“To Molt and to Love” was selected by Joyland editors as a finalist in the 2021 Open Border Fiction Prize.
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When Shin thinks about his first molt, he recalls the shape of his loneliness. He remembers being surprised to find the molt looking much like him—the left antenna pointed askew, its puffy upper lip, the whole container of him engorged with a longing he would spend the rest of his life trying to explain away. How bare he felt that instant, not like the roach he is but something other. He had reached out to touch it, the translucent shell, wanting to touch something within himself through it. Had it not been for Ren beside him, he would have stared forever at his loosened self.
Shin never thought he would long for the days of molting until it was no longer a possibility. Shin is dead—and a roach at that—so his loneliness quite often feels doubled. As ghost, Shin is still his original size, half of a human palm, which once made for scurrying away undetected at the flicker of kitchen lights incredibly difficult. Not that it would be an issue now—a sheer blue haunt that can pass through anything. With some conviction, the other person-sized ghosts can harden themselves, turn opaque through sheer will such that they could slam a door or hold up ever so briefly a glass cup without spilling any of its contents. The other ghosts seem far more interested in the capacities of their new forms, however, and oftentimes prefer to squeeze themselves through pipes, sink through the floorboards and through five apartments (much to the alarm of their unsuspecting residents), and pass through a live body with all its murky guts and splendor. That last one never fails to embarrass Shin for all that he can spy of someone’s innards, that curious rush of blood and muscle like fast-moving twine. Learning quickly that it was impolite to linger too long in a person’s body, he has since curbed that practice of bodily haunting. Working against him too was the ever-present knowledge that even in his ghostly form, he appears still to these looming human bodies as another roach.
But harden? He cannot. He passes through every cup and door so easily. Since the start of the acid rainstorms, it takes nearly all his energy to keep from slipping through the floors. At the height of his overwhelm, the falling feeling seizes him, and he grips the floor, his legs sliding and passing through.
It is possible, it occurs to him, that this stage of ghostliness is only a momentary state before the next one, and another molting is in order. He had only seen it happen once before with a person-sized ghost a couple of floors down from where he resides with Ma, Mira, and Grandpa Why. A young man who was once part of a large family of ten crowded in the same apartment, the ghost kept mainly to himself such that he and Shin never spoke, and so when he no longer appeared in passing, Shin paid the family’s apartment a visit. It was as if he had never been there at all, the way the family bustled with their usual routine, clamoring over each other, the large black-and-white photograph of the young ghost still hanging above the dining table. Yet when he looked closely, Shin saw the light touch of a blue glow against the wall where a long crack ran along the surface. Over the course of the next days, the blue went away completely. Shin does not know the human version of a molt, but he suspects that some iteration of it has occurred. And if something can happen once, then it surely is bound to happen again.
“Do you believe in an after to the after-after?” Mira asked him once, and the question rattled him because Ren had asked the same of him before. But whereas Ren had quickly added, “Wherever you go, I’ll go, and you do the same,” Mira had only wept. They had only just met.
Shin didn’t know what to say at the time. She looked at him imploringly, as if he had special knowledge about ghosts that he could impart. She seemed to want an answer to something else though, which he did not know how to provide, and so he said only, “I believe so.”
It comforted her then, and moving forward, they grew close, sometimes nestling together in the same bed where she spoke, and he listened. He was always listening. Fascinating how much the humans could remember and care, especially among the living. In his aliveness, he never looked so closely at another human face, and no one before this but Ren had ever looked at him without wanting to kill him.
With so much conviction about an after to the after-after among humans, there had to be one for ghost roaches, surely. This, he wrestled with on his own while Mira’s eyes glazed over with sleep. He wished he could know for himself too because, Quite honestly, Mira, he would think to himself, I’m not sure I can do forever here.
So, Shin practices. He squeezes himself taut as if he can to make a molt out of the nothing that is his body. Do it, you stupid jerk, he says to himself in the mirror. But as he tilts his head toward the reflective glass, he falls through it with tumbling ease. He does this every day, each attempt to harden proving as futile as the original attempt. At first, he would shrug the disappointment away. Over time, the disappointment turns to devastation, and one day, Grandpa Why finds Shin frantically passing back and forth through the mirror, making sounds he assumes can only be weeping. “Friend!” Grandpa Why cries as he lifts the mirror from the wall. “You are not okay!” And Shin knows he is not as he shudders into Grandpa Why who, being a ghost himself, cannot, to the best of his abilities, hold him.
◆
There are no words to describe Shin’s affliction.
Over time, the city turned itself into a concrete lot. It brimmed with holes. The acidity of the rain grew more pungent, its assailing power now tough enough to erode the three-decade old surfaces of Building 4B. Now the city has regulated the use of thick black resistant rubber covers, which engulfs the building in a totalizing darkness every Tuesday on the morning before the downpour. In an instant, light ceases to exist. On the first day this regulation was put in place, the building manager came by apartment 9A to hand Ma and Mira a box of flashlights. Upon first flicker, the lights lit up the room with tiny fluorescent moons. It became a game for Ma and Mira, this exercise of dancing light and shadow. They carved their names into the walls in the dark and it was not long before Grandpa Why joined in, taking the light to his chest like a bullet wound while singing to the moon goddess, Chang’e, “I’m sorry, so sorry for your sacrifice, my lady! Bless me! Bless me with your touch!” Ma and Mira barraged him with a chorus of boos.
Looking at Ma and Mira squeeze the light between their fingers, making it small as a pinprick against the wall until it is no more, Shin thinks about the smallness of his in-between life, how it can sometimes feel like he is waiting for the shadow to descend upon him, wiping him out. During a break, he turns to Grandpa Why frantically and asks him, “Do you ever think about what happens next?”
“Excuse me,” Grandpa Why responds with grave seriousness. He holds up several vases with his head and arms. “I’m preparing for my next act.”
While Ma and Mira giggle at Granda Why’s careless balancing act, shining the light at distant corners to throw him off intentionally, Shin feels their laughter move far away from where he stands, and he realizes he is sinking into the floorboards once again.
On the week before Qingming, the feeling continues to sit like the puckered darkness inside him. Although the ninth-floor brims with the noise of shuffling bodies, his insides feel sedimented. The humans and ghosts move around him, carrying trays of saran wrapped food, bowls covered in newsprint, joss sticks and gold-flecked paper. Sometimes there would be one visitor, and other times, a whole family from down the hall would come in to visit with Ma, the apartment filling with half-drunk cups of tea.
If this is the season of ghosts, then why do I feel as if I don’t belong here? Shin wonders as he watches the flicker of activities before him.
It continues to be impossible to talk with Grandpa Why who has been bouncing off the ceiling with excitement for Qingming. “When was the last time someone celebrated your deathday?” Grandpa Why yells from the ceiling.
“I don’t know,” Shin would whisper under his breath when asked to join in. But Grandpa Why never lingers long enough to hear his answer anyway. To Mira, he confides, “I don’t know what is happening.”
Mira pauses while sweeping the floor to peer deeply at Shin. She relays, “You look the same as when I first met you. Maybe something is happening inside.” She gestures towards her chest, at where Shin assumes is the nebulous organ that is the human heart. He hears Mira talking about the human heart often during her radio show, and it is mystifying to him how much emphasis people place on something no bigger than their fist, that it should symbolize something more than what funnels blood throughout their body.
Shin is not convinced. “What did I look like when we first met?”
Mira takes a moment to consider the memory. For Shin, he remembers it vividly, the barging weight of her coming through the front door after abusing the door knocker. Her face was wet, and the rain was about to start that day. How she could be allowed to storm into the building so recklessly when security armed every corner and stairwell, he had no idea. She had flopped onto the bed, spoke briefly with Ma, and then looking up as if realizing the apartment around her for the first time, stared at Grandpa Why and Shin who were both sitting and watching on the top of a bookcase.
“We have ghosts now,” Ma had said, waving her hands towards the two, and then to Mira again, “You were gone too long.”
“Oh,” Mira uttered, her mouth forming a tight “o.” “How long do they plan on staying?”
While Grandpa Why went on and on about Mira’s unfilial self, Shin remained quiet on the shelf. Only later when others left the room to let Mira finish out her crying that he came down and sheepishly said, “Uh, we’ve been using this room, but you can have it back.”
Mira looked up and around, finally landing her eyes at Shin. Shin moved closer then so she could see him better. He found that this was the easiest way to mitigate human shock, to move closely and with some determination that they were forced to look before reacting.
Mira opened and closed her mouth several times before asking, “I know why Grandpa Why is here… but who are you?”
“I’m Shin,” Shin replied and added honestly, “and I don’t know.”
“Where’s your family?”
Shin tried to recall this. No one had asked him this before. Trying as hard as he could, he had no visual for mother, father or any number of siblings. A perfect blank. He answered honestly, “Don’t know.”
“Partner? Lover? Poly unit? Roach consortium?”
Ren. That much he did remember. But if Ren was there too, they would have found each other. That much, he knew, and yet there was nothing comforting about that fact. More softly, he said again, “Don’t remember, don’t know.”
Mira nodded as if to say, Fair enough. She twirled her finger in the air, asking Shin to do a turn for her, which he did and thought uncomfortably funny.
“Huh,” Mira considered, tilting her head as she examined Shin’s blue ghost body, which seemed to glow electric as he spun one way and then another. “Where did you even come from?”
Shin had no answer for it then and was no closer to answering it now.
“Are you remembering again?” Mira asks with concern.
Shin shakes his body into a defeated “no.” Truthfully, he sees flickers of Ren from time to time though he has been ascribing it to losing his mind. Ren running behind the house plant, withered down to its last brown leaf. Ren rattling around in the silverware drawer. When he rushes over to check, no one is there, so he must be imagining it. Each appearance seems to shake something loose within him, and he can almost feel his old lover touching him, leg to leg. It feels cruel, whatever is happening to Shin, but it also seems as if there is no end in sight.
Ma calls for Mira in the kitchen. Mira turns to Shin. “Will you be okay?”
Shin does his best to imitate a human shrug.
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The day Shin met Ren, a food raid was underway, and every roach was fending for themselves. In the dark, they each descended upon an open trash can, the lid tipped off by a nuisance dog who was more afraid of them than they were of him. The garbage overflowed with fruit peels and sour meat, their juices soaking through several layers of newsprint. Shin had always moved slowly, tentatively, and had burrowed himself so far deep into the trash can that he had a tough time climbing out. On top of an apple core, he chewed and groped his way back to standing. In the middle of grasping for leverage, he felt another leg clamp onto his, and in the blue darkness, he could make out Ren’s broad face, so eager and full of mischief.
“I see you like sweets too,” Ren said, plucking off a sizable chunk of the fruit and handing it to Shin.
Back then, Shin did not know that what Ren was doing was called flirting. He thought it a jab at his own inadequacy as a scavenger. Okay, Shin thought, well, fuck you too. But Ren’s face was bright and optimistic even in the gauze of night, and he had taken Shin by the front leg, dragging him up with him, a piece of apple hanging from his mouth.
They ran so hard they nearly ran smack into a thin crack in the wall they mistook for a wider crevice that some of the other roaches had burrowed through. When they found the hole at long last, they nestled themselves within the bricks, and there, Ren flirted again with, “You know, they say that apples are an aphrodisiac,” and all Shin could say sheepishly in return was, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” It was not until Ren kissed his antenna against his that it became a bit clearer.
“Have you ever…?” Ren asked.
Shin shook his head.
“Would you like to…?”
Shin’s head nodded so vigorously, he thought it would snap. His front legs on Ren’s face, he saw through a sliver of light that he was so beautiful. His eyes like black marbles, the burnished honey of his shell. Shin felt he could look at him forever, and a tiny hurt grew inside him.
Ren touched him lightly on his head and Shin flinched.
He trailed his leg along Shin’s back, which made him wince and whisper a litany of sorrys.
“Are you always this nervous?”
Shin thought about it for a while, feeling quite strongly that he had been this way for as long as he could recall life. Yes, Shin said with his eyes, I have always been this afraid.
Ren smiled, his leg stroking Shin’s face. “I have a little trick I use when I’m nervous. Do you want to try it with me?”
Shin nodded, his legs falling by Ren’s side.
What Ren said next, Shin would never forget. Stroking Shin’s face, Ren spoke of the safest place for a roach to go, the second closest thing to an egg sac. The place where they both once grew to be, lively and abundant and carried through. Picture the sac as a hole in the wall, he said. Picture it big enough to get through but too small for human hands. The hole fits two. You and me and no one else, he emphasized. The hole is damp and cushioned by the dark. It is a place where they can sleep for days and no one would know, and no one would find them. It is a place where no one else can go, just the ones you let in. This, he declared again, and by then, he had stopped stroking Shin’s face. This is the safest place.
Lulled by the drawl of Ren’s voice, Shin did not notice at first that Ren had begun undoing his skin, plucking apart his shell with soft bites peppered between words. When Shin realized what was happening, he leapt to catch up, fastening his legs to Ren with sudden urgency. Then they were taking each other apart frantically, moaning into each other’s mouths, their backs rubbing against the harsh bricks behind them. Looking upon Ren’s face, its honeyed brightness like brown liquor hitting the light, Shin felt that he was taking him into his body.
When they woke up together the next day, they saw that their molts were lying beside one another like twin lovers frozen in time. Where they were bronze once, they then became a pale nude. They looked different to each other, bare beyond bare, and they were fascinated by the other’s body, its new ridges and shapes, softer and clearer than their former selves. Eventually, Ren would catch himself staring and rouse himself to leave.
“I had a wonderful time,” he said as he skirted backwards towards the opening.
Before Shin could respond, Ren had already darted out the hole, leaving him alone in their safest place with their two molts, the pair already having untangled from each other’s hold by some slice of wind that had snuck its way in at some point when neither one was looking.
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As Qingming nears and the piles of food in apartment 9A start to look like staggered towers in the corner of the living room, the kitchen having been exhausted of its counter space, Ren seems to appear more often to Shin than before. One day, while Mira is lighting joss sticks for Grandpa Why, Shin sees the smoke wafting from the yellow sticks convulse in the air, eventually becoming the shape of a handsome roach, the wings of his back readying to ascend. Just as soon as he spies Ren in the white puff, his old lover disappears. He thinks of the shape of Ren all the time, but to see him there, dispersing just inches from Mira’s face, jolts him. When it happens again later the same night, a hole in the wall humming and glowing, Shin dips his head in to investigate. When he peers into the hole, he sees the scuttering butt of an insect turning the corner. He thinks about running after him, of yelling “Ren! Ren!” until the figure hears him and turns around. It has become hard to know what is true and what is a vision of his most fantastic imagination. In this world, it is possible that all of this can mean the inauguration of Ren’s eventual arrival. A ghost is made, after all, as the product of one dying. And Ren is most certainly dead.
The night that Shin does not chase the figure in the hole, the humans and ghosts of apartment 9A gather around the coffee table, which is littered with Saltine cracker crumbs and salted black beans. Mira calls it “Chinese caviar” and she eats until her belly hurts. This, Shin knows, because she offers lush descriptions of its taste from its hearty beginning to lodged end. It does not matter what any of the ghosts are doing at the moment—they always pause long enough to hear her contemplate her words while chewing, going “Hmm,” and then offering up an assessment of its flavors, something that the ghosts know only through memory alone. There is a strange comfort to hearing someone describe what you cannot experience again.
When Mira describes the soft pungency of preserved black beans, everyone’s eyes, living and dead, turn bright with nostalgia. The conversation turns to favorite foods, what has been lost or misremembered or simply would not grow again after the acid rain.
“Papaya,” Ma shares immediately, nodding as she recalls scooping the dark green seeds out with a large spoon. “To have a slice of it right now would be very, very nice.”
Grandpa Why spits into the air and shouts, “No one here yet has been able to make proper stir-friend snow pea leaves with garlic! A travesty if you ask me!”
Ma and Mira look at each other, each hesitating to share that nothing but cabbage, lettuce and potatoes have grown since the acid rain, encouraged by some enhanced Miracle Grow in indoor laboratories. Certainly, there would be no snow pea leaves to set by Grandpa Why’s altar. Neither of them has tasted garlic for a very long time.
Shin has nothing to contribute to the conversation. When he tries to recall the taste of apples, he can only sense its bitterness. The taste of Ren, however, was a different matter. Yet, looking at Mira, he sees an idea circling like a storm above her head. He prays she will not ask him to join in the discussion.
Mira excitedly works her way to standing. “An idea!” she gasps. “We’ll try to make imitation dishes of everyone’s favorite food for Qingming. How about that?”
The room resounds in deep agreement while Shin remains silent. In watching Mira over the past few months, Shin sees how she has increasingly filled her days with activities. Between her mournful first arrival and now, she has not stopped moving. It is the most curious thing, especially since he can feel himself slowing down.
Then suddenly everyone seems to grow aware of Shin’s silence.
“We can make your favorite food too,” Mira offers with a smile. “Did you have a favorite from… well, you know?”
Shin looks at Ma’s face then Mira’s and then Grandpa Why’s, each of them looking at him expectantly. Since his arrival at apartment 9A, he has shared so little of his previous life, remembering little of it. There are his memories of Ren, but what good will that do anyone now? Yet they are waiting for an answer, and try as much as he can, he cannot recall the taste of anything so great that it is worth celebrating during a day of remembering what has passed.
Their eyes are still watching him.
“I think… a sweet rice cake.”
The answer seems to satisfy. In truth, he cannot recollect even the taste of that, only the sensations of the spongy cake that Mira once described in full, and even so, he knows that there are differences between the human and roach mouth that even Mira cannot begin to bridge.
The group disperses but Mira and Shin remain.
Mira holds her hand out to Shin as if he can take it with his own. She says with invitation, “Wanna take a walk with me?”
Shin nods. Together, they make their way down several flights of stairs and towards the back exit of the building, pausing every couple of steps for Shin to catch up. They seem like an odd pair—the one, tall, fleshy, and always with her shoulders hunched forward in a permanent sulk while the other barely fits in Mira’s hand and in a past life, would have been squashed flat on a forgettable surface.
How different this ghostly life is for Shin from his living days, and though he cannot confirm the difference through memory alone, he feels it reverberating through him. He recalls the first day of his arrival to apartment 9A, his body and mind coming together all at once that he felt himself designed particle by particle. It felt like a hurried effort as if trying to fill the mold of what he used to be with sand, one grain at a time in a panicked rush. It was dizzying, this scramble of time and his remaking that he felt himself come in and out of consciousness.
When he finally came to, he felt the coldness of Ma’s floor, her loud shriek, and then the bright pink slipper above her head, waiting to smack down on him. He was prepared to die a second time then. When Ma’s slipper slammed into his body though, he was surprised to feel, not the crushing sound of his own mass, but the impact moving through him like a current. Then he opened his mouth and spoke a meek “Wait!” at the sight of Ma’s slipper raised again for a second blow. It was that moment that Ma fainted.
Mira enjoys the story a little too much at Ma’s expense. She has Shin tell the story over and over, poking her finger through him in jest. By the time the ghosts had all settled into the building, one by one at first and then seemingly en masse, the presence of these haunting figures was no longer a surprise to anyone, least of all to returnees like Mira herself.
Walking with Mira now out the doors of the building feels like another life, one in which he can look out across the East River and feel nothing of his attachment to it. The river roars at the two of them, just as it always sounds like teeth gnashing together before the storm. Above them, workers are preparing the rubber cover over the building, tending to the ropes and folds of it for a more efficient drop.
Mira is deep in thought as she props herself up onto the railing and takes a seat on the highest metal bar. She looks up to the top of the building. “How much longer do you think we can do this?” she asks aloud.
Shin thinks of Mira with her promise of papaya, snow pea leaves, and the fatty recollections of a time before. He cannot recall ever involving himself with humans in his life before, so talk of endurance in people-time seems outside of what he can immediately assess.
Sensing Shin’s silence, Mira speaks again. “Sad and I slept together, you know?” She looks down at her feet, dangling over the lower bar.
Shin has watched the evolution of Mira and Sad’s courtship over Mira’s radio show, how she had stumbled into his apartment one morning and returned soaked head to toe in salty water that nearly gave Ma a heart attack, thinking she had been drenched in acid rain. Mira’s eyes have moved sleepily ever since as if permanently dreaming. Still, Shin hears the heavy fluttering of Mira’s eyes when she sleeps, and he can tell something else haunts her in dreams.
Shin considers his next statement carefully. “Oh?”
“It’s… new.”
“Oh.”
They sit in further silence for a while. Grandpa Why has often said to Shin that talking to him feels painful. The former ghost zips and spins in the air and the latter can barely form a sentence unpunctuated by an “um” or an “uh.” The quiet unnerves Shin, honestly. He looks up at Mira who seems to just let the silence hang. It is as if he is not even there.
Mira turns to him suddenly. “Did you have someone you loved in a previous life?”
Shin thinks of Ren who by now has become his entire world.
At his lack of response, Mira posits another question: “What would you do if he was with you right here, right now?”
Shin tries to imagine Ren coursing about the building, covering ever wall and surface. He would leave no inch of the building unexplored. Together, they would make their way to the back exit, staring up at the graying sky, and then with some ceremony, back their way into the building once again. Ren too would have limits as to where he could go, but he would make a second life of uncovering how far he could take it. And Shin would gladly come along.
Mira does not wait for Shin’s answer when she shares, “We are a lot alike, you and me.” Upon seeing Shin’s antennae twitch in confusion, she goes on, “Someone lives inside of us and won’t get out.”
Shin thinks of his insides as a house’s interior where he and Ren can live and nestle together in peace. He imagines the warmth of that space, the softness of light in the room, almost as if… but no, he cannot go there. Not yet.
“Sad is wonderful,” Mira interjects again. Shin looks up at her and she looks almost sad. “I feel so lucky.”
“It’s going to be okay.” The sound of Shin’s voice shocks him. He does not know if it will be okay.
Mira nods once, twice, and several times more as if it to assure herself. “I’m trying to do a nice thing. For everyone.”
Shin is confused at first and then remembers the food for the party. Truthfully, it does not matter to him whether there will be rice cakes or fake papaya or torn up paper painted to look like leafy greens. He thinks of telling Mira then that something inside him is changing and rice cakes cannot cure it.
“I just—” Mira’s voice comes shaky, cracking a little at the last word. “I want everyone to be happy.”
Shin inches close to Mira as if to say “there, there” or at least he thinks this is what you are supposed to do in these moments. He does not know for sure.
Mira turns to look at Shin on the ground beside her as if she has just noticed him there. She asks, “Are you happy?”
The question makes Shin stumble a little. Honestly, he is not, but she is asking for confirmation of something else. Still, her question is a stinging reminder of what plagues him and sinks him into an unpleasant place. He would much rather think of a home with Ren, but now all he can think about is how it can never be. Shin finally speaks. “Thank you for making the sweet rice cake,” he says.
The answer, for what it’s worth, seems to suffice for now.
◆
Not long after Shin met Ren, he learned that the roach who left him alone with their husks was a frequent guest at the love motel stationed at the back cupboard of the kitchen. With full neon armor, the love motel managed to be both gregarious and hidden in plain sight. Shin had heard of such places in passing, of the lure of its sugar-lined walls. He heard of roaches who had given up on midnight food raids, left their packs, and drifted towards the beckoning call of the love motel’s hot pink glow. Once they were there, they never really left, visiting the outside world every once in a while, but their legs would be sticky with an unknown gel and their words slurred. They moved slowly, weakly, and tasted food differently, remarking on how the apples and beef grounds that they once lapped up with pleasure no longer had the same exhilarating flavors. A temporary home for wayward roaches, for those who could not divorce their longing from their hungers—the love motel fed them plenty in both.
A roach nearly twice his size, Ren would stagger out of the place, drenched in its sweetness. Shin would follow him at first to make sure that he made it from open floor to shadow safely. Whether Ren pretended not to notice or was truly oblivious to Shin’s scurrying steps behind him, it was unclear, only that this ritual would go on for days at a time. One day though, Ren turned around, blurry-eyed, and said, “Do you have a light?”
They found an empty matchbox and tucked themselves in it, the dark smelling of sulfur. Ren did not recognize Shin at first, only managing to muster that he just needed a break, pressing his face against Shin and falling asleep shortly after. Shin let him sleep on top of him, careful not to move too quickly. He could smell the love motel on him, a candied scent with a ripe pungency. It gradually filled the space of the matchbox, and it was the smell that eventually put Shin to sleep as well, dreaming of the two of them, their limbs knotted and tangled together.
But Ren would never stay too long, and when Shin awoke again, his love would leave only a sticky trail behind him. Still, Shin continued to watch Ren from afar, his brazen body swaying to the rhythm of the open air, exploring its own time. From the love motel echoed a choral tune that sounded like wings rubbing together in rapid succession. The pink of its signage glowed and waned in careful rhythm. Even when Ren entered its doors once again, the music did not stop and only grew louder. Shin could almost see why someone would give themselves to this place, why they would stay a little longer than they intended.
◆
On the day of Qingming, Shin finds apartment 9A completely transformed. In a radical revision of a typically austere holiday, the apartment flooded with people, ghosts and noise playing music from a disc honoring the best of songs from the last decade. The streamers that had originally laid limp and tangled in the center of the living room has grown in volume and intricate design. There are balloons, tiny half-filled ones pumped by a weak lung, but someone had arranged them on the wall like clashing and noisome bouquets. A cascade of newsprint confetti swirls overhead when Shin walks into the room. Packed wall to wall, the apartment feels unrecognizable with rows of fold-up tables lined with sweet rice cakes, flatbread, fried corn with sugar, potato salad tossed with ten-year-old Miracle Whip, and bathtub vodka in old water bottles labeled with a dried-out Sharpie and a haphazardly drawn skull and crossbones. As people come and go, they grab joss sticks, bowing in whichever direction that their drunken bodies sway before planting them in one of the many mounds of clay. Some forget that they are holding joss sticks and take to shimmying to their knees on the ground when the music tells them to get low, the ashes from the burning sticks coating the floor. As people dance, Grandpa Why slips through their legs, occasionally spooking the dancer so much that they fall backwards onto the floor, though they keep dancing anyway on the ground until they are pulled back up.
For a second, Shin thinks that he might enjoy himself. Parking himself by the sweet rice cakes, he finds himself moving to the music, tentatively at first, but then with a little more gusto. On occasion, someone will walk by, warn him about the vodka while pouring generous portions into their cup, and dance their way to the center of the living room. He imagines Ren would use this as an opportunity to sneak by with crumbs, feeling a bit smug for having pulled one over a crowd like this. “Go on, dance,” he envisions Ren teasing, bumping his body against his own. Shin could already feel his whole body blushing, shyly shaking his way to a coy “No, I don’t think so…”
Then, with a forceful tug of his antenna, Ren would go, “Why not?”
Shin feels a thousand pinpricks rain throughout his body. Through the music, he hears the skittering feet of someone close to his size, and when he looks into the crowd, he swears he can see a tiny body gleam between stomping feet.
Ren, Shin thinks loudly to himself. And then he says it to the room: “Ren!”
The party continues, Shin’s voice lost in the din. Suddenly, he feels very tired.
Mira emerges from the kitchen wearing a heavy necklace made of aluminum foil. She stumbles when she approaches Shin, a mug filled with clear liquid sloshing in her hand. Shin braces himself.
Mira opens her mouth wide, full of teeth, and shouts, “Come on now! It’s Conga Time!”
It is exactly as Shin feared. Mira’s announcement is a beacon to a fast-forming unruly train of people and ghosts. In his effort to flee the scene, Shin accidentally finds himself thrust into the middle of the action. Though the Conga line starts to make room for him in between people, the growing number of bodies in the apartment means that everyone eventually is shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. Shin feels the bodies closing in on him.
When the first person steps on him by accident, he does not mind, their shoe passing through him without consequence. Shin tries to move out of the way to keep in rhythm with the Conga line. When he is trampled once again, the sensation of the foot against his back almost takes the wind out of him, much to his great surprise. He dodges one foot and then another. When the third time comes around, he can hear a slight crunch in his backside, and instinctively, he winces.
Finding Mira bouncing in the crowd, Shin plants himself on her shoe, hardening with all his might, and pleads, “Please—”
“It’s okay! Dance with me!” Mira shakes her boot, and Shin, trying to follow the motion of her feet, feels close to being sick.
“Please!”
“Just go with it!”
Shin does as he’s told, his head spinning. The crowd blurs into one terrifying color, their sounds like one collective gnashing of metal against metal. When he squints, he can see Ren shaking his head as if to say, You’re not supposed to be here. When the song slows, Shin catches himself agreeing. His movements taper into a low sway and he is reminded just then of his final days with Ren at the love motel.
When he first came to the love motel, it was to find Ren and tell him that he longed for him, could not stop thinking of him each night. Inside the pink box, every roach was twirling, drunk on some music in their heads. Ren was splayed out on the floor, his wings tapping out a quiet rhythm. In any other place, Shin would have thought this charming, how Ren’s eyes glazed over with mysterious delight, but this was the love motel; the rules governing joy came laced with something else.
“Did you follow me here, handsome?”
Ren spoke first, startling Shin who could only mutter in return, “…worried about you.”
Ren offered him a dollop of white sugar, its bitterness punching through Shin’s senses. Shin shook his head, declining with some shame.
“What’s the matter?” Ren’s face contorted quickly into one of concern, suddenly lucid.
Shin shook his head again.
“Oh baby,” Ren cooed. He reached over to touch Shin’s face. “Things are moving a bit too fast for you.”
At the party, Shin feels that same sensation again, of being so near Ren, the scent of him, so dizzying. The music seems to crawl up walls, the whole apartment shuddering. The people jump up and down to a song that pelts its instructions across the crowded room. Every cup that has not been turned over now give way to spill. Every frame has been toppled, and the people too, are draped over each other like dominoes. Shin backs himself into a corner again, his insides pulsing with noise. It is so loud, the rest of the room goes mute, and suddenly, it is as if everyone is just thrashing aimlessly into the night. When he looks around, he can see all the cracks on the wall, the thin ones and those with their own sense of cartography. They brim with heat, every single of them, and they seem to say, Come on now. It is time.
No, not yet, Shin calls out to the air. What about Ren? Is he still waiting to arrive? Has he already passed over? These are the things Shin does not know, but the holes have their own sense of time. Shin darts in between dancing bodies, coursing through their damp flesh. In their liveliness, he sees their fear, how intently they move to avoid the rush of death.
He stumbles through, plants himself on a table, and crawls his way to a plate of something spongy. Though he cannot taste it, he knows the smell of sweet rice cake immediately, their gooey texture like a cushion for his weary ghost body. He hardens himself, surprised by the ease in which his back can bristle against another surface. He crawls deeper into the crevasse, an opening in the cake leading towards its center. So soft, he sighs to himself. The day has made him so tired. He stops and closes his eyes, feeling the familiar wave of sleep kiss his body.
◆
Shin kept returning to the love motel. Once he made it in the first time, the hosts had come to expect him. They would always hand him piles of sugar at the door, which he refused. There, in the love motel, Shin and Ren would lay together, their bodies clinging and pulling apart like scotch-tape. Even as it grew hot in there, they still fastened themselves to each other, and it was the only way it felt truly good.
At first, Shin stayed only a couple of hours, timing his visit meticulously, and left with enough time to purge his stomach of the place. He swore each time he’d stop, would drag Ren out of the love motel, to some place far away—a field of apples maybe, where they could eat their fill and then some. Shin was wild with plans, but each time he came to the love motel, he would sink into its sticky floors, grow drowsy and languid, and collapse on top of Ren.
Then he touched his mouth to Ren’s mouth one day when it was dusted with sugar and he did not hate it.
Each day, Shin came back to the love motel to find Ren and touch his mouth to his, the same sugar passing through them both until Shin was just as dizzy as his love. It happened gradually and then quickly.
He sprinkled sugar on Ren’s back and lapped it up greedily.
They would fuck and take turns drizzling sweetness on each other in between fucking.
At the front door, Shin would collect the sugar offerings, stuff himself so full that he had only energy enough to lay on his back by the time he reached Ren.
“It is like daffodils,” Shin said. “My mouth feels like flowers.”
Ren loved the description so much, he worked it into their lexicon. “My daffodil boy,” Ren called him, “my brightest bulb in the garden.”
Shin loved Ren so much, it made his stomach turn. He was sick so often, not even the air outside the love motel could alleviate his nausea. In fact, it made it worse, so much so that he decided there was no reason to ever leave the place. When Shin told Ren as much, he seemed relieved, and they held each other as the air inside the love motel grew heavy as a curtain.
During their final days, their time blurred together into a mesh of legs and slow bodies colliding into one another, unsure of where they began and where the room ended. They ate so much that their heads hurt, and they would say to each other, “I love you so much, it hurts.” They fell asleep in their own retch and woke up to begin the same ritual again. It was unclear who died first and however many minutes apart.
◆
By midnight, only half of the party has made it through without passing out on the floor or hallway. Pushing the bodies aside, Mira calls out to every corner for Shin.
Mira finds Grandpa Why wrestling with himself beneath the sofa cushions. “Have you seen Shin?” she asks. Grandpa Why responds with the shaking of his head, resuming his solo wrestling match when Mira rolls her eyes.
She grabs hold of Ma rounding the corner. “Ma, have you seen Shin?”
Ma shrugs.
As Mira looks around, picking up cups and scanning the floors, she finds herself at a loss. No Shin in sight. She grabs the sweet rice cake from the table and carries it to the middle of the living room. Maybe Shin will come out for this, she thinks.
Outside, the rain has subsided, the thick rubber tarp lifting from the windows, exposing a tiny sliver of sun from the departing clouds. For those who are sobering up, the soft glow from the window incites the smallest exhale.
None of the Qingming festivities that day are anything typical. Ma says this over and over, frowning at the drunken display in her living room. She plops herself on the couch where Grandpa Why is still wrestling with himself, and realizing her disruption, she moves one seat over. Meanwhile, Mira has kneeled by the coffee table, setting the plate of sweet rice cake down.
When Mira prepares to slice into the sweet rice cake, Grandpa Why leaps out from the couch. Ma does not move from her seat, and instead, begins to fan herself with a plastic folding fan. Everyone else looks around for Shin, lifting tablecloths and checking the bottoms of their feet. No one suspects that Shin had found himself a bed in the softness of a sweet rice cake.
Grandpa Why, growing impatient, begins to chant: “Cut the cake! Cut the cake!”
Mira slices the square in half. She stops, hearing a slight crunch. Slowly, parting the two halves, she spies a glint of something in the center. With a finger, gently, she lifts it out, revealing the shimmering blue husk of something that once had wings. There is only one roach anyone knows of that size and shape, and so they each come to realize that this molt belongs to the saddest roach they know.
No one says anything at first. They take turns poking at the molt, having seen nothing like it before. The molt glows like an oceanic body. As they all study and admire the beaming shell of a once-Shin, it occurs to them that after one ghostly phase, there can be another. What becomes of a life when one dies again after death? The question hangs in the air, each one in the room puzzling the consequence of this in their own life and death.
Ma is the first one to speak. “Bow three times,” she instructs, shutting her fan. “Let us show some respect.”
Everyone, human and ghost, lowers their heads three times. On the third bow, they almost expect Shin to hover above them with some tentative speech. And yet, the room falls silent except for the light beginning of a second round of rain. The soft pitter patter of it outside seems innocent enough before the tarp falls over the building again, engulfing the room in darkness. In the artificial night, someone turns on the music again, and this time, the sound is brassy and full of trumpets. Several people even resume dancing, but it is not quite the same. From the middle of the room, Shin’s molt continues to shine, flicker, and shine.