The Lonely Tower (1879), Samuel Palmer
Returning
In the world I come from, there are only two identities: the hunters and the hunted. I didn’t choose to be hunted. That happened when I had something precious to lose. Thieves and looters came with their impatient shovels, opening holes in the ground like empty eye sockets. Then one day, they were coming at me. There was no place to hide; to bury it was to surrender. I had nowhere to run. I had to keep my precious safe, so no one could take it from me. I had to eat my precious to carry it with me. I had to eat it. I had to eat her.
But before we get into that, let me tell you a story. It was my daughter’s favorite folktale.
In the tale, the legendary deity Ne Zha began life as a ball of meat—a gigantic ball, which had tormented his mother’s womb for three years and six months. Ne Zha’s father was a powerful man who valued his public image more than his family. When he saw his wife had given birth to a meatball instead of a boy, he wielded his sword at it as if slicing off a tumor. To his surprise, out of the ball came Ne Zha, a precocious son with magical powers who could walk and talk immediately after birth. These qualities made his mother love him all the more, but his father fear him.
Perhaps that was why, when Ne Zha slew a young dragon, his father went white-faced. Ne Zha had thought he was enacting justice—the dragon was eating human children for snacks. He’d plucked out the young dragon’s vein and wore it as a belt of honor. His father knew enough to turn a blind eye—the murder was not a crime if the dragon was a prince. The father dragon, enraged, threatened to flood the land if Ne Zha didn’t turn himself in. A son for a son, or a massacre for a son. Ne Zha agreed to sacrifice himself, but first he had to pay his parents back. You see, where I am from, children’s skin, hair, and bodies are not their own property, but on loan from their parents. If a child sacrifices his life as punishment for a crime, he’s giving away what doesn’t belong to him, his body burdened with multiple debts. So, for his father, Ne Zha snapped his bones, joint by joint, to sooth the King’s anger; for his mother, he carved up his own flesh, slice by slice, to envelop her grief. For the old dragon king, the carving and snapping were feast enough.
Devastated, Ne Zha’s mother tried to build a temple to house his drifting soul, but his father thought him a disgrace and burned the temple to ashes. Ne Zha’s teacher, an immortal god, brought him back to life by making a new body for him from lotus roots. The reborn Ne Zha lived on, fighting heroic battles, and later became a deity. He could be found in different incarnations in folk stories. Sometimes he was a teenage boy with double hair buns, fire wheels blazing under his feet. Sometimes he was a handsome young man, his red sash beating in the wind. Sometimes he appeared in combat form; with three heads and six arms, Ne Zha could take down an army. The miracle son.
Everyone loved the legend of Ne Zha. A god who began as meat and ended as a vegetable. How fascinating: food from the chopping board was immortalized and came back to rule mouths. The prey outlasted the predators.
Except that the story was wrong. The legend of Ne Zha never made sense. The meatball couldn’t have been a son. We all knew that only daughters were hunted. And, as a mother, I had to do everything I could to protect mine.
§
I found it twelve years ago under the pagoda tree overlooking my door. Or, rather, it found me, the only married woman in the village who was childless. I knew something good was there because two stray dogs were closing in on it, and more were probably hiding in the pleats of night. Dogs here were all strays; hunger ruled all of us. I thought it was a dead rabbit or chicken under the tree, that my lips might relive the warmth of grease. I was hungry. The fields were hungry. The dogs in front of me were hungry. None of us was willing to share. I started throwing gravel at the dogs. Flaring with appetite, their eyes locked on me. I grabbed a stick and wielded it as if I was cleaving the air, chopping off the heads of ghosts. The dogs wheezed, howled, and left.
But when I went to collect the carcass, I didn’t expect what I saw: an abandoned baby girl in a swaddle of tatters. She was the size of a papaya, her breathing as thin as a poor man’s hope. Abandoned baby girls were common, but a breathing one was not. She was cold. The moment I held her to my chest, she gave my left breast a sharp bite, mistaking blood for milk. A baby with teeth. What kind of creature are you? I wondered. The blood she suckled colored her face, and soon she began to warm up. She let go of my breast and opened her eyes, but she didn’t cry. It hurt, but just a little, as precise as salt in a dish, enough to stir the flavors in my heart. I stroked her cheek, soft, like dough. “My husband doesn’t even leave a mark there. You’re quite something,” I said. She blinked.
If I had known what was to come, I would never have brought her home. I would have left her to the dogs and walked away, covering my ears with leaves. That would have been easier.
At home, my husband didn’t like what he saw—a competing mouth to feed when there wasn’t enough food, a strange baby who carried my blood within her but not his. He paced back and forth, kicking up little ochre clouds of dust.
“She’s tiny,” I pleaded. “She won’t need much food. Fate brought her to us. Shouldn’t we cherish her?”
“Why bother? She’s premature. She won’t last a week. Put her back now and save yourself unnecessary sorrow.”
“Yes, she will. She survived the dogs. She’s a miracle.”
“She’s got teeth! What kind of baby is born with teeth? Those are the ghost teeth she inherited from her previous life. She’s not a miracle. She’s a curse.”
“Don’t love before you’re ready for loss. You’re wasting your tears.”
“One week then,” I said. “If she can make it, we keep her and raise her as our own. If not, I’ll dig her grave myself.”
“Don’t love before you’re ready for loss. You’re wasting your tears.”
“One week, just one week.”
“Fine.”
I tore an old pillowcase apart and made her some clothes. Without anything at hand, my husband washed the wok clean, to use as a cradle for the night. He slept on the ground and left the bed for us. I put the wok against the wall, tucked her in, and slept into a crescent.
She lasted more than a week, and turned my chest skin into a gauze of scars, a map of want. She rejected milk or rice soup, but was willing to settle on pink milk pigmented by my blood. Only my blood, no one else’s. Though the blood loss had weakened me, I didn’t hate it: it felt great to be needed. Our bond was becoming essential; her existence was dependent on me. What other mother and daughter could have that? I was never afraid of showing my body to her. She admired my breasts the way village girls admired a bride’s pearls. Her father, however, said my breasts now repulsed him like battered plums.
Strangely, she stopped growing physically at six regardless of how much blood I gave her. Once I squeezed out one full bowl and forced her to drink, but all we got were her metallic burps. I became worried and desperate. I told her to bite her father’s arm when he was asleep (he startled, hit her jaw and broke the cup on the bedside), waited with a bucket at the butcher’s for some pig blood from the slaughter (but the apprentice was new, the pig resisted, and its blood spilled all over the ground), stole a chicken from a neighbor (it turned out to be a hen so we kept it for eggs). Before she was seven, she had adjusted to taking human food, fully cooked, and we pretended the bloody history had never existed. Her father and I were relieved, though sometimes I secretly missed the intimacy. A gift despite its source. A normal child after all.
She didn’t grow fangs or claws, which was a surprise, but she ran fast and had the eyes of an eagle. When she was eight, her father took her to find wild mushrooms in the woods, and she gathered a basket of juicy umbrellas for him, among which was the rare herb Ling Zhi, bigger than two palms combined. He sold it for a fat price, bought her a pair of quality shoes, and sent her to the village doctor to study herbs. Of course, we didn’t dare tell the old doctor about her feral origins, and he spotted nothing wrong, blaming her small size on malnutrition. The old doctor was glad to have someone to search out useful herbs within the folds of the mountain, to help him put his medical skills to good use.
Her father was happy. Medicine sounded to him like a much better business than farming. The mercy of the weather was unreliable, and death was a frequent guest here: a blue mushroom, a slippery stone at the riverbank, a bottle of pesticide with the label rubbed off, a snake, a bug, a ditch, a roof. Medicine was in high demand.
I was happy that my daughter was happy. She liked the thrill of stirring the wind when she ran. The bloodthirst might have died, but I knew she could not be tamed inside. Maybe she did have a past life, as she was not afraid of death, but was comfortable around it. Sometimes when a bereaved person couldn’t afford a proper funeral, the village doctor would help dispose of the body, and my girl would quietly observe at his side.
One day after a house call, she seemed to be in a good mood. When I asked why, she said, “I found out I’m more valuable than men.”
I was amused. “You’ll always be my precious,” I said. “You should always know that. What happened today that led to this discovery?”
She shrugged. “Whenever the doctor and I need to get rid of a dead woman’s body, a man with a mustache shows up. He smokes cigarettes while he waits outside. When he sees the doctor, he says a number. He has a lot of cash. I don’t like him. He always kills his cigarette butts on a tree. But I never see him when the corpse is a man. So, women are more valuable than men, and one day I will become a woman.” Her face lit up. “A valuable woman.”
I was appalled by her words, but her father interrupted first.
“No, that’s not why the man only comes for women,” he said. “It’s because dead men are in good supply. Just like those mushrooms and herbs. Supply up, price down. Get it? Better to sell the dead women before their graves are robbed.”
“But Ba, why would anyone steal them? They are dead. They have no use.”
Before I could give him a kick under the table, he began spilling out the answer like a shallow teapot. I didn’t want her to know about marriage in the afterlife, a tradition passed on by the village elders, one as old and inevitable as a nightmare. If a man died single, they said, his loneliness would sour into rage and hate, and he would come back. We dutifully inherited that belief. But if a ghost bride’s body rested in her groom’s grave, decorated by the Three Ornaments of Gold—necklace, bracelet, and ring—both bride and groom would stay underground, content and peaceful in the next world. And a fat red carrot, purchased fresh on the morning of her burial day, would take the woman’s place in her family’s tomb. I always hated that superstition and hated him for telling her about it.
He was satisfied that she listened carefully to his answer. Neither noticed my frowns. I drummed against my bowl with chopsticks and glared at him. “Let’s show some respect to the dead,” I said. He stopped talking. Nobody mentioned that horrible practice for the rest of the meal.
She was helping me wash the dishes when she suddenly asked, “Ma, does the family eat the carrot after the ritual?”
“What? Of course not. They leave the carrot there and seal up the coffin.”
“And let it rot?”
“Yes, just like a corpse, it eventually does. But we don’t want to think about that too much. You see, a carrot resembles a root. A root for an empty hole, as the saying goes. By putting in carrots, the women’s graves are complete. This practice means a lot to their families.”
“But the tombstones. They don’t carry the women’s names.”
“The families don’t want their daughters’ graves to be disturbed again.”
“By ghosts?”
I sighed. “Something like that. Something driven by greed. Is helping the doctor bothering you? I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“No.”
Her voice betrayed a sadness that I couldn’t see into. I dried my hands on my pants. “What is it? You’re worrying me.”
“If I can’t be a valuable woman, am I going to be a carrot one day and left to rot? Or worse, serve a dead husband I don’t like in the afterlife? Who would come and rescue me down there?”
I held her tight. “No! You’re my precious. You will never be a carrot. I won’t let anyone touch you against your will. I will keep you safe.”
That was the first promise I failed to keep. Being a mother is like that. The more you care, the more you fail. It’s foretold in our language: the expression for love is ache.
But I had to try.
§
It was cold, even for a winter’s night, when I realized I had lost my daughter to a ghost. Colder after. The wind had solidified into a whip, lashing the hand-rubbing people in our house, but no one moved to close the windows. My husband had smashed the stove in my daughter’s room to pieces. Perhaps the people were waiting for the smell to go away. Sulfur mixed with decay; the room reeked of a winter ghost. Outside, the moonlight salted everything into a cataract grey.
We’d heard stories and seen victims of the winter ghosts. They hid inside coal stoves, only showing up after the lights were off to prey on careless humans, harvesting them in their sleep. Quiet. Unpredictable. There was one man in the village lucky enough to have escaped death, but his brain was never the same. He still saw the ghosts laughing at him, everywhere, when all we saw was the wall. He poked his eyes out to find peace. I had thought him crazy to invite pain until the night the ghosts came to my home and took away my daughter.
Had I ever thought that one day I would become a name in the stories of the deranged?
She was lying on the floor of her room, unresponsive as a statue, except that her skin and lips shone an almost festive, deceptive, inappropriate rose. I couldn’t hear her heartbeat. The hollowness inside her chest was as heavy as gravity. I stuck my finger, my nipple, my tongue into her mouth, fumbling for the ache bestowed by her teeth, so I could bring her back again as I had done years ago. Bitterness was the only thing I found. Twelve years. For twelve years I had kept her safe. Now all was taken away. Why did I have to move the stove into her room? Why didn’t I get into bed with her myself and keep her warm? I looked for my husband, silently begging. Don’t give up on us. We’ll build her an ice cellar to keep her fresh, in case she wakes up again. She will wake up again. He averted his eyes, slowly walked into the kitchen. After staring at the dinner pot for a long time, he began to scoop out all the leftover noodles. The soggy lump had hardened, but he kept scraping, the spoon hitting the pot like the toll of a bell.
The people outside my daughter’s room were shivering, getting agitated. They had their own homes to go back to instead of gathering in a sad room all night, with nothing to do but stand around, exhaling clouds and sighs. They tried to pull me up from the ground, away from the corpse, but I bit every hand that dared to touch her or me. A woman gave me a white towel to cover my naked chest. I didn’t take it. She tried to veil my girl’s face, and I pushed her away with such force that she hit the table and winced. Men turned their heads away. Women started whispering. I cried and cried. I don’t remember when the crowd dispersed. I only remember the relief I felt when everything went black. I thought I was joining her.
I woke up to find myself in bed, dizzy, dressed, disappointed. My girl was there, between a straw mat and a thin white sheet. Someone was talking in another room, its door closed. No, there were two voices, one of which belonged to my husband. My head felt heavy. I couldn’t make out their words. I sat up.
§
“Just to make sure, your daughter was still a virgin when she died, right?”
“Watch your mouth, or I’ll pluck your tongue out.” (The wooden table groaned under the pounding fist.)
“Hey, hey, easy. Don’t want to break the cup as well, do you? Enough bloodshed already. You know the tradition. We honor the tradition. No non-virgin is allowed to have an afterlife marriage, or the groom will come back to haunt us. Just want to make sure.” (Someone shook a box of sticks. A strike, a flare that quickly subsided, then a blow of breath.)
“She was twelve! If you dare ask me again, I’ll smash your family tomb.”
“Fine, fine. Calm down. A loss can be a blessing in disguise, really. The Wangs are sad, and, lucky for you, this time the sad parents got cash. Their son fell into the water, and all they want is to keep him from being lonely down there. Look, the Wangs have prepared the Three Ornaments of Gold! The bracelet is thicker than my watch. Come, bite it. Feel it for yourself. Feel the taste of real gold. The Wangs are good people. Your daughter’s soul needs a home. The Wangs are coming to pick her up tomorrow to join their son in his grave.”
“She’s my daughter. My baby girl.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but you know it’s for the best. You can’t even afford a proper pinewood coffin. We both know the straw mat won’t shelter her soul. You don’t want your daughter’s ghost wandering out at night, being barked at by dogs, right? You don’t want graverobbers shoveling up her body. They can smell a dead woman from miles away. You can’t escape them. They own the night. Take the offer while you can. She’s not your real daughter, anyway. Dead or alive, she would have taken someone else’s family name. Follow the tradition and your daughter would have been grateful.” (Another shaking of the box. This time, two strikes. A flare, and a long blow of breath.)
“She was just twelve. She should have lived to marry a real man, not some drowned fool. She was supposed to live to be old, to bury me.”
“The Wangs are sad, too. You two families share the pain. It’s a bond.”
“You devil.”
“Listen, how about we double the cash, for your pain? Please understand. The Wangs are really sad. They just want a bride for their son in the afterlife. You want your girl to have a home down there too, right? You’re her father. You need to think about what’s best for her. That’s what parents do.”
“You think money can bring my dead girl back to life?”
“No, but it can buy the rest of your children a better life.”
“I don’t have more.”
“You will. The Wangs are giving you a future. More kids. A new wife, even, someone sane. Only if you dare to dream.”
(The slow tapping of the box. No strikes.)
“One more set of the gold jewelry. To memorialize my daughter.”
“Such a good father. Always thinking of his children first. We’ll be here at ten. Come, come to the Wangs with me. In-laws should get acquainted. Come. They have warm food and wine waiting.”
(Door creaks, footsteps, then silence.)
§
This was why my husband had been poor, and would always stay poor: he was careless. He had left the body behind with me and forgot to close the door. If you don’t cherish something, don’t grieve when someone else takes it.
I needed to get my girl out of the house, but I was weak. Even on my own, I didn’t have the strength to run far away enough in the fierce winter, let alone while carrying a body. But I had to move. The night was dying. Not much time left. I looked around for assistance. No cart, no ox, only a handsaw. My husband had borrowed it to get rid of the pagoda tree outside the house, where the miracle had taken place. He said the tree was growing old and hollow, and ghosts were nesting. “Don’t you see,” he said. He wrote down “pagoda tree” on the ground with the edge of the handsaw, then drew a line down the center to split the character into two halves. The left was the word for wood, and the right was the word for ghost. “It’s in the name. This tree brings ghosts.” For days he pulled and pushed the handsaw, and for nights I dreamed about crying children. Finally, the tree became a rough stump and chunks of firewood. I swept away the sawdust.
The wind opened the door even more. I carried my daughter’s body outside, laid it at the tree stump, and knelt beside her. God, ghost, or the god of ghost, I bowed until my head touched the ground, and prayed. I’ve only asked for food, not hope, but I’m begging you now. Please help me. The third time I got up, the gravel had opened up my forehead, trickling, moistening my eyes into lenses of red. God, if you had told me she was a loan, not a gift, I would have walked away. I got dizzier as the vermilion dots joined to dye the dirt into maroon clay. I’ll do everything to protect her. Please have mercy, mother to mother. Please show me a sign.
§
"Eat me.”
Startled, I jumped to press the side of her neck, checking for a heartbeat. Nothing. I dipped the blood from my forehead with my finger and stuck it into her mouth. Nothing. Either a ghost in the wind was impersonating her voice, or I was hallucinating. I bit my palm to regain focus.
“Yes, just like that, but on my hand, not yours.”
“Who’s there?” I picked up the handsaw and yelled, “Who’s there? Don’t come near me!”
“Mama, listen." The voice started again. "It’s me. Don’t you want to bring me back? I am back.” It sounded like my daughter but it couldn’t be. She only called me Ma. But the voice was powerful and I felt compelled to follow her words. “Remember the Ne Zha story you told me? That’s how our story began, and it’s how it should end. You fed me before. Now it’s my turn to feed you.”
“No! My daughter is not food! I promised her she would never be a carrot.” I covered my ears, trying to shake the voice out of my brain, but it pierced right through. “Stop, stop it! Tigers don’t eat their own. Even the heartless can’t do what you’re asking. What does that make me? What does that make me?”
“It makes you my mother, my true mother.” It was as if the voice had heard my deepest wish. “Mama, don’t be afraid. Your body is the only home I want to come back to. Not a strange man's grave. Take the bite, and we will never part again.”
“Stop! I can’t. I don’t know what to do.” But the last sentence was so tempting. So horrifying, yet irresistible. I pulled my hair and cried. “Please stop.”
“I’ll make it easier for you, Mama.”
Her body started a violent shriveling. Hands crumpled into sand, legs withered to dust, the skeleton dissolved like salt. I stared in horror as she melted into a meatball. The size of a fresh papaya, pristine and bruiseless. I held it to my face. It smelt like pork sizzling in grease. Then I felt it—the feeling of hunger taking over my stomach, tongue, mind. I closed my eyes. The primal urge didn’t feel strange. Instead, it felt familiar and natural as a calling, and following its lead made me feel safe. When cats eat their kittens, do they hesitate? Do they taste bitterness? Or do they hum with satisfaction like a gourmet wiping their lips with a napkin? I held it closer and opened my mouth. “Yes, yes, just like that.” The voice continued as I returned my girl into my body with my teeth, chewing, swallowing, absorbing the hurt and my precious daughter forever into my bones.
XUEYI ZHOU was born and raised in Foshan, a city of manufacturing in Guangdong, China. After she earned a BA in Translation and Interpretation in Shanghai, she returned home and worked at a stainless steel company. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Guernica, Waxwing, Passages North, Chestnut Review, Tahoma Lit Review, AAWW The Margins, Best Small Fictions 2022, and more. Her recent honors include a fiction longlist in Disquiet Prize 2024, a finalist in Black Warrior Review Flash Contest in both 2022 and 2023, a shortlist for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023, a Best of Net nomination for poetry, and more. Her poetry has appeared in BOOTH (runner-up of the 2022 Beyond the Margins Prize) and Frontier Poetry. Her writing has been supported by Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She served as Editor at Witness magazine (2023-2024) and she is a prose reader at Chestnut Review.