The air was thick with the smell of burnt incense and singed paper, its haze mingling with the humid August night. Mei Ling pressed her heels into the concrete, feeling the cold seep up her spine, trying to ignore the muffled thump of getai* music in the distance. It tired her — the rituals, the old superstitions, and mostly, her husband, who kept her waiting most nights with his mysterious mountain of “work”.
She stormed out into Ann Siang Hill in her red dress. She wanted to go to the bars at which she knew his office went drinking. It is dark and well past midnight. Remnants of offerings float around the kerbsides, like moths —half-burned effigies of luxury cars and stacks of paper money, all left for those who had already moved on in this life. If they didn’t need those Rolexes and Mercs in this life, they certainly wouldn’t need them in the next. She stepped squarely on a half-burnt joss stick, and it snapped, brittle under her heel.
The click of her low, blocky heels echoed louder than before. She felt eyes on her back. She kept walking, hoping her steps would drown out the whispers that now trailed her, breathy and almost human, too close to be imagined. And then—a chill swept over her ankle, a pressure like ice gripping her skin.
A figure stood before her, pale, draped in white, eyes sunken and accusing. Mei Ling’s breath hitched. She’d never imagined meeting one of them—a hungry ghost, a wretched soul left to wander, forgotten, spurned. The spirit’s eyes, though empty, were filled with a lingering sorrow. She looked down. Its fingers with long grey nails clutched at her. Mei Ling’s lips moved, though no words escaped. She heard the squeak of an old iron hinge, like the wheeze of an asthmatic.
She turned and ran. Her sandals clattered like firecrackers, and she didn’t stop until she was back at Block 8, Cantonment Towers. She jabbed the lift button multiple times, panting. Panicked, she looked around but there was no one. No one, dead or alive. She got to the 10th floor and shot down the corridor. She flung the door of her HDB flat open to find her husband waiting, pale, his hand wrapped in a fresh bandage. ‘I cut myself on my way home,’ he explained almost apologetically, though she had not asked. Her panting drowned his usual excuses out. He stank of beer and smoke. ‘It was strange,’ he murmured, ‘I felt a sharp metallic object scrape me outside my office, and I pulled away. All these sharp bits were sticking out. They were like claws trying to stop me. I saw I got this huge cut,’ he holds his bandage up, expecting her sympathy. ‘Aiyoh. Such a rusty gate too. All squeaky. Best to get a tetanus jab, what do you think? Mei? Do you think I should?’
Mei Ling saw the dark ash smudges on her ankle, five in a row, a reminder of the night she tempted fate, only to find it staring back at her. She would not wear those deafening clackety heels again in the seventh month. It was not his office. There was no such gate there.
© Ivy Ngeow 2024
*Getai (歌台), literally means “song stage” in Chinese. They are pop-up street stages for travelling shows or Chinese operas. Believed to have originated during the Japanese Occupation at the New World Amusement Park, it became a popular form of mass entertainment in the 1950s with getai established at various amusement parks.