Illustration by Amber Hahn
Miyoh was never very good with unanswered questions. She despised secrets, and agonized over minutiae she knew to be false. So when her English teacher, Mrs. Meyers, explained the concept of possession to a class of giggly, pubescent sixth graders, she stayed behind to clarify a few things. Mrs. Meyers was only too happy to answer her questions. She believed in capital-G God, the Catholic one, of course. And she could see the potential for ruin in Miyoh’s eyes. She explained all the different ways the devil could possess your body and the many things you could do to keep him out.
So each time Miyoh drove past the Catholic cemetery, she’d close her eyes and hold her breath, counting the seconds in her mind. Her sister would roll her eyes, but Miyoh ignored her contempt as best she could. The ghosts wouldn’t be able to float into her body on the wave of an unsuspecting inhale. Her family refused to do the same, despite her weeks of pleading. So she accepted the fact that she’d one day wake up to a ghost in the form of her father.
Her family was not religious in any sense of the word. Belief began and ended with a small incense pot in the corner of the kitchen, where a dried orange peel atrophied in front of a portrait of her dead grandfather. Her mother said he was in the ground, the sun, the wind that moved the oceans. He seemed to be nowhere and everywhere at once.
Miyoh accepted their godlessness, and it was this that made her feel that it was only right to fear possession more than her pious classmates and neighbours. The ghosts would have a better chance with someone like her, who had no one to turn to, not even god.
Her parents would not take her to church, so she worshipped to the vlogs of evangelizing Christian Youtubers. But she couldn’t make herself a believer. Mrs. Meyer’s forewarnings were all she could think about as she kneeled alone each night in disingenuous prayer. Her stomach overfilled with dread as the sounds of her family’s raucous Chinese dramas spilled over into her one room chapel. She felt so far from salvation.
On Christmas Day, Miyoh closed her eyes and clenched her fists as her parents rolled to a stop at a red light outside the Catholic cemetery. She tried so hard to hold her breath. She made it all the way through the red light, but then a wayward pedestrian ran across the intersection, and she let out a sharp gasp as her father slammed his foot down on the brakes, his fist also fast on the horn, narrowly avoiding disaster. She inhaled a sharp, cold breath that scratched its path through her body like a wayward fish bone.
—
Oh, little Miyoh. Such a strange and unexpected girl. A shame it had to be her.
It has been some time since I have had a body of my own, and now that I am in hers, I feel things as she once did. The fear of an unexpected encounter, the anger of a slight by a prettier, cooler classmate. The anxious chill of spilled salt and broken mirrors. I feel at once exhausted and revitalized, like I’m about to emerge from a chlorinated swim, but I have yet to break through the surface. I suppose I will grow old again. But for now, I am jarringly young. The world is exciting and warm. I will enjoy this life that Miyoh has left me.
Angela Feng is a writer and filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. You can find her on Instagram @angelafengg.