I’m a Victorian damsel. I’m a ballet dancer. I’m a suburban teenager. I’m every person who survives: clutching a weapon and the last of their mind. I’m also every person who doesn’t survive: nonvirgin and named yellow, unrepentant fighter against the elderly and dead colonizers. There will never be statues or universities in my honor here.
One hand grips a crowbar, and the other clasps a two-gallon gasoline can taken from the truck. I’ve ripped the largest splinters from my palms, but the tiny ones that require tweezers stay, digging deeper. I stare at the house with its windows dark. My áo dài catches on a breeze, dirtied but as gorgeous as any gown. Dirt clumps my hair into thick bands. My eye has swollen up, obscuring a quarter of my vision.
The balcony’s French doors snap open, swinging as warning and invitation. “You’re so dramatic,” I say aloud. Ghosts don’t spare anyone on drama, I’ve realized, or maybe it’s Nhà Hoa still fired up from the party. It’s part of the spectacle.
At the front steps, I lean down to inspect Alma’s body. Overgrown leaves shift by her beaten face. Alive.
Fuel slicks the porch and shines in untended pools. Not wasting any more time, I unplug the can to pour within. Before I finish, I have to make sure Ba and Lily aren’t trapped by the house. The door is ajar, snagged on the abundance of climbing hydrangeas that have claimed outside. I crouch low to avoid their touch. After getting jumped by Alma, it’s better to be safe.
This house encases me whole, hotter and more humid than hours before. Every single thing unlit. Every noise quieted, as though the rats have had their fill. The light switches are dead. I’m already sweating by the time I shut and lock the door, in case Alma gets up.
When I turn around, green eyes find me again. Marion Dumont stares from her portrait. No one answers my call, so I have to go in deeper. An old house like this settles over time, and it might have taken Ba and Lily into its crevices. My heart is exhilarated with excuses to talk to my sister. Dear Lily, have you seen the rats? Doing quite well, are they not? Destroying everything? Have we considered that this place should not be saved?
The welcome mat caresses my feet, which rub in until freed of the biggest clumps of dirt and grass. I set the gas can down and run a hand on the wall beneath the staircase, feeling for every dent that proves it is not perfect. “Where are they?” I ask, and nothing answers. I bring the crowbar back and smash against the panel. I peel it back, opening this house up for its sullen insides, its dark secrets. Wood plummets to the floor.
This house never would’ve passed inspection, Florence had said, and it is true.
Ants overcrowd the walls, staked through their heads by the fungus that controls them. Most have perished, releasing spores to poison the whole colony, but others crawl through tunnels leading far into Nhà Hoa. Ba had passed on houses in the US for less.
Then, I overturn the gasoline, dragging a slimy trail through the sitting room. I check the fireplace for my sister’s feet. I drown the potted hydrangeas. I blink, and blink, waiting for my family to appear in the dark—or her, Lady of Many Tongues. I’ve seen half-wrecked buildings, scorched and wet after a firemen’s visit; I don’t want that. I need more fuel.
I toss the rattling can. Ba says a grease fire can’t be put out by water, so maybe that’s true. The kitchen will have oil. I have to make this place combust any way I can now that it knows I’m no friend. The leftover trays from the party have been flung off the counters. Something has stepped on them, turning appetizers to viscous waste.
No time to wonder who or what.
I kneel by the cabinets to grab all the oil. Ba has provided a variety—olive, vegetable, ghee, sesame, and even avocado. I throw the first glass dispenser. It breaks in one great gush. When I double-check for more, I find a jar. My jar, the one that’s been missing from my room. It was full of dead insects the last time I saw it; it’s empty now.
Theorizing about parasite-infested food can be an academic activity; witnessing the proof that Ba—whether under the house’s or Marion’s influence—supplemented our meals with bugs is nothing short of a nightmare scenario.
With stomach acid eating at my throat, I check my mouth for splinters and sprouts. My skin tastes like American fast-food grease. My finger comes out clean, except for the blood running from a bit lip. I rise, arms full of my chosen weapon. A creak from the back room puts me on high alert. “Dad?” Again, no answer.
Movement rumbles the ceiling, so I empty bottle after bottle up the curving stairs. My silk trousers are soaked from the bottom up, moisturizing my dry heels. The walls beg me to listen again, but my head swims in fuel and oil. Ba and Lily have to be upstairs. My family will be upstairs, and before I burn this place down, I need them.
Leaves rustling, hair being brushed, tiny legs scuttling. This house is alive.
“You’ve returned,” Marion says in French-accented English. In this hallway of closed doors, she stands outside the only open room, the master. Through the balcony, Đà Lạt’s cool night finds its way inside: pine and hydrangea, wet earth, smoked pork, and again, gasoline. Her dress is a velvety smudge.
“Lily!” I call out again. “Dad!” As my voice echoes back, Marion holds me still and awake. She demonstrates her control over me by plucking each taut muscle until the bottles and crowbar clang on the banister.
“You’ve made a grand mess,” says Marion as her neck stretches. “Fooled this house all you wanted, but now we both know you, useless rat.”
I look everywhere for a sign that they escaped, straining to gloss over her abandoned torso. Perhaps it’s better that there’s no indication they’ve returned at all. If I am by myself here, Marion can compel me alone. “Cam,” I try instead, closing my eyes. “Cam. Help me.” She’s warned me before. She’s given me clues where she could. She’s shown up for me, and I need—
“What hasn’t she told you?” the Frenchwoman simpers. Her absence of smell dulls each accelerant on my body as a bony cheek slides over mine. Against my ear, she whispers, “It was never only me.”
This memory is different from previous excursions. The world materializes in slow blinks: floors first with oak boards steadily shaped; sheer curtains wrinkled by rough hands; severe masts arched from bed to ceiling; and porous walls brimmed with whispers. Then, at the master’s center and backlit by sunrise, a young woman straddles her husband.
From a corner, Marion grins, and I know suddenly that this is a ghost’s memory.
Cam’s expression is blank. The glint in her eyes is borrowed, shining from the blade she sneaks from the pillow beside them. Her husband is too enthralled by the flowery robe hanging from her emaciated shoulders to notice. She stabs down and spills blood. She stabs and his big hands try to find her throat, but it’s too late.
His sloppy gurgle joins the walls’ low murmur as I begin to shake. In all her memories and our dreams, she’s never shown me the precursor to her death, the way she first murdered her husband.
Marion’s voice is soft and encouraging as she coaxes her sister-in-law to rise. Come on, Camilla. In a daze, Cam slips from the canopy bed and pulls the sash from her waist. Come, dear, Marion says from the balcony. I shut my eyes before I can see her neck break.
When I finally look again, Cam heaves upward from the bent iron, one arm clamoring over the other to take turns lifting her long neck. The robe’s sash stays tight on the railing where her body hangs. All the while, Marion laughs and laughs, unaware that she’s made a terrible mistake.
This house will be alone for a hundred years. Neither will be happy.
And Cam, she is a hungry ghost, and not even my incense can fill her.
I’m standing in the kitchen. The lights have come back on, and in front of me is Ba with a searing gaze. While I lived Marion’s memory, she must’ve moved me. She helped me find my family. “I got it fresh,” he says, palm slapping the thigh-sized red meat laid out on a large cutting board. Its bamboo is ready for another knife mark. Fat marbling streaks through the meat, as white as airplane exhaust.
I giggle. In this house of dreams, I can have everything I want. Its buzzing tells me so.
He sets out another cutting board for me, and I take up a knife.
Lily enters from the back, dazed, while Cam walks behind her. Supervising. Those golden-brown eyes—so awake—rest on me, explaining, pleading, full of shame. It was her all those times. The brush, me walking on the road, a hand in mine to sleep, it was all her. Marion told no lies there.
Married at seventeen, dead at twenty: there’s a nursery rhyme somewhere, a warning for girls who follow.
From her protective hands, my sister drops dead grasshoppers under my knife. Look at me. For a moment, awareness flickers between us. “Don’t listen,” I murmur to her, but she leaves for the dining room, set to task. Cam lingers closer to me, dousing the grasshoppers’ earthiness with nothing, blotting the meat’s blood soak with nothing, pervading all other scent with the staleness of a plastic bag.
“What else did you do?” I ask. I don’t blame her for her husband’s murder, not after his crimes and Marion’s urging, but Cam actively concealed it from me. She worked with the house to hide it from me.
“Chị bảo vệ em,” she says.
An incredulous chuckle fights its way out. “You didn’t protect me.” I strain to yell, but the shame has lodged inside me. The party bombed. Lily is not okay. Ba is witnessing the failures of my lust. “Tại sao?”
She is quiet at first, so much that I expect her to fade away, but then she answers in halting Vietnamese and English. This house isn’t the only one learning from its tenants. Cam has been listening to me and Lily and Ba, absorbing our tongue in bits and pieces. “I not want hurt family, nhất là em.” Her diction is slow and clear. “More time we đi chơi, less I feel lẻ loi. Less lonely. We the same.” I shake my head, though I know intimately how much less lonely it’s been to live a dream or in limbo to escape real problems. “But they not. Marion take. Người Mỹ take. I take back.”
A shiver runs down my neck. Cam reclaimed that brush by puppeteering me to Thomas and Alma’s villa. This plea, however brave in this mishmash of languages, isn’t an apology. Ba carves the thigh, pointedly not staring at us. “That why you told me not to come back? I’m a đồ chơi to you,” I say, fed up with being someone’s plaything.
Her áo dài is a gash at the periphery, ripping closer until her dead hand rests on mine. “No,” she whispers, words in a perfect rush of excuses. She warned me earlier she couldn’t promise I could leave if I came back, so why did I return; she knew she couldn’t stand to be stuck here with only Marion, so please understand. Fingers squeeze into my palm as she says, “I not let her hurt you anymore. Ở lại with me. I want you, Jade.” Those four words tug deep, especially my name in her mouth—that barely there d. I don’t respond. If I stab her with the knife, she won’t even bleed. No escape. No future if I stay.
When I keep silent, she adds, “Last food, okay?” My world begins to get hazy and simple as she leaves me behind.
“I suspected,” Ba says, somehow the most clearheaded among us. “But didn’t know. She stays away from me usually.” He didn’t care, as long as he got what he wanted.
Dazed, I cut the grasshoppers’ heads off—since no one likes being looked at when eating, really—and slide them from the cutting board in one swoop. They bounce around the sink. In even pieces, I split legs and arms. Their paper-clip thighs get an olive oil massage. It’s important to let these tough things rest, but they’ll be tender enough.
Oh. Oh. I’ve done this before. While Ba’s been feeding me, I’ve been feeding Lily. My pride in being able to provide a comfort crashes into numbing realization.
There are so many ways to make a meal not vegan.
The afternoon after we went fishing—our last real happy day—wasn’t at all what it seemed. Brined in soy sauce and fried with tofu, diced grasshoppers don’t look very different from lemongrass.
In small ways for a long time, Marion had me in her palm. My sister is another victim of Cam’s fucked-up and unclear warnings.
Beside me, Ba’s knife work is fast and imprecise, rushed compared to our usual dinners. The clanging is hypnotizing. Sautéed less than a minute, the meat still drips raw in the middle. All as it should be. Each morsel, slick with lime juice and fish sauce, is carefully arranged on a bed of crisp and fragrant herbs. Grasshoppers have been mixed in as perfect garnishes by my hands. Translucent onions ring the platter.
Unable to help myself, my mouth waters. The contents of my stomach are still in the forest, leaving me empty and starving.
Flatworms. Tapeworms. Parasites the size of loose thread. Deadly little things.
Last food, okay? my bride had said.
“Shit,” I curse, and stumble away from the platter. Cam’s or Marion’s or the house’s compulsion weakens, and I immediately run to the other room for Lily. Waves of pain rock my head. Acting in the moment is as draining as doing every calculation, but I didn’t come here to die. Soft candles shed light on the grand table, set for a feast. My sister oversees another girl, whose hands have been tied from behind. A rag has been slotted tight across her mouth. Her hair has a cool, unwashed shine. “Flo,” I say, shocked by her familiar profile. I didn’t notice her on my way in at all.
“Dad needs us here,” Lily mutters, blank-eyed, when I gently push her aside to unbind the ropes around Florence’s wrists. Words are muffled, urgent, rushing me along.
The rope twists and turns, an indecipherable mess. As calmly as I can, I tell Lily, “Get out and I’ll catch up with you. Don’t listen if something talks to you.”
Confusion slips onto my sister’s face, but she repeats, “Dad needs us here.”
I take a deep breath. We’ll have to do this the complicated way then, me dragging everyone out. Florence’s head tilts so I can undo the gag. As soon as she’s freed, Florence coughs and spits, “Your bride knocked me out.”
“I guessed,” I say, wondering whether Cam had done it before or after warning me to stay away. How long has she been planning this? I pat my pockets down, but the phone’s gone, probably lost during the scuffle with Alma.
Florence leans forward, catching my uninjured eye. “I heard what happened at the party, so I looked for you.”
You came back? Like that day in the attic, Florence had come to rescue me. No one’s saved me before. I want to kiss her again, to wreck that purpling mark on her neck.
“Maybe untie me first?” Florence says next, as though she can read my messy expression under all the bruising and puffed skin.
My strength isn’t enough to undo the knots, no matter how I fumble with the ropes. Perhaps her best friend is right about me, after all, for my lack of muscles, for the trouble I am. Florence is in this position because of me.
I look around the room for scissors or a knife, and finding neither, I seize my sister’s shoulders and shake her a little. “I’m serious, Lil. You need to go first and call someone for help.” Her brows scrunch together as she works through my command, half turned toward the exit while also clutching a tall-backed chair.
It’s Ba who responds first, emerging from the kitchen with the platter we prepared together. “We’re all needed here, Jade,” he says as the porcelain dings against the table, signaling dinner. As if determined to finish his toast, he raises Florence’s cat-eared phone and taps the screen on. “We’re not done yet.”