The Wedding of the Dead

The Wedding of the Dead.

DEVA DEVATE, GUHA, GUHATE,DHARA DHRTE,NIR-HRTE VIMALATE, SVAHA.

Today I am going back home for a wedding. Mama said I hadn’t been back home for so long, after I left the village for university. She didn’t know where my university was because she knew the village as the only place in the world, and everywhere outside of it was beyond her imagination. She didn’t know neither how long exactly I have been straying outside, as she counted her time in the sowing and harvesting season of rice, not in the numerical months and dates of the calendar. But I don’t blame her: why would you blame a peasant woman, who has been trapped in the most poverty-stricken mountainous area since the moment she was born, for not knowing geography and mathematics? 

Actually I never wished to be back here. Here, men work as their own slaves, and women work as slaves for everyone except for themselves. When I told my university friend that my aunt was chained at home until she finally gave birth to a boy after the first seven girls, she covered her glossed-rosy-red lip with her hand on which her pink-blossomed nail oil glittered, and exclaimed, ‘This is absolutely monstrous! You folks are treating women like animals!’ ‘Well, I don’t think so’. I thought,but didn’t say out loud at that moment when I saw a beloved, fluffy Pomeranian in his cradled-like dog stroller which looked more sophisticated than anything I would find at home. 

Wedding in the village, then, is a nauseous performance that pretentiously sanctifies such animalistic breeding, reproducing more humans who will live their life worse than the animals and who will reiterate their reproductive desire relentlessly in the form of matrimonial mating when they become sexually aroused. How pathetic, I thought, when they forced me to kneel before the statue of Guanyin after they told me that they had arranged a marriage for me, too. People named it Songzi Guanyin, the goddess who generously gives women offspring as presents just like Santa Claus, but she needs a kowtow for a son. Fair trade. Their obsession with carrying on their ancestral line fertilizes the ancient clay of the goddess, and her stone womb bears a monster named ‘son’, but I called it ‘the patriarchy’. They were silent for a moment, and burst out laughing as if I were the weirdo who insisted upon calling the apple as Malus Domestica. They would never be bothered to name or question the thing that’s haunting the village like the air. 

Luckily, I managed to escape. But I don’t remember how. 

DEVA DEVATE, GUHA, GUHATE,DHARA DHRTE,NIR-HRTE VIMALATE, SVAHA.

I am back home for a wedding. But there isn’t anyone, or anything in the courtyard where the wedding banquet is supposed to be held. Mama, Brothers, Papa, Cousins, Uncles, Grandpas, Neighbours, and the Village Head are all gone. Only the icy wind is blowing like blades cutting through my skin, and weeping like a ghost who ruminates on her violent death. I was told that the wedding starts at 12. Am I late for the ceremony? I look at my phone: it is 11:55, nearly noon, but the sun is hiding its radiance behind the cloud, and I am feeling so cold. Everything is shrouded in a pale mist.

I decide to enter the house where the newlyweds and the guests will be staying for the wedding ceremony. The red double happiness sticker is still on the front door, showing that the ceremony is not over yet. I push the door of the building. With a ear-piercing creak, it reveals the entrance to a dark, unfathomable abyss where no light can penetrate. How strange, I didn’t hear a sound in the building as I climb upstairs to the third floor where the ceremony will be held. There is supposed to be an overflow of unpleasant noises in the wedding: the shrieks of spoiled little boys, the dirty jokes from middle-aged men, and the squabbles among the aunties over the unequal distribution of the wedding sweets. But today there is none. Perhaps they build soundproof walls after I left. On the empty staircase, the sound of my heavy footstep echoes so monotonously that I lose count of how many steps I have took. I climb till the top of the steps, make a turn at the corner, and continue to climb the steps ahead of me like a laboratory rat in an endless labyrinth. The room is on the third floor, yet I feel that I must have climbed a century yet still not getting there. I suddenly feel sick with apprehension and quicken my footsteps. I start running upstairs, make a turn at the flatform between the floors, and run upstairs faster and faster while breathing heavily. Yet I still do not see any door at the end of the stairs because there are only more stairs at the end of the stairs that I am climbing. 

Suddenly, someone calls out my name, ‘Come back home, we are here for the wedding.’ It is the voice of Mama mixed with unintelligible murmurs that I cannot understand. I know that she is at home waiting for me, so I run faster and faster, and the door to the third floor with wedding decorations finally appears in my vision. The journey is so long, and I feel as if I had climbed 18 floors to reach the third floor. I make a sprint, and now I am finally standing in front of the … door? There is a crimson Chinese couplet at the surrounding and a dark red double happiness sticker in the middle, but there is no door. These wedding decorations form an illusion of a door-shaped blank space on the sterile, white wall. There is no place for me to enter. Am I insane? 

DEVA DEVATE, GUHA, GUHATE,DHARA DHRTE,NIR-HRTE VIMALATE, SVAHA.

I blink my eyes so hard that red shadows veil my vision the moment I reopen my eyes. The whole world is drowned in blood and becomes appallingly red. Before my brain starts to think, the redness quickly fades like a nightmare that leaves no traces in memory or body but only with the fear in heart. The door opens.

The room is dimly lit with two flickering candles on the Baxian table at the centre of the room. As the monitor of the wedding ceremony, the statue of Songzi Guanyin is at the centre of the Baxian table with a faint smile on her emotionless face. A red Chinese wedding couplet is stuck on the wall behind the table, saying ‘A life-long fated romance is as long-lasting as the earth; An everlasting sweet couple is as immortal as the heaven.’ I can’t tell whether it is a curse or a bless. The groom and the bride will be sitting on the two sides of the Baxian table with the statue of Guanyin in between, both in traditional Chinese wedding costumes that shroud every single inch of their skin in blood red. But for now, the seat for the groom is empty and there is only the bride sitting in the room with no other person. It is not surprising that she makes no move to acknowledge my entrance, since she can’t see anything when her whole head is wrapped in the red veil. 

I ask her, ‘Do you know where are the other guests? I am looking for my Mama.’ She didn’t reply, sitting as still and as straight as a dead insect fossilized in the amber. I approach her and notice that her head is slightly tilted to one side as if she were asleep. Therefore I shout, ‘Hi, do you know where are the other guests?’ She still sits motionlessly like a puppet. Therefore I pat her on the shoulder in order to wake her. 

Plop. Something drops on the ground, creating the sound of a pebble dropping into the pond and makes a ripple. I look down and see a small, dark object lying at the crimson shoes of the bride. I squat down to pick it up, and it feels cold and moist in my palm. It is a small finger. 

I look up at the bride in horror, witnessing a chain reaction happening to her body: it starts with her fingers, then her palm, her arms, her feet, her legs, her thighs, her waist, her butt, her breast, her neck and her head. In an instant, her body is dismantled into fragments of a corpse like a building collapse suddenly and everything falls apart. Dark pools of the blood spread quickly on the floor. The smell is so thick that it makes me sick. Her head rolls in front of me and stops. The red veil is still wrapping its content inside. I lift the crimson shroud and see a face that looks exactly the same as mine. 

I scream but make no sound. 

Suddenly, the statue of Guanyin on the table speaks in a voice that is loud enough to deafen a soul’s ear, ‘Do you remember what you did?’

I was called home, and they arranged a marriage for me. I escaped by jumping off the rooftop and breaking myself into pieces so that they can’t own me anymore. 

But they still got hold of me. If they can’t marry me to the alive, then they marry me to the dead. Dead daughters can only be sold at a discounted price, but still better than nothing. After all, my university education proved me smart and increased my value. Then they coaxed back my soul as the last fragment of me to complete the ceremony. 

The statue stares into the voidness with a faint smile. I smash it on the floor and shatter it with tears of hatred and despair. Splashes of dark blood burst out from the clay, and I hear it murmur, ‘You are going to piece them together, just like how your Mama pieced together your shattered body.’

DEVA DEVATE, GUHA, GUHATE,DHARA DHRTE,NIR-HRTE VIMALATE, SVAHA.