Lotus Stench
Lillian announced her presence with the sound of her suitcase rolling down the hallway, the wheels squeaking as if being dragged over gravel. Hearing it, Liana rushed to open her door. It was the first day of spring, move-in day, and Liana couldn’t be more thrilled. The two of them were friends who’d met in the most unusual of circumstances: their cheating lover, Sang. An underemployed novelist who hated making decisions and loved attention, Sang had two-timed them for several months until Liana and Lillian found each other.
“Your place is perfect,” Lillian said. She set down her backpack and smiled. Liana’s apartment was on a fourth-floor walk-up, sparsely furnished with a small thrifted couch and an IKEA dining table, a snake tongue next to the living room window, its leaves browning at the edges. The space was cramped, but it didn’t matter; between the two of them, they had very few belongings. Lillian’s room was the guest room, a windowless space with a small futon on the floor, but she preferred no windows. Temporary, all of it, necessarily—but loved.
“Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here,” said Liana. And she truly meant it. In many ways, it was remarkable that they got along at all, let alone this well. A fox spirit and a ghost, forming this union born of rivalry—who would have thought! Liana uncorked a champagne bottle and poured two flutes.
“This is a beginning. Let’s toast.”
Liana had first met Lillian on an unseasonably hot day in October.
She had come home to Sang’s studio early after taking a trip upstate. Immediately something felt peculiar. Take-out boxes on the dining table. A half-eaten pound cake, its crumbs spilled all over. Boxed wine, two empty glasses, one with a lipstick stain. Then finally Liana saw the open window—and Sang, outside on the fire escape, kissing a waifish young woman.
At this point, Liana and Sang had been dating for about six months. That week, Liana had traveled by train to the Hudson Valley for her mother’s funeral, Sang having decided not to accompany her; he said he was hard at work on a deadline for his novel, which remained unwritten.
Whenever fury overcame Liana, she shape-shifted back into her fox form. That day in the studio, she degenerated, molting her human husk: her flesh shrank and crinkled, prickling with white-hot fur. Tails and whiskers razored her smooth flesh, soft and barbed like cattails. Her coat wet from summer rains. She slipped into Sang’s laundry basket, full of the clothes she’d so neatly laundered earlier that week, which he hadn’t even touched. She’d throw them in the cesspool tonight, she thought, seething.
Climbing back in through the window, Sang tugged on the young woman’s hand. An alien smell, fishy and coppery—something like a mix of rotten seaweed and musk—settled over the apartment, and Liana was certain it came from the strange woman. Safely hidden, Liana peered at Sang’s lover. Her face seemed familiar, but Liana could not place it. Had Liana seen this girl at the hair salon where she got digital perms in Chinatown? No, this girl looked like she got her balayage done somewhere much fancier—not a hair on her head was out of place. Or perhaps Liana had seen her at school—that would make sense. Liana had attended NYU, where Sang was also employed as an adjunct instructor teaching fiction. Perhaps she was one of his students? Liana wouldn’t put that kind of relationship above him. Sang had always toyed with the idea—when they first dated, Sang had made the requisite student-teacher jokes, even though Liana had never taken any of his classes and they’d met on a dating app. As Liana searched her memories for clues, Sang peeled off the young woman’s plaid skirt, one she could have bought at a Hot Topic in New Jersey.
This girl was very pretty, Liana could not deny. Her figure was lissome and thin, skin jutting out because of knobby bone, fragile and greenish like celadon. Wispy bangs, a flat moon-shaped face. She had a translucent, dewy pallor that matched her general dolor, as if she’d been shut inside her whole life. Liana recognized this type—she’d seen them everywhere in this city, in her own mother—abject women steeped in yin, whose spectral beauty, sorrow, and loneliness were permanent as grease stains. The smell, too, felt permanent. This girl seemed smart, had to know better than she let on. Despite this, it was clear she craved male attention, if only from the way she looked at Sang: half simper, half stare. Liana understood: she was the type who infantilized herself near men, when it was convenient, and this no doubt inspired a pity in Sang, pity that aroused him. She watched as he kissed the other woman on the clavicle, as it elicited an instant response—a whimper.
Then something dawned on Liana, something that startled her so much she lost her grip on her transformation. Instantly her human form reemerged, snapping the plastic laundry basket apart. Covered in Sang’s rags, she sprawled in front of the undressed couple.
“What the fuck?” the other woman yelped, gripping the comforter as Sang scrambled to find his glasses on the bed. Slapping them on his face, Sang stammered, “Liana? Where did you come from so suddenly?”
He mumbled a series of excuses Liana did not hear. She had finally placed where she recognized this girl from—a class Liana had taken the year before, that one lecture with at least seventy-five students, English 401, taught by a professor whose syllabus only contained dead white men. Her name was Lillian. The Lillian in front of her had black hair, but last year in class she’d always looked like she had just arrived from an anime convention, with her oversized sweatshirts and saucer-eye contacts, her hair changing color every week, silver or lavender or red. It was hard to know what she really looked like underneath the hairstyles and makeup. During lectures, Lillian sat in the back, nodding off and copying notes from her friend.
All the expected feelings of betrayal or anger that threatened to throttle Liana in that moment dissipated. Because now she remembered: the girl from her class was dead.
Early in the previous semester, Liana and Sang had been inundated with emails about the news that a fourth-year student from the History Department had vanished. The story went that Lillian had gone missing from her dormitory, and her roommate filed a report. Two days later, her body was discovered in an alley beside the Humanities and Social Sciences Building. The girl had fallen twelve stories from an open window in the east wing of the building, from the office of a professor in the History Department. It was a mystery whether she had been pushed or fallen of her own accord, but the university and the police investigated and found no evidence of foul play. They brought a few people in for questioning, but no one was named a person of interest.
So there in the kitchen of Sang’s studio apartment, Liana realized that the woman in front of her was a female ghost. It explained the pungent smell, and it also explained her preternatural beauty—a beauty she most certainly had not worn in life. Liana had met a few such ghosts in her lifetime—always gorgeous and pathetic, smelling of melancholy and death.
So Sang had a type: the supernatural woman.
“A ghost, Sang? Really?”
“I can explain!” He put his hands in front of his face.
“You could get violently sick from fucking around with ghosts. They swarm with death and disease!”
“I thought foxes and ghosts are more or less the same.”
“Are you stupid?” Liana cried. “Foxes are flesh and substance!” She didn’t think that Sang was silly enough to make such a false equivalence. Sex, for fox women, had a very specific purpose: yang cultivation for ascendence toward immortality. Compared to Lillian, Liana was not just any vulpine enchantress, she was almost huxian, a transcendent: an eight-tailed fox spirit on her eighth life masquerading as a human. One more cycle of gathering life essence before she emerged as an immortal transcendent—nine lives, nine tails.
Lillian, on the other hand, was the embodiment of yin: a female ghost who died young. It was common knowledge that the ghosts of young unmarried women were dangerous because they lacked progeny, falling away from the ancestral line. All the unfulfilled longing they experienced in life manifested into sexual insatiability as ghosts. Their living lovers often died from yin poisoning. (This was all according to the classical stories of the strange, the zhiguai and chuanqi. There weren’t many stories of women with interiority coupling with charming ghosts, of course—most consisted of this tedious heterosexual tale between a grown man and beautiful melancholy ghost girl—nine times out of ten, she was a teen virgin.)
By this point, Lillian had practically dematerialized, her head hanging in shame, her body covered in Sang’s comforter, as Sang pleaded some nonsense Liana couldn’t make out.
“I am disgusting, I am foul, you’re right. All I do is pollute him,” the ghost whispered.
As Sang prattled on, Liana began to recognize what she and Lillian were—two feminine creatures, one human and one not, one living and one not, squaring off over a person whose only virtue was that he was both human and living. That night, Liana broke up with Sang and moved out of the apartment, letting him grow ill and emaciated from fornicating with a ghost. Soon, Lillian followed suit.
It was true that they perhaps should have despised one another. But when Lillian showed up at her apartment two months later, begging to make it up to her, Liana considered their circumstances.
“I know what you’re thinking. How could you trust me?” Lillian said. “But I don’t harbor ulterior motives. I owe you a debt, and I intend to pay it. Ever since I died, I’ve been floating in this world like a piece of driftwood, but now I have a mission, a purpose: to right my wrong.” She tugged at her sleeve, choking back sobs.
“Stop it. You’re okay. Stop crying.” Awkwardly, Liana stroked the top of the ghost’s head, now tousled.
In the end, Liana had to give it up to her: Lillian was right. She had nowhere else to go. You would think that the scourge of gender politics would not bleed into the spiritual realm, but there it was, sneering: arbitrary rules and roles for feminine monsters, whether they were ghosts or shape-shifting foxes—the absurd routines, the mortifying and debilitating cycle of seduction and deceit, the ridicule, the ostracization, the vitriol.
Also, what kind of grudge was worth harboring for the sake of Sang? Sang came on to her, but it was Liana who had to assume all the domestic duties once they lived together. She was the one forced to constantly cater to his emotional and physical needs, babying him, healing him when he was sick, yet it was she who was also considered the sexual parasite, the alien. She’d humored his every sexual fantasy, by assuming the shape of various actresses, supermodels, and celebrities, even the historical beauties of China like Xi Shi and Wang Zhaojun. She had been anything he wanted her to be, and he had still betrayed her.
And so Liana admitted to Lillian that she had been a bit unfair earlier. “I think we both lost ourselves in that person,” she said. It had been wrong to distinguish herself too much from ghosts, at Lillian’s expense. At the end of the day, both ghosts and foxes were regarded as sexually insatiable, dangerous women.
And Sang, who seemed so sincere in the beginning, was no different from any other man she’d met—and in her eight lives, Liana had seen them all: the Tang Dynasty suitor who had pummeled his own penis with a mallet to prove his virility. The Ming Dynasty suitor who had tried to wrangle her into a glass bottle. The Qing Dynasty suitor who had hired an exorcist to break up with her. Now Liana found she was ready to take an indefinite break. After a few centuries, the art of seduction had gotten boring. The search had lost its marvel, as had the prospect of a human domicile, assimilation into some human form of family or order. She was tired of the role of the responsible healer, protective fox spirit. She was eager to go back to her wilder ways—the ways of a poltergeist, an imp-like vixen, who played games, who tricked people instead of taking care of them. A prankster, a force of chaos.
“I want you to haunt this city with me, so we regain our power,” said Liana. She asked Lillian to move in with her when spring arrived, so they could frolic together.
In Lillian, Liana finally found a common ground with another alien, someone who understood this marginal existence. In their liminal household, no one would be the parasite.
Two weeks after move-in day, black water began leaking out from the ceiling. A clog in the drainage pipes from the apartment upstairs had caused the water to come flooding down, the super said. It would take at least a week to fix.
It was the last chill of spring: The gas heaters were radiant with noise. The drip soon transformed into a syrup of dark sedimental liquid, now spilling from the faucets, the showerheads, its stench unmistakable. Liana tried to fix the place up with her illusions: she tried to mask the smell with a lotus scent and musk she’d acquired with her experiments with perfumes. Bemoaning her choice of apartment, she began to look for an exit plan.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find somewhere else to live,” said Lillian. “We’re resourceful.” City ghosts and city foxes could only go so long without a new place or person to haunt—it was only a matter of time before they would be forced to move on, anyway.
The two of them scanned through Zillow and StreetEasy looking for vacant apartments, condos, lofts. Sometimes they wandered through the city together for hours, gawking at all the newly constructed skyscrapers muddling Midtown and Hudson Yards. At first they were careful to select places that looked long-empty or abandoned, but gradually, they grew braver and bolder as the weather thawed and the city came back to life. Forget propriety; they threw caution to the wind. They vacated the space in Chinatown, skulked every place in the city they fancied.
The small heists usually began with a spontaneous invasion: Lillian would materialize into some empty gut-renovated apartment, and then she’d open the windows or doors for Liana to climb inside. They found their way into empty hotel rooms in the Waldorf Astoria. They found the French country–style mansion of Liana’s landlord upstate in the Catskills and ate his whole batch of chanterelle mushrooms, drank the oldest bottles in his wine cellar. They bounced on California king mattresses in the penthouse apartments on Billionaires’ Row owned by shipping magnates. They went on joyrides in an Aston Martin DBS 770, blasting reed flute songs from other lives on the stereos. They broke into Sotheby’s and stole the opal collections of deceased heiresses. They tried on the sumptuous satin gowns at Bergdorf’s and exited camouflaged as mannequins. After the cleaners finished sweeping and the lights were turned off, they read the tomes of Qing scholars from the rare collections at the New York Public Library Rose Main Reading Room. At midnight, they shared pots of Pu’er and Longjing teas at the Astor Chinese Garden Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They touched the moonlit taihu rocks and ginkgo latticework, basking in the artifice of a remote home they both could barely remember. They lived like nomads: every few nights, they moved to avoid detection.
“Rich people have limited taste,” Lillian said one day, as she surveyed the eighteenth century rococo trousseau in the primary bedroom of the six-story limestone mansion overlooking Central Park that they were squatting in for the week. It was late afternoon, and light spilled in from the Palladian windows. The cupboards and refrigerators were filled, although the family was reportedly vacationing in Bali.
For dinner, Liana chopped scallions and ginger in the chef’s kitchen to make a brothy soup. She unwrapped some frozen oxtails and set to cooking. Lillian had her phone and was swiping on dating apps.
“You’re really dating again?” asked Liana, curious. “How do you intend to explain to these suitors that you’re no longer living?” She set down bowls of marrow soup with oxtails on the carved satinwood dining table.
“I don’t have to, because I’m only swiping for shits and giggles. I will not actually go see any of them,” said Lillian as she took a spoonful. “Delicious. Best home-cooked meal since I died.” Lillian’s ghost smile was unnervingly charming.
Amused, Liana started swiping, too. After they lurked on the apps for a while, the two made a list of the preferences written on the profiles of these men. Lillian wrote out the first few on the whiteboard hung on the refrigerator:
Must be easygoing, chill, drama-free.
Knows how to lighten up and have fun, must be classy yet sexy.
Kinky, beautiful, happy, smart, sexy, and passionate.
Prefer Chinese girls under 70 kg.
Must know how to take care of her man and spoil him. Loyalty is key.
“My god,” said Lillian. “I’m glad I died a virgin if this is the pool that’s out there….”
Liana laughed. “Our heists are way more fun than dating,” she said, and really meant it. A year and a half ago, before Sang, Liana had created her first profile on a dating app. Trying to date in twenty-first century New York as a fox woman—how bad could it be? Soon she experienced the full extent: the date where, after one drink, the man compared her to a “vulnerable and succulent oyster” that he wanted to suck from the shell. The date where the man Venmo requested her for the bill after she politely turned down his request to go home with him. The date where the man, upon successfully getting her to go home with him, couldn’t get excited and so instead she spent an hour listening to him complain about all the women on the app who rejected him.
By contrast, Lillian was a fearless specter, unexpectedly wily and enterprising for a female ghost, in a way that Liana had always avoided, careful to evade the vulpine stereotype. The Lillian who had wept in Sang’s bed in the beginning felt remote. Now their laughter spilled freely, carrying over the view from the fifth story of the town house, the treetops of Central Park, canopies crowned with dusky yellow seedpods, leaves as big as saucers.
Lillian stopped swiping, breaking their spell. “Hey, I recognize someone. This guy.” On the app, the face of a man. Bearded, bespectacled.
“Was he…” When Liana saw him, she understood. It was the professor they both knew, the one from whose office window Lillian had leapt.
“Yes, he was.” Lillian didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Without her divulging, Liana knew what this person had done.
“Why didn’t you tell me before? Also, why is he on a dating app? I thought he was married.”
Liana’s mind raced with ways to haunt him: Pelting him with bricks or roof tiles. Pelting him with crockery, smashing his china collection. Mixing filth into his coffee. Scaring his daughters, possessing them. Shaving what hair was left from his head while he’s sleeping.
“Want to get even?” Liana asked. “We could find him, easily.”
To Liana’s awe, Lillian simply shrugged and said, “No. What’s the point?”
Liana was really impressed. Even though this woman was a female ghost, even though she had studied vengeful, bloodthirsty female criminals of Meiji-era Japan during her very short life, she herself felt no desire for revenge.
If it were Liana, she would not be nearly as noble. Sometimes she still kept tabs on the fates of people from past lives who had wronged her—that Qing Dynasty man who tried to exorcize her, for example, fell into a rainy ditch on his way to the Daoist temple. The Ming Dynasty man who trapped her in a glass bottle bit into a fat plum spiked with a blister beetle’s poisonous eggs. The Tang Dynasty man who beat his penis with a mallet had cheated on Liana with one of his family maids, so he ended up mad after his member shriveled up into the size of a silkworm. There was a whole pantheon of such unfortunate souls, and Liana smiled when she remembered all the fruits of karmic retribution.
Sang called them constantly. He left voice mails, text messages, emails. He seemed to know they were living with one another; in all his voice mails, he implored them to come back. The stoic, mild-mannered façade was gone: The messages were steeped in flaccid, self-centered apologies. Listening to them, Liana realized that Sang’s objective was not their reconciliation, but reassurance that he was a good man—or, if not a good man, at least that he was not a bad man. It was almost amusing how desperate he was to hear them say it.
“He seems sincerely sorry,” said Lillian. “Are you going to keep ignoring him? What if he honestly wants to make amends?” She paused uncertainly, and then added, “I promise I won’t interfere if you want to get back together with him.”
“I’m not interested in amends,” said Liana. “And I’m done with him.” The thing about these situations—and she’d experienced them over and over—was that even though she had been the one wronged, even though she had tried to do right by him, somehow it always amounted to her being the one to feel sorry for him.
“I don’t know,” said Lillian. “I feel like he can’t be lying if he’s willing to grovel like that. Why deny yourself true love?”
“Love, darling, is that something you want?” Liana asked.
“Well, yes,” said Lillian. “I’d always wanted it, even though I never knew what it was. Never could find it while I was still alive.” Her eyes were shimmering, fertile with dangerous dreams.
“Love has other purposes for me,” said Liana. “I need a man’s love in order to extract his essence. But he needs to understand that I cannot stay. I will always have to depart.”
Maybe this time Liana wouldn’t secure a human host. Maybe she’d fail in her vulpine duties, be forced to circle the sun eighty times again before becoming a celestial fox, but she was okay with that if it meant getting to live this one life on her own terms, this time with Lillian by her side so she wouldn’t feel lonely. They would turn this world hospitable together.
If only.
After a decadent spring and summer, trouble finally caught up to them. Around seven o’clock in the evening on a crisp September day, Liana came home to find a stranger in the house. He was naked, lying on his side with his face down on top of the shag rug.
A dead man.
Lillian was bent over him, trying to resuscitate him and failing. On impulse, Liana ran over, swatting Lillian away. “Is this…is this Sang?” she shouted.
“I didn’t mean to kill him! I only meant to haunt,” moaned Lillian. “He had a planchette and was trying a séance and the next thing you know, I…”
“Oh my god,” said Liana. “Don’t tell me.”
“I never thought that just one roll in the hay would kill him!”
“We have to do something about this!” cried Liana, surveying the mess: bottles of champagne on the floor, mirroring the moments before her first encounter with Lillian. “How could this have happened?”
“I’m so sorry, you know, he came back all apologetic, and he sweet-talked me, made me believe we could be a family, with you included….”
“And you believed him?” Liana spat. A pang shot through her. It had never occurred to Liana that Lillian would revert back to her romantic illusions, at the expense of both of them.
Liana knelt down to Sang’s mouth and opened it with her fingers. One whiff of his scallion breath informed her that he was still alive. She kicked him. Once, then another time, then another. With a violent jerk, Sang finally moaned, turning around and revealing a swollen growth on his chest. He was on the edge of dying.
For a moment Liana considered it: Was it worth saving him, yet another time? This time the cost would be much more dire. Another life dreamed, another life wasted. Then she looked at Lillian, on the floor, inconsolable, her panicked croaks spilling in all directions. An unexpected warmth took hold of Liana.
Gently, Liana took off her cinnabar bracelet and placed it on Sang’s growth. Then she crumpled into herself, heaving a little, making herself as small as possible. She coughed up a red object. From her throat it emerged, covered in phlegm and marbled streaks of blood—a pearl, a pill, an elixir. The essence she’d cultivated for all these years. She pressed it to his wound. Slowly, the breath returned from her mouth to his. Hot tears emerged through her ducts. As a fox spirit, she didn’t want to give back her breath. She needed his breath, his life force, to ascend beyond this wild nightmare of a world. She released it and all that she had worked for, all that she desired—the palace of peace, freedom from the vicissitudes of human emotions—retreated beyond her line of vision until it was no more than a cloud bank in the sky of bare illusion. She heard a voice, distant: “Liana, no! Liana, I’m so sorry! I was weak, I won’t betray you again!” The sobs gained traction until they reached a crescendo, washing over Liana like water from a hot spring. She shook her head, tried to speak. She wanted to say: There is nothing to forgive.
Liana understood now: their shenanigans had always had to reach a terminus. Female ghosts wanted romantic love, the safety of family to remember them in their afterlives. At the end of the day, Lillian was still a human. Her desires all belonged here; condemned to only this earth, she would wander here forever. Lillian wanted love, but love was not enough for Liana. Liana wanted escape: She wanted transcendence, didn’t she? She wanted to end her stint as a guest on this earth. And there was a way, Liana now knew, to get what they both desired.
Lillian gathered her friend’s slumped form into her arms, the ropy flesh of Liana’s limbs slowly giving way to the shape of furred skin and bones, hollow and limp, heavy. In a matter of minutes Liana’s body had degenerated into a carcass of an exquisite red fox, pungent with wounds.
Was she gone?
Beside herself at the thought, Lillian let out a cry, alarming like the screams of foxes. She cried and wept and screamed so much she terrified Sang, now awake, who tried to console her. She pushed him away, already far afield.
First she fell into memory. It was late spring, two years ago. They were in that class together, English 401, the professor had assigned the book Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger. The professor had assigned them to the same discussion group, analyzing the story “The Laughing Man,” in which Salinger imagined a fabulous version of China. The story followed an American protagonist, the child of missionaries who lived in China, near an imaginary border with Paris. He was kidnapped by mercenaries who injured his face by compressing it in a vise, disfiguring his mouth into a permanent smile. A troupe of Chinese freaks followed the American protagonist blindly on his hijinks. The other students had loved the story because it was a version of an even older novel by Victor Hugo called The Man Who Laughs, and these stories eventually coagulated into the character of the Joker, from Batman, a face they recognized, a face they knew well.
Liana had hated the story (“Imagine,” she had said, miffed at the curriculum. “A Paris-Chinese border. This sure is some fucked-up imperialistic fantasy!”). Lillian, too, had hated the professor, who had often leered at her not-so-clandestinely during office hours. Still, this part of his lecture came to her now, in her afterlife.
“Stories and characters have so many lives,” the professor had said. “The same fates, the same lives, get repeated in a cycle, over and over, until the story is perfected. We may not live to see the perfect version, but you will recognize it when you do.”
Thinking of this, Lillian ululated, and her cries were so powerful she began to dream. A field, a parallel place—not earth. Deracinated, she lost her shape. Her insides emerged: blood and guts and worms. Flowers, too, and tiny poison mushrooms, their feathery jeweled gills. All this organic material she never knew a ghost could harbor. She wept, and as she wept she transgressed, all boundaries were broken now, she was crossing into an illusion, a phantasmagoria. She took a deep breath, and it was something more than air she inhaled. Ferns, heather, fields of lupine. Was that Liana, running forward in the grass, the copse of trees beyond where she stood? Lillian’s heart leapt. Her own desires lost materiality as she chased her friend toward god knows where, all her entrails strange and loose. Past the pastures, the misshapen pines, she saw a lush primeval sea. Her body, left behind. And her friend, now a fata morgana against the winking crepuscule. Ahead, the low thunder rolling.
Midnight struck, and Lillian came to with an ache throbbing wildly in her chest. And a bolt of—was that pain? And how? Did she have nerves again? Rising, she felt the smooth skin of her arms against the linen duvet, the bones underneath. Tight braids of veins and vessels. The movements of bowels. She pulled at the foreign hair growing from her scalp. A white hair curled around her finger, and when she extracted it, a pang flicked through her head. Breath moved in her lungs, her rib cage contracting. A lump sat in her throat.
Sang had long since left. His string of texts she didn’t bother to read. Instead, she turned to where Liana’s body was supposed to have lain, but it was gone. The red fox corpse was gone—and she, Lillian, was fully, shockingly alive again. She got up from the bed and ran through the house’s many halls looking for the bathroom. In front of the mirror, she saw the face of someone dear to her, and then she finally understood what Liana had done, who her sacrifice had been for.
A year passed. Lillian re-enrolled in their school to complete her degree and moved back into their first shared apartment in Chinatown, signing a two-year lease. One afternoon, she was browsing at McNally Jackson when she spotted a novel: Lotus Stench, by Sang Xiao. She had not thought of him since Liana’s death. So, he had miraculously sold and published his novel. She was impressed that he’d actually made it to the end of his draft.
The novel was the story of Liana, Sang, and Lillian, fictionalized with an ending that Sang wrote in place of what had transpired. In the happy ending, they lived on together, a ménage à trois, in harmony despite all the misgivings and jealousies in the beginning, which the protagonist-Sang dismissed as women’s excessive “emotions.” Whenever protagonist-Sang found himself enjoying too much sex, Liana and Lillian took turns nursing him back to health, making him drink their saliva to treat his yin-sickness. Lillian is eventually reborn in the body of a teenage girl, who runs away from her family to live with protagonist-Sang. Liana gets pregnant with his child. After the birth of her fox son, Liana falls ill and dies, and her corpse returns into the form of a fox. The revenant Lillian and Sang weep for her, visiting her grave every year thereafter. Years later, Liana, too, is reborn as a human (teen) girl, and the three of them reunite and continue to live a happy life together.
Finishing the novel, she whooped at his audacity. Sang had described Liana’s breasts as “juicy little kumquats,” and Lillian’s sex parts as “lagoons of unadulterated ecstasy.” He described all their sexual encounters in excessive, lurid detail. Lillian imagined Liana’s reaction: I’d rather be dead than alive and in someone else’s postpubescent body! At the thought that Liana was not around to read this travesty of a novel, Lillian felt a wrenching ache spear her spine.
The next day, Lillian placed the book in the “Free” bin next to the English Department’s offices. As she set it down, the professor appeared. He was exiting his office and tilted his head, glancing at her. His bloodshot blue eyes twitched slightly, averting her gaze. The flesh on his face pinkened, and he began to tremble, agitated. She walked up really close to him, felt him recoil.
“Boo!” she barked.
The professor coughed violently, dropping his tumbler of coffee. Hot liquid stained his wing-tipped shoes, sizzling the threads of the midnight-blue carpet.
“Are you okay?” a passerby shouted, holding the professor’s arm steady. There was a commotion now, the people in the vicinity surrounding him. He was sinking now, kneeling into the spilled coffee.
When Lillian was a ghost, she never wanted revenge: too much sorrow steeped it with an unappetizing bitterness. But now that she was alive again, the idea didn’t seem half-bad.