets in.

Revenge has always been easy to understand, but hunger implies that something can be filled. What is a ghost’s limit when they have no real body?

It slips in the teeth: broken floss, chicken skin, something for your tongue to consider removing.

And though I want to crawl back into bed, I stay still and do not move, because if the house settles, I do not want it to know that I can see it. That I am waking up.

This house. The ghosts. Who is eating whom?

There might not be a hell for houses, but this house never lets a scrap go to waste.

Is this how it feels to be a parent? Making impossible choices or avoiding them to survive yourself.

Ba was the youngest. His mom put him on a boat with her dreams. He came here and lived with his uncle. He was hers, but she wasn’t his, an ocean stretched between them. Not enough. There were nieces and nephews he never held, cousins I barely knew. So many things drowned between us.

The house’s spine quivers. It echoes in my body.

“Did you all die here?” I ask out loud, when really the question I mean is, Have I buried you well enough?

My hand searches for a pulse in the wall. Tame homeliness presses back, plain and forgettable. It doesn’t talk as Nhà Hoa does.

I should know better: my family language, the written form, the truth.

Only the hydrangeas grow, ruined and ethereal, more muscle than root.

Nhà Hoa quiets as I move through it, each motion a secret between us.

Cabinets close in squeals of laughter, doors crack their hinges in preparation of a day’s work, and curtains dance without a single breeze, and underneath it all is its real love language: scuttling legs and grating feelers as enthusiastic as a baby’s babble.

I carry his burden, and so it’s fair that he should have some of mine as well.

all I sense is dread unspooling under the birds’ glossy eyes and the silverfish’s clicking maw.

Under my breastbone, something is loose and wild.

The thumping stopped once I found what was hidden in the chimney. My sister, sleepwalking again, marked her height against Marion’s children. The food rots, no matter the refrigerator’s age, and now these walls release their animal scent.

This house can’t be left in boredom. It gets too many ideas.

When Nhà Hoa’s maw opens for the tourist season, the insects will have their fill of someone else.

I’m listening too. Something chews. Something gnaws.

Somewhere, in my world, are her relatives, the children of her siblings, but they’ll have all forgotten her name, in the same way that I do not know my mother’s mother’s mother’s name. There’s no place to find them anymore.

All the money he got building houses for other families, spent on a place that can never be owned.

My rage is silent, akin to grief, a body in anticipation of loss.