She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

One of the first villas the French built here. 1920. It’s old. The Little Paris of Vietnam,

This time, I don’t turn my back in the house’s direction. My body is tilted, so I can always see Nhà Hoa

This woman has her PhD in colonization, and I’m supposed to mindlessly defer to her?

I tell her all the things I learned from the internet or people with a uterus, and nothing that Mom had told me about when I got my period. A girl’s body is like a jar, Jade. Once you open it, the inside’s spoiled.

Lily waits, anxiously watching Ba tighten the bandage over my open palm. “Why this house?” I ask. “Your grandma worked here when she was little, but it was never hers, right?” Most of these villas belonged to French officers when first built in the early 1900s, and Alma had already told us who owned this one. On the wallpaper, another bird has been eaten by silverfish, giving it the texture of crushed tissue. Outside the rain lulls as if to leave us space to shout. “This is a good house.” Ba’s eyes level mine. “Good location.”

It is becoming more beautiful, after all, and a house must be clever when it has no feet or hands of its own.

Rather than an exorcism in this house, there will be a haunting.

“Yeah, I know,” says Florence. “I believe that you believe ghosts are real.”

Always in movies, shows, and based-on-true-events stories, the ghost is a girl or woman whose virginity or lack thereof is a moral lesson and whose mental state has grown fragile. Sometimes, the fight is not only for her own life but also for her born or unborn children. She torments the next female in line.

“Seems like it, huh?” Florence says. “Even dead, we’re the scariest thing.”

“You want to haunt a haunted house.”

This house won’t tell, but. She’s always underneath the bed.

“Jade.” The way she says my name is a sigh, the d barely there. “Không nên đến đây.” These words don’t match the shape of her mouth. They float in translation. You shouldn’t have come here.