by Ellen Oh
Afterward, the men stripped him of his beautiful cloak. They shook it, hoping that golden coins would fly loose.
They did not notice the small jewel heart thumping silently into the dirt.
They might have left the clothes with the body, but the night was cold, and the cloak was beautiful.
And so. And so.
The Mountain wore her wedding dress.
There were flowers in her hair. Pearls around her wrists and ankles. The mist threaded through the trees, and clouds of fireflies hovered softly, so that her world was nothing but sparkling lights and gauzy dreams.
The sun broke upon her face, and the Mountain could not help but think that the sun had never felt so soft and honey-warm as it did now, when it shone with the radiance of a hope teetering on being realized, the kind of decadent hope that’s about to be snapped between the teeth and devoured whole.
She waited.
She had made a throne of anemones for Bulan and a crown of blossoms where drowsy bees still slept in the folded palm of a flower. He would be amused, she thought, smiling to herself.
A day passed.
Then two. Then three.
They clotted together, a knot that wouldn’t choke itself down.
The Mountain ventured near the slope facing the town. There, she saw Bulan, in the bright orange cloak that he always wore when he made his way to her. The villagers were dancing for their spring festival. Bulan’s back was to her, but the Mountain still saw the tawny arms of another woman around his neck.
The Mountain had never been spurned. Her heartbreak was a thing of distance. Like the pressure of a knife before the pain hits. Black, numbing seconds where a hope—that perhaps there will be no pain—flutters just long enough to carve a wound far worse than any knife.
She turned her back. Her tears conjured thunderstorms and swelled rivers. How cruel that he had stolen her heart. Locked her to this place.
On that day, she made a promise: “I will never let another human steal what is mine.”
Perhaps, if the Mountain had taken two more steps, she would have seen it. Her heart glinting dully. Covered in dirt. It had fallen far away from Bulan’s body, right at the line where the Mountain’s skirts met the human village. Perhaps, if the Mountain had waited two more moments, she would have seen the man’s face and realized he was not Bulan. Perhaps, if the Mountain had not uttered another oath, things might be different:
“I will find my heart, and no one shall steal from me again.”
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
All splinters of a tale.
That is why you must not laugh when you see a beautiful woman scrabbling at things in the dirt or reaching for high branches.
That is why you must turn your clothes inside out.
That is why you must empty your pockets of fruit.
For the Mountain does not like you to take things that do not belong to you.
Maria Makiling
A Filipino Folktale
Sometimes a guardian spirit, other times a precolonial goddess, Maria Makiling is associated with the Philippine’s beloved Mount Makiling, whose peaks resemble the profile of a young woman. Always breathtakingly beautiful, the reasons for why she stays on the mountain differ from time period to storyteller. The most popular stories about Maria have her stealing away young men to live with her in the forests of the mountain. But her love affairs are not always blissful. In one version of the story, told by José Rizal, the Filipino poet and national hero, Maria falls in love with a young man who spurns her love when the army begins to recruit. Instead of waiting for Maria, he marries a mortal woman so that he can safely stay inside his village. Mournfully, she tells him she would have protected him if only he had waited for her. In another tale of Maria, she shows her benevolence by turning ginger into gold for a group of villagers. But her benevolence backfires. In some versions of the tale, the villagers are grateful and show her love. In others, they become greedy, and break into her mountain garden, hungry to see whether all that Maria grows is made of gold.
Maria is deeply tied to the landscape. People still report sightings of a woman dressed in white, walking the long mountain road. Sometimes she tries to get a ride down the mountain. As if there were something she is trying to outrun.
I chose this story because no one tale can pin down the personality of this mountain goddess. And yet all stories warn us not to steal from her. I wanted to know why. “Forbidden Fruit” is my exploration of her background and my homage to her presence.
—Roshani Chokshi
Olivia’s Table
Alyssa Wong
Olivia blew into town with the storm and headed straight for the Grand Silver Hotel. Pots and containers of sauces and marinades clattered in the trunk of her Toyota, packed in with the rest of the groceries she’d brought from Phoenix. The evening sky hung heavy with dark clouds, but the shrinking Arizona sun still burned her arms through the car windows.
Bisden was one of those mining towns that had sprung up in the eighteen hundreds, flourished for a while, and then all but died once the silver ran out. Now, the town made its money from the tourists who trickled in, hoping to see two things: a real Wild West ghost town and one of the most haunted historical sites in the southwest.
After a childhood of making the trip down from Phoenix, Olivia barely needed her GPS to guide her. She drove past the sparse palo verdes lining the old shop fronts. Outside, the wind whipped up sharp clouds of dust and stone shards, sending them sweeping down the barren, red-dirt road that ran through Bisden’s town square. The air carried a light brown tint, and Olivia squinted to see through it.
In front of a clapboard saloon, two reenactment actors in full period dress were toughing out the approaching dust storm, fingering the pistols hanging at their hips. Most of the town’s tourists had migrated inside; a few hung back to watch them, shading their eyes or filming on their phones.
And then there were the ghosts, dozens of them, clustered around the tourists and swaying in the wind like feather grass. A few were dressed in fine clothes—long skirts and blouses buttoned to the throat, cravats tucked into tight waistcoats—but most were dressed in working clothes. Wide-brimmed hats, sturdy trousers, loose shirts. Only some of them were white folks. All bore signs of trauma; gunshots punched a cluster of holes through one gentleman’s torso, and a cluster of women hanging back by the saloon had burned, blackened bodies, the remains of their dresses drifting around them in ashes.
Olivia sighed. They were right in front of the Grand Silver Hotel, too. Figured.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder and pocketed her phone. Her braid was coming loose, but she ignored it. After locking her car, Olivia pulled out the long envelope of paper talismans that her grandma had written years ago. She slapped one over each of the car windows, and the coppery scent of magic sparked in the air. The sky rumbled overhead as she retrieved a pack of Saran Wrap and taped sheets of plastic over the talismans. If this worked, the talismans would keep ghosts away from the car, and the Saran Wrap would keep the rain away from the talismans.
It would work, she thought firmly. It’d worked for her mom all the times they’d made the trip together. And even though she wasn’t here now, Olivia had watched her ward her car like this for years.
No time for doubts. She headed for the hotel, past the reenactment actors and tourists. She had to push her way through the ghosts. Their bodies felt more solid than they did the rest of the year, and fabric brushed her hands as she edged through the crowd. “Excuse me,” she muttered. A pair of Hopi women glanced down at her from beneath the brims of their hats, turning to make room for her to squeeze by. A cluster of Chinese miners, their bodies broken and smashed—A cave-in, she thought, an accident—watched her, unmoving, from a distance. None of the tourists seemed to see the ghosts, staring through them at the girl weaving her way through empty air.
The Grand Silver Hotel rose three stories, clinging to its last shreds of grandeur. Inside, new l
ightbulbs shone in old fixtures, and the tatty carpet crunched under Olivia’s sneakers. Like every other establishment in town, the Grand Silver kept its head above water by advertising its very own ghost. An oil painting of the Wailing Lady hung on the wall above the reception desk, and a rotating rack of postcards, most of them reproductions of the painting, spun lazily by the elevator door. The older woman behind the desk smiled as Olivia approached. Her name tag read Renee. “Welcome to the Grand Silver Hotel. How may we help you today?”
“I’m here for the Ghost Festival,” said Olivia. Her voice sounded too loud in the nearly empty lobby. She hated listening to herself speak; talking, period, wasn’t easy for her. “I need a room for tonight and tomorrow night, and some help getting things out of my car.”
Renee brightened. “Of course. The Ghost Festival is tomorrow night, and it’s one of Bisden’s big attractions. Now, there are a few other groups of tourists who made the trip here to see it, so you won’t be alone. It’s perfectly safe, but we do ask that everyone stay inside and keep a healthy distance from the ghosts—”
“I’m not a tourist,” Olivia said. “I’m here to cook the banquet for the festival.” She reached for her driver’s license, and her student ID slipped out first. She caught it before it hit the ground. “You’ve worked with my mom before. Amory Chang.”
The receptionist squinted. “You’re Exorcist Chang’s daughter, are you? You do look a bit like her.” It’s nice of her to lie, thought Olivia. “She helped us out for years. Every summer, on the night when the ghosts come out to walk among the living. And her cooking, of course, was sublime.”
Thank you, Olivia wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Renee didn’t seem to notice.
“We’re looking forward to having you for the Ghost Festival. Exorcist Chang was always a wonder to watch. Excellent showmanship, and her work kept the town safe for years.” As Olivia checked into her room, Renee paused. “By the way. Our Wailing Lady is getting . . . unruly. Could you look into fixing that up, or finding a replacement? It’s been almost ten years since your mother tended to our ghost.”
The Wailing Lady’s painting hung serenely on the wall. It depicted an ample young woman wearing a wedding dress and a veil that obscured her face. A jilted, suicidal bride, whose weeping could still sometimes be heard late at night. Not very original. “I’ll look in to it,” said Olivia.
Renee and the two folks working at the hotel—a maid and a young man who was probably her son—helped lug Olivia’s vats of soy sauce and marinade from her car and into the hotel kitchen. Rice, cooking utensils, and paper bag after paper bag of different kinds of meat followed. Pickings at the Bisden supermarket were slim, so she’d brought everything she could fit into the Toyota’s back seat and trunk. As they carried the groceries inside, Olivia caught sight of the ghosts out front. The reenactment actors were gone, and now the ghosts stared, as one, at Olivia and the hotel employees.
The air smelled like approaching rain. She walked faster.
After sussing out the kitchen—on the small side, though all of the kitchens at the old Bisden hotels were—Olivia checked her phone. No signal, no internet, though there were a couple of password-locked hotspots from the shops nearby. The Grand Silver had its own router, and Renee gave Olivia the password along with a long, old-fashioned metal key. “You’ll be in room three-oh-nine,” she said.
Olivia spent the next couple of hours in that kitchen, cutting, testing, prepping. It was night by the time she finished. When she made it upstairs to her room, she crouched on the floor by the bed and set out packet after packet of incense and joss paper. She hoped she’d brought enough. Enough incense, enough food—
No, it would be enough. She unpacked a small ceramic bowl and emptied a handful of dried orange peel into it, and then she lit a match over it. Once, her mom had taught her that the smoke from burning orange peel would keep the ghosts away. It had never failed her.
Olivia hesitated. The flame licked down the match, chasing her fingers. After a second, she shook it out.
Wind rattled the windows as she settled into bed. The sounds of faint footsteps upstairs and a woman sobbing through the floorboards chased her into her dreams.
It had rained during every Ghost Festival that Olivia could remember. On the seventh month on her mom’s calendar and the eighth month on her dad’s, Mom would pack the minivan with food and head down south for a couple of days, leaving Olivia in Dad and Grandma’s care. It was monsoon season, and torrential rain flooded the roads and the stony washes out behind the houses. But when the skies cleared, Mom would return with an empty trunk and a check for more money than she made in half a year.
For a time, she didn’t tell Olivia where she went or what she did. But the year Olivia turned eight, Mom loaded her into the back seat next to the paper bags of groceries and drove her to Bisden for the first time.
Come with Mama, she said. Back then, her short black hair was only faintly laced with silver, and she still looked healthy. I need you to help me with the Ghost Festival this year.
The drive was several hours long, and by the time they reached the tiny town, sunset was approaching. So was a storm, a desert monsoon that crawled inexorably across the horizon. That night, they checked into the Grand Silver, although in the coming years, they would rotate from hotel to hotel, collecting paychecks from many grateful proprietors. Every hotel in town wanted the chance to host the festival and attract the bulk of that year’s tourists. Mom told Olivia that when her own mom, and the long line of Chang women before her, had cooked for the Ghost Festival, in this country and in their countries before that, they’d rarely stayed in a place for more than a year.
Different ghosts are tied to different spaces, Olivia, Mom said as they got ready for bed. The lamp cast a warm glow across her face. Sometimes they form attachments to specific places, and sometimes other people bind them there and they can’t leave. Moving the banquet means bringing food to folks who missed their chance to eat the year before. Good service is all about being considerate of others.
Mom spent the entire night and then the next day prepping and cooking, and she had Olivia help her as much as possible. Olivia stood on a little metal stool and cut vegetables. Her knife cuts were careful and even under her mom’s strict tutelage. Occasionally, she peered out the windows, watching the tourists run through the rain, their eyes growing huge and round, even from this distance, whenever they glimpsed one of the ghosts.
“They’re scared of them,” Mom told her as she set out a pair of bamboo steamers. “Right now they can see them.”
“Can’t they see the ghosts all the time?” she asked.
“Not like you and I can. The festival is when ghosts are most themselves instead of what the living want them to be. Not everyone will like what they see tonight.”
When Olivia’s arms grew tired, Mom sent her out of the kitchen to take breaks. The long banquet table that Mom had requested from the hotel was set up on the front porch. She crawled under it and watched the rain slosh down the road in growing streams, swirling with red-brown dirt, until the daylight faded and the electric lights came on.
Her Game Boy. She’d forgotten it in the car. Olivia didn’t have an umbrella, but she ran out into the rain anyway, letting it beat at her through her clothes. It only rained for about two weeks each year, and the cool droplets hitting her face filled her with giddy energy. She sprinted down the street toward her mom’s car, splashing deliberately in the biggest pools of water she could find.
Halfway down the darkening street, a voice stopped her: “You’re not from here.”
Olivia turned sharply. A ghost stood under the awning of the Bisden General Store, leaning against a post. She wore a cotton shirt and trousers, like many of the other folks who’d worked on the railroad when they were alive. There weren’t many women among the Chinese ghosts. But this one was a girl, with deep brown hair like Olivia’s, and a small mouth and dark eyes like Olivia’s. She looked a little older t
han Olivia, but not nearly as old as Olivia’s mom.
“Did someone lose you?” said the ghost.
“Nobody lost me,” said Olivia. “I came to get my Game Boy.” She came a little closer, under the awning, and the ghost didn’t shrink back. When Olivia reached out to touch her sleeve, her hand passed through. “What’s your name?”
“Mei Ling,” said the ghost. She sounded amused. From this distance, Olivia could see that her legs were mangled, the way a number of other Chinese ghosts who’d died in construction accidents were. “My ma calls me Sadie, though.”
“I’m Olivia,” said Olivia. “My grandma gave me a Chinese name, too, but my dad doesn’t like me using it.” She’d overheard her dad talking with her grandma one night, when she was very little. What will she do when the other kids tease her at school? he’d said. Olivia didn’t tell him that the other kids teased her anyway, name or no name.
“I don’t know what a Game Boy is,” said the ghost. “But why don’t I walk with you while you get it?”
An alarm bell in Olivia’s head began to ring. Don’t talk to strangers, Mom had said, over and over. And don’t trust the ghosts, especially not during the Ghost Festival. “No,” she said. “I’m okay. It’s just over there.”
But the ghost followed her. Olivia began to run faster, and the creak of the ghost’s ruined ankles grew louder and louder as the night got darker. The rain pounded down around them. The water rushed across the ground in rising torrents with no gutters to guide it away from the street.
Where was the car? It was dark, and the electric lights seemed so dim, and the ghost was behind her, lurching forward, moving too fast—
Olivia’s foot slipped out from under her and she fell backward into the water. Her head cracked hard against a stone, and the flash flood pulled her, rolling and gasping, down the street and onto her face. She inhaled a lungful of water. Olivia choked and tried to push herself up, but her palms slid on the loose gravel and her hands slipped out from under her.