[chinatown restaurant]
by Celeste Sea
I meet Ghost Girl when she comes up behind me and tries to scalp my name. She ends up stealing yours from my brain and then my mouth instead, neatly trimming my tongue of your characters.
Your name is all I have left, and so I fight her even though it’s too late: I grip her with both hands and shake till she spits in my face. For a moment, she reminds me of the day we closed you up, padded your windows and caged your doors. Something about how your storefront flashed silver the way her bones do now: a moonlit nickel. I must say so aloud because after an exhale she stops struggling and licks the inside of my palm.
That’s when I see your name, coiled along the side of her mouth. A wreath of smoke in the dark. I should stick my hand in there, shove it all the way down her stomach. I don’t, though. I don’t because you taught me mercy, remember? Because of you, I still leave offerings roadside for the dead, a holdover from how I used to burn incense before each shift. You’d hum with luck. The other chefs said it was the sound of your gas stoves, how they seethed with potential. Or perhaps it was the flickering of your neon, how it rivered across your windows. But I knew. I knew it was you.
It’s the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. Ghost Festival, but the streets are empty. It’s been like this for months. No roadside altars, no burnt effigies. Ghost Girl must be hungry and so I show her your mercy: I take her home, where we eat in darkness. Pork skin and fat, the grease dripping down our chins. Noodles, wet-fried and tangled. Yu-choy, slathered in oyster sauce. For dessert, she sucks on your name, lollipopping it between scalloped lips.
Give it back, I say in my most velvet, polite voice. Please, give it back.
Give what back? She smiles when I gag. Oh, the name? Why don’t you say it? Say it now.
I can’t, no matter how much I try. My mouth makes a shape but my mind comes up blank. Were you two syllables or three? [ ], I choke. [ ].
The night is long, and my desperation is human. I lock the doors and windows. I tear out the cables so Ghost Girl can’t escape through the Internet. I plead with her. I flatter her. I make her sit crisscross on the floor, feet tucked up till only her ankles show, and I beg.
She breaks at dawn. I have her cornered in the bathtub and if I squint I know I’ll find tears, but I don’t because you also taught me to be strategic with my mercy. After all, you used to make me kill the things that fussed in the shadows: ants, rats, cockroaches. Things that nibbled around your edges.
Ghost Girl gives me a watery look. I’ll give back the name if you tell me its story, she says. Otherwise, it’s mine.
How do I even begin?
The setting: Manhattan. Chinatown. Mott Street, third building, third floor. Your high ceilings, your single chandelier. The soundtrack? The same Leslie Cheung CD. His greatest hits. The wait staff would sigh. What is this? they’d grumble. We’re not in Hong Kong anymore.
The beginning: The first year, you hosted ten weddings, one after the other. Every weekend, I’d drag out the faux-gilded dragon and phoenix statues till the paint rubbed off their bottoms. We’d tell the bridal parties that the gold-smudged carpet was intentional. For good luck, we laughed. Double happiness.
The middle: Chefs who lanced the air with Cantonese and Teochew and Mandarin. The kitchen, steaming with order numbers: 14, 62, 49 no egg, 56 medium-spicy. You were all I had.
The end: We all know what happened. People didn’t dare breathe inside and so we kept your chandelier lit for nothing, pretending it was a fallen star or a god or a ghost. Something otherworldly; that’s what we needed towards the end. Towards your end. A miracle to save us, but even your Kitchen God was powerless.
Ghost Girl sobs when I finish. She tells me that I’m a shitty storyteller and that you can’t have been that important, right? After all, you’re just a place. I shake my head because she’s wrong. It meant something, to be a part of you. To ring your floors with tables, to fill those tables with families, to feed those families with the scraps of what we brought here with us. All those memories of home. If I didn’t think much of you, I would’ve ended things from the start. A knife through the spleen or a gun to the head, except even that would’ve been pointless. No one wants to become a ghost, dead and urned, in a strange land.
Ghost Girl screws up her face and cries even harder. Why does the story have to end like that though? Can’t you make it less sad?
How can I rewrite the past? I shake my head. There’s no way to change your ending, and my answer seems to sap Ghost Girl of her fight. She coughs out your name into shadowed fingers, then shoves her hands forward.
Here, she snaps. Take it. Take back the name.
She doesn’t let go until I slide my hand underneath hers, and then your name leaps into my palms and slithers up towards my shoulder. Once settled, it hums in my ear.
Ah, so that’s it.
Solemnly, I beckon Ghost Girl to come closer, closer, yes, closer, until her ear rubs up against mine.
Listen, I tell Ghost Girl. Close your eyes and listen.
And we do. We close our eyes and we listen to your name. We listen to its song. We listen to its chorus winding through the morning, how it licks along the memories of anyone who’s ever eaten from you, anyone who’s ever slurped up too much or too little, anyone who’s ever come back for this dish or that.
We listen to the sound of you. Your name. The heat of it, running through anyone who’s ever walked through your doors.
Celeste Sea lives in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in A Velvet Giant, perhappened, trampset, Tiny Molecules, Shenandoah Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @celestish_ and online at celesteceleste.carrd.co/.
