Mi was paid a handsome sum from three dead husbands.
Although it was not customary for a woman to take three husbands, the surviving elders said it was like the days when husbands could take a wife and two concubines. In this way, Mi became the ghost bride of all three families. Each had a son who’d died in the epidemic. Each had married a dead son to Mi. They intended Mi to tend their ancestral home for the rest of her life.
Everybody knew that spirits who were well taken-care of would move on from their hauntings, and would not cause trouble. Perhaps if Mi took good care of them, they would pass on in the spirit world and walk the three bridges. Perhaps if they were satisfied by Mi’s care, they would not mind that the entire village had left behind a polluted Earth. The spirits would bless their descendants in space.
• • •
After the epidemic, the river fell several meters, turned gray, and reeked of crude oil. Nobody washed their clothes on the banks anymore. Nobody ate the carp anymore. Occasionally, Mi saw a figure rowing a bamboo raft down the river, before disappearing into the mist. In the early days of the disease, there was no sun, only fog.
• • •
Mi saw pictures of the silvery-blue city encased in domes where artificial sun showered the citadels and flowers bloomed in lush gardens, and children, fed on new rice strains, grew more than two meters tall. They had schools of engineering, medical advancements impossible with the gravity of Earth, and art forms that came to fruition only when people didn’t have to worry about hunger.
The night before her wedding day, she’d cried. She didn’t want to marry the dead, to become a ghost bride three times over, or to be left behind.
She was fourteen years old and all her life she’d loved the eldest Shin son. She dreamed that her parents would change their mind about leaving her. They’d say, of course, we need your help with the twins. You’re the only one they listen to when they throw those tantrums. You’re the one who taught them algebra and basic coding. They’d say, and we’d miss you. We love you, our daughter, as much as we love our sons. You are precious to us. Then they’d say, go pack all your things. They’d say, we asked the captain to reserve an extra cryogenic capsule.
And she dreamt that she’d wake up in space, just a few months before they reached our destination — they’d all sit on the terrace and gaze at the stars dying and birthing. The suns would explode in slow motion, golden reds and electric greens, colors she’d only seen in movies. Aboard the space craft, as they learned the new rules of gravity, the eldest Shin son would proclaim his love for Mi after realizing she wasn’t some snot-nosed kid anymore. They’d get married in a real ceremony. Not in a death ceremony.
• • •
Winter came. The air clung to her clothes, cold and heavy. She felt suffocated by spirits. Sometimes she caught fish with two heads from the river. These she promptly tossed back and they swam away, two heads bobbing. How long would it take for the contamination to leave Earth? Perhaps mutagens were embedded in the wildlife’s genetic material for generations to come. In the distance, Mi saw a spirit on a bamboo raft row across the polluted river.
All throughout the winter, she did as she was supposed to. Every month, she burned incense sticks which she held inside gold foil folded in the shape of a leaf. She placed a tea set in the altar of each family, and regularly pretended to pour tea into the cups. She left apples, which symbolized wisdom and peace. She found abalone washed up on the river banks, and this meant definite good fortune. She left grapes, which symbolized many descendants. Except all these descendants would be in space, perhaps waking now from cryogenic sleep to a life she would never know.
Spring came. The weather warmed and the river turned a light green. The bright color promised her that the poisons could clear. The air in her nostrils smelled fresh. She took peace in solitude.
On the fifth day of the fourth moon, she swept all the graves of her four families and offered rice, tea, and wine. She left offerings of horse chestnuts on her grandmother’s gravestone and chains of flowers for her grandfather’s gravestone. She peeled oranges and separated the segments. It was a daughter’s duty to prepare fruit. Although she paid the most attention to her grandmother and grandfather, she dusted hundreds of gravestones with a rabbit’s tail brush for the families of her three husbands: the Changs, the Zhus, and the Shins. She lit incense for their many ancestors.
• • •
It was a rainy day, and camellia bushes had begun to flower. The child crouched near the bushes. He plucked petal by petal from the camellias and ground them in his fists. When he turned to Mi, she saw his hair plastered to his ghostly forehead. Despite being soaking wet, a tuft still stuck out at the back. His hair would have been black in life, but his whole spirit had taken on a transparent form.
“Where is my family?” he demanded.
Mi pointed up at the sky.
“You don’t sweep my gravestone the way my mother did,” he said. “You’re supposed to lay flowers at the east, not at the west, dummy.”
Mi shrugged. “Be grateful I’m sweeping it.”
The boy opened and closed his mouth. His face contorted in anger. The tuft of hair wavered back and forth.
“It’s not like I want to do it,” Mi added.
The boy stood up to his full height and frowned. “I am the youngest son of the Chang family and my grandfather was the magistrate of the Eastern township in — ”
“1999,” Mi said. “I know.”
“Don’t interrupt me!” screeched the boy. His voice had become clearer and clearer. Less like a ghost’s, but like that of a boy’s. “You are my wife and you must respect me! Otherwise I will haunt you forever!”
“I was left behind by my family too,” said Mi.
“Oh,” said the boy. “Where did they go?”
Mi pointed up at the stars.
“Will they come back for you?” said the boy, smoothing out his tuft of hair nervously. “Even if you are a girl?”
“I don’t know,” said Mi. “They’re now in a different time.”
“Oh,” said the boy. He let the camellias fall to the ground. His palms, though transparent, were stained pink.
“Where do you go if you stop haunting me?”
“The bridge,” said the boy.
Mi relived the boy’s childhood with him. They played with kumquats, painted with crushed flower petals, and visited all his old haunts. He was sad to see his friends gone. After a few days, the soul left. From his grave sprouted new kumquat trees that never needed watering.
• • •
Around this time, she met the second dead husband, who was around thirteen and had pimples and a visible scar on his spirit face.
“Couldn’t they choose a better wife than you?” he spat.
“No,” said Mi.
“I wasn’t supposed to marry you,” he said.
“I know,” said Mi.
He went on and on about how his life was supposed to go, and who he was supposed to marry, and what property he was to inherit, and what he would have done with the fifteen cows bequeathed upon him—
“Cows are extinct now,” said Mi.
He glowered at her, and continued his tirade. Apparently, he had come from a falling dynasty in the Zhu family, and since his father had passed away, he had a grand plan to bring his family back to power through a tactical marriage and farming investments.
“Who will look after my mother now?” he wailed.
“She migrated to space,” said Mi. “Named your cousin her heir.”
At this, the boy sat down on a rock and put his chin in his hands. After what seemed like hours, he said: “Well then, I suppose there’s nothing more to it. If my mother’s well, I’m off to the next life.”
“Next life?” said Mi.
“One of the three bridges,” said the boy pragmatically. “I wasn’t good enough in this life to become a minor god, I wasn’t good enough to walk the path of Buddha, but I’m sure I was good enough to be granted a new life out in space. Pray I’ll be born to the Zhu family.”
What a tactical spirit, Mi thought.
• • •
“I wasn’t supposed to die, I wasn’t supposed to die,” he wept outside her windows.
Each night, Mi talked to him of bridges. Autumn turned into winter, and she shivered and invited the spirit inside to sit by the fire. Each night, she learned more of his regrets and hopes. She learned that his heart had stopped beating at birth, that it still had a murmur, that that he had had the blue fever four times, that he had had prosthetics installed — difficult to tell now in the spirit form. She learned that he lived a life in the mind, not in the body, and that he was afraid of forsaking all the wisdom he’d gained in this life by moving on from the village.
“Beyond life,” she told him, “There is the silver bridge, where you become reborn as a god. There is the golden bridge, and if you cross this, you escape the cycle of rebirth.”
“The golden and silver bridge are rare crossings,” said the spirit.
“Then, there is the bridge of forgetfulness, where you drink the soup that will clear your memory before you reincarnate.”
Each time they talked of this bridge, the spirit resolved that he could not forget, must not forget. He told her that he’d escape the old goddess who brewed the soup. He wanted to remember his grief and bring it into the next life.
Eventually, he resolved that he would cross the bridge without drinking the soup. He said he’d write to her, tell her how it went. Mi never got word.
• • •
She came to see things that she couldn’t see before. She could see the outlines of spirits and their souls. Sometimes spirits possessed two or three souls that had different ideas about where they wanted to go, and all of them settled to haunt.
Mi learned to speak to all the spirits who still resided in her village. Her eyes sharpened to the most minute of air pockets, of willow branches moving under the weight of a soul, of the sound of spirits sighing.
• • •
Mi no longer wanted to go to space.
It was around this time that she thought that it occurred to her to visit another village by foot. Perhaps she’d find another ghost bride.
Mi followed the path next to the river where the plants grew thick and thorny. She bandaged the welts as they rose on her calves. She cut aside mutagenic plants and saw too the familiar plants of old flowering again. She walked until the river became blue. Years of pollution had dissipated.
She walked and walked until she could no longer, so she slept under the stars where her family and their descendants had settled, many light years away. She slept and dreamed that the bamboo raft waited for her, had always been waiting. The figure that she had seen many times rowing down the river was no lost spirit. He was the river god, dressed in kingfisher blue. In her dreams, the river god’s raft brought them to a bridge.
