* Author : L. Chan

* Narrator : Julia Patt

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

Chasing Flowers

by L. Chan

Lian’s world is flat. Not just the landscape, which extends as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon under the rolling twilight flux. Not just the houses, dotting the slate grey earth and the thunder cloud sky. Not just her folded servants, who used to pad around silently with their painted smiles and their unblinking eyes, unfurling from their hiding places to bring her the same dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hundred years.

Lian ate regularly for fifty years before she realised that the food tasted of nothing but fire and ashes. Before she realised that she wasn’t hungry and had never been since her death. Not down here, where the sun peeks over the hills at the edge of the land and she still doesn’t know if it’s rising or setting because it’s been stuck there for the hundred years since she died.

Diyu isn’t so bad. It’s better when you have money, but what isn’t? Lian doesn’t get money anymore. Body to bones, bones to dust. Her gravestone pocked by water, bleached by lichen and scoured clean by the wind. Her brothers and sisters ceased burning offerings for her shortly after her parents died. They’d be down here too somewhere, her entire family. If there was a torture here for those who’d broken their daughter’s body and dreams, she hasn’t found it yet. Bodies healed, dreams did not but Lian never found it in her heart to seek out her kin’s suffering.

She’s been waiting for a long time. Not for money or food or even to expunge her hillock of karma. Not for her family, but for someone else. Lian’s been asking around, paying itinerant souls for information, roaming the eighteen courts herself when the money ran out, till her flat paper shoes were worn to shreds and the razor grit turned her footprints scarlet.

The sky is raining ashes, grey snow; the air is heavy with hope. Once a year, the gates are open. Once a year, the dead are free for a month and then to return. The gates of Diyu are of stained wood; darkened by age, lashed together with the sinews of the dead and blasted clean by the screams of sinners. The gatekeepers flank the open portal, tall as houses, thickly muscled. One had the head of an ox, wickedly curved horns and nails of brass. The other had the head of a horse, mane tangled and matted, nostrils flaring and venting steam like a locomotive. Their eyes narrow at Lian’s approach. Not all ghosts get to leave hell and they can smell a runner a mile off. She’s not used to speed and she no longer has a beating heart or breathing lungs, but she pushes herself anyway. She’s through the gates even as the keepers turn. The chase is on.

Mei’s world is flat. She’s on something. Rhymes with magazine but has too many Zs and Xs to be a real word. She gets it from a friend who buys in bulk over in Johore and peddles it on the right chatgroups. The pills suck the spit from her mouth and she only pees once a day but they soften the prickles of living in her skin so she buys them in unlabeled plastic bottles of a hundred each.

Mei knows the names of the flowers by heart in more than one language, some alive, some dead. A riot of colours surrounds her; but the pills fade them all to a mushy grey at the edge of her vision. Flowers don’t sell well during the Hungry Ghost Festival, so she preps bouquets to die a slow death in the chiller. A flick of her wrist brings the metallic tool down the stalk of a rose, tearing away thorns. She imagines the rose crying a little with the scrape.