(Content Warnings: post-climate collapse, body horror, death/corpses)
The old Zhu family house sat on stilts along a cliffside. It knew the ocean waters with increased regularity as the tides rushed in and up before falling back out, and the water level slowly crept higher along the stilts to greet it as the years passed. No one quite knew how long it had been standing—its architecture a hobbled mix of 19th century European and traditional Chinese, with roof tiles of oak and bamboo and terracotta. It was covered in a healthy dosage of grime and dust, and within were timelines of increasingly obsolete technology. Yi had lived in this house her entire life, gone everywhere except the attic and the narrow staircase that led up to its door, which held stuffy secrets and clusters of mysteries in the memories of her childhood. Her parents told her that behind the door was just the empty space between the ceiling and the roof, but once, when she tried to hole up there to escape the heat, her parents picked her up off the stairs and forbade her from going any further.
That was all they ever said about the attic. And it filled her with a suffocating sense of dread.
Yi once spent a day organizing the glass jars and ceramic pots that carried ancestral recipes and old specimens (for someone in her family some time ago had been fond of dead things). But by the end of it, everything found their former resting places: each newspaper clipping, each beady-eyed preserved snake, each pot of fermented soybeans. She had asked about it once, and her mother only shook her head and told Yi not to question it.
“This house is hard to clean,” she said. “Nothing ever quite stays put.”
Yi didn’t know much about her family’s home. She knew it saw a time before the summers lasted nine months of the year, that it once sat far above the surface of the ocean, that it witnessed the rise of cities and watched them vacate and implode. She knew the house was how her family survived, that even the two months of blistering cold—when it did come—seemed unable to penetrate the oak and the bamboo and the terracotta. And, finally, she knew that even when the weather swung hard, when the village’s livestock died from the heat, her family always managed to find food in the smallest corners of their house.
•••
On the days that weren’t too hot or too cold, Yi’s mother sent her into the village for school. She would take her bag with her books and food, along with the paper umbrella her mother gave her to shield her from the sun.
Most days though, she wasn’t sure if the umbrella helped at all. The humidity stuck to her bones and coated her skin, and she wondered sometimes if the air in her lungs was as grey as the air that hung below the clouds. It made classes distracting, and while she tried to sit still in the classroom with the other kids, she was hyper-aware of the dirt that sat on her skin. She could feel the particulates settling in her pores. Even her lunch tasted different. She swore it did.
Yi was one of the few kids with full meals instead of rationed rice imported from afar, scraps of meat, and preserved vegetables, and she always felt terrible for it. Because Yi had all these too, in abundance, for the house seemed to know whenever they needed food and she wanted to share it. One day, she asked her mother if she could bring some bao or share their stores of fresh fruit and veggies, and she didn’t understand why her mother refused. So Yi tried to sneak out a bag full of longan, slipping it in with her schoolwork. It was her grandmother who caught her and gently told her to return it to the kitchen.
“Imagine what they would think,” she told Yi, “if they knew what they could take from us.” But Yi didn’t think of it as taking. She wanted to share their relative prosperity with the others. Keeping it to themselves seemed unfair.
•••
Winter came fast. The old mercury thermometer they hung by the front door dropped twenty degrees in four hours as a polar vortex crashed downwards from the arctic circle. Yi watched it patiently and waited for the mercury to settle at the bottom, telling her she wouldn’t have to travel into the village for school. Instead, it rose again slowly, millimetre by millimetre, degree by degree.
“Do I have to go?” she asked. The cold scared her; she wasn’t used to the cold.
“Dress warmly,” her mom replied from the mahjong table. “You should go see your friends.”
“And come home early,” said her father over the clangs and clinks of the mahjong tiles. “It’s going to drop quickly.”
Yi glanced at her parents’ and grandparents’ game of mahjong before reluctantly wrapping her scarf around her nose and mouth. “What’s for dinner?” she asked, hovering at the door.
“Ask the house!” exclaimed her mother.
Yi stifled a groan and headed outside.
The air was humid and mild even though the wind pierced like ice and cut her to the bone. The leftover chill of the night hung in crystals of ice in the air around her, melding to her skin as she walked her usual route to the village. There was still frost on the ground, dusting the wispy grass like lace, while the sheets of ice crunched underfoot.
In the distance, she spotted a figure the size of a grown adult, hunched into a small ball. She could make out the form of a man with his arms hugging his legs, bent at the knee into his body, his back curled forward. Yi approached despite her better judgement, despite the shrieking alarms in the back of her mind.
The man was covered in ice, gradually melting away as the world warmed up. There were small droplets that coated his skin and his hair and his clothes, giving him a sheen despite the pallor beneath. His skin had blued, his flesh now translucent layers of blue and purple muddied by the pale pigments of skin. Yi held her breath and searched for any signs of his. And, when she was sure the man in front of her was dead, she stepped in closer and reached a hand out.
The man did not move. The tips of her fingers broke the frost to find wet fabric, feeling nothing but cold beneath his skin. He was solid, frozen, and stiff from death.
Yi stepped back and held down the dread in her gut. She wiped the moisture from her hands onto her pants and retreated back onto her route, keeping an eye on the corpse as she left for school. It didn’t help her hate the cold any less.
Yi got to class late, not that anyone seemed to mind. Even the teacher simply nodded at her to take her seat—which she did, carefully crossing her legs on a thankfully-dry rug on the dirt of the village square. She tried to focus on her lessons—although the vocabulary for today had the character for “person” in it far too many times—and decided she would take a wide turn away from the body when she headed home.
•••
The next few days were cold and wouldn’t let up. The frost was thick on the glass of the Zhu house as the humidity from outside coalesced onto the walls and windows. Yi stayed inside for all of it, knowing that even while confined to her home, she still had homework to do.
She watched her parents and grandparents play mahjong while she sat at her cluttered desk, brush in hand and wanting instead to join them.
Something rolled into her foot, rattling along the wood floorboard before hitting her in the heel. She looked down to find a jar, unlabeled and sealed shut. Sometimes the house dropped things rather than appearing them in the predictable nooks of shelves and drawers. She picked it up, opened the lid, and sighed when she smelled it. “Mom,” she said. “Were we out of doubanjiang?”
“Is that another jar?” her mother asked, not bothering to look up from the game.
“Yeah.”
“Perfect. Just leave it at your desk, I’ll take it when I start making dinner.”
Yi put the jar at the corner of her desk and glanced between her schoolwork and the window. The glass had fogged up, making it difficult to look outside; the frost crystals crawled up the window pane and covered it like clouds. She gave the jar one last look before packing up her schoolwork and taking it to her room, the clinking of mahjong tiles melding with the rattling of the icy wind against the house.
Her room overlooked the front of the house, toward the barren land beyond. She laid out her papers and her brush and ink, sat down in a brief moment of contemplation, then walked past her bed to the windows. She squinted through the frosted glass and then cleared it with her hand, feeling the ice melt away beneath her fingers. She breathed in deeply and searched.
The landscape surrounding her home was not particularly interesting. She could see the path she took toward the village; it was dusted with snow, more crystals than flakes, balled up in the dead grasses and the sparsely bricked road. The memory of the body made her skin crawl, but part of her expected to see it anyway, that there would be a figure in the distance, hunched over and frozen solid like a statue. It had been too cold for any decomposition, too dry for the elements to do anything but preserve the body in its huddled, last attempts to stay warm. She listened for the mahjong tiles, the rhythmic mixing and stacking, and a thought occurred to her: what would happen if someone in her family froze to death outside too? And then another thought: how many people out there died from the weather to begin with?
A strong gust assaulted the house. She felt it creak against its frame, felt it tilt along its stilts. She took hold of the windowsill for support and heard the wind whistle past, heard the clinking of the mahjong tiles below, heard the violent crashing of the waves.
•••
Winter lasted a week. The polar vortex subsided and the world turned foggy as the frost evaporated and the world sat in limbo. The warmth started its sluggish seep through the wood and terracotta of the house once again.
Over that week, Yi uncovered more food. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for the house to provide food in waves, even when it sensed they weren’t in need. It was strange to think of it like that. That the house could sense anything. That the house somehow knew when they were running low on certain ingredients or when they were simply craving a specific meal. And yet, things appeared from the crevices, rolling out from the baseboards or growing along the bookshelf.
It never mattered much when she was young. The house provided. The Zhu family never had to go hungry.
Now that she was older, she wondered.
School restarted and every morning she walked through what seemed like perpetual fog. At first, it was too thick for her to dare straying off her path. She glanced at where she thought the body sat, then continued on without investigating. When the fog began to clear, she decided to risk the look. She could see twenty feet or so in front of her now and she wandered off the tracks onto the grassy field beyond. The weeds squelched underfoot instead of the expected crunch as she tried to retrace her steps to the body, only to find nothing in its place. She looked around again before realizing she’d actually gone farther than where it had sat, and she retreated back a few feet, fighting off the chill crawling up her spine as she passed the ground where there was a small patch of dirt instead of plants.
Yi took a few cautious steps back, then ran to the road toward school.
•••
That night, the heat dragged in the humidity. It closed in slowly as she returned from school; wet, sticky, and suffocating. She remembered learning that the sun was once a sure sign of warmth. That the temperature was supposed to drop with the night. That rain could quench and comfort.
Yi struggled to believe that. She had known the sun to be bright during blistering cold days and for nights to be so hot and humid that even stepping outside felt like being steamed alive. When the world got like that, Yi stayed far, far away from her windows.
Yet, after a week of frigid polar vortex, Yi struggled to sleep in the heat. The Zhu house was good at keeping out the elements and maintaining a mild internal environment, but some days were worse than others. Some days had always been worse than others. Humidity was difficult to keep out, even for the Zhu family house.
She laid in bed, sweating uncomfortably.
The stuffy silence was broken by the sound of shuffling and the click of the front door opening. Yi held her breath and listened.
A breeze wafted in through the open window, buffeting her with more warm air. She sat up; lying down was only making the heat worse. The steps below continued outside and it was silent enough that she could hear the crunching dead grass underfoot; even with the humidity, the world was so dead and so dry. For a few moments, that was all she heard. She held her breath as the steps faded into the distance, quieting down to soft padding between gentle breezes. Her nerves, starting as shaking in her hands and arms, were solidifying into tears in her eyes. Who in her family was leaving the house in the middle of the night?
Minutes passed before Yi heard the footsteps return. They fell rhythmically like a metronome, creeping ever closer with the hissing sound of something being dragged along the dead grass and fine sand. Yi slid out of bed as soundlessly as she could, her heart pounding in her ears as she risked a peek through her window. She caught a glimpse of her father and the thing on his back.
At first, it looked like no more than a shadow. In the hazy, unlit night, the form of her father had doubled in size and there were feet trailing behind in the dirt. The clouds moved with the warm, humid air, and the moon took its moment to shine. Soft, white light filtered down onto dead plants and sallow earth, illuminating her father. He looked ahead, determined, and the body he carried was limp.
Yi didn’t know why she was crying. She just was; tears welled in her eyes as her thoughts caught up with her emotions. Who did that body belong to? What was her father doing? She took in the sight one last time before her father reached the steps to their house, the body hunched over his back like a growth. Its hair was matted to its head, its arms wrapped around her father’s neck, her dad holding it in place by its wrists. He stopped for a moment to open the door, then dragged the body into their home.
Yi slid to the floor, too terrified to make a noise, and waited.
And listened.
She listened for the quiet thumping of the corpse’s ankles hitting the steps of their staircase behind her father’s footfalls.
She listened to his movements, trying to map his position within their house.
She listened to the creaking of the stairs that led to the attic and the soft thuds as they ascended.
Her heart dropped at the realization and she trailed the sound upward, to the ceiling of her room.
This was not the first time Yi had heard movement in the attic. She had always thought that the house was simply creaking. It was old, after all, and it sat precariously close to the edge of a cliff, battered by tempest winds and waters, the ocean lapping away with each beckoning tide. The Zhu house, with its aging wood and terracotta, should barely have held on for as long as it had.
The shuffling continued above her for a few moments before her father’s footsteps finally returned to the door and down the stairs. She heard him through the walls as he entered his bedroom, carefully turning the door handle to close it with as little noise as possible.
Yi took a breath.
In the darkness beneath her bed, something moved. She jumped and fell onto her side, swallowing a yelp of surprise. A box emerged in front of her, peeking out into the moonlight, cardboard and blue. Why was the house giving her something now?
She reached out and pulled it into the light. It was a small box of tissues. She plucked one out with a shaky hand and wiped away the tears.
•••
The next morning, Yi busied herself with her schoolwork. She knew there wasn’t much—and she was fairly sure her parents knew too—but she wanted to keep to herself, away from having to look too closely at her father. It panicked her a little every time she saw him. What was he doing last night? How often did it happen? She thought, briefly, of the body she saw after the freeze, of how it had disappeared just a week later. It hadn’t been left to decay or to be eaten by whatever animals still roamed the desolate lands and feasted on dead flesh. So, was that her father’s doing, too?
She glanced at her parents’ daiyi game; her mother was winning with a small hand of two and the cards were stacked in a tall pile between them. Her father brushed off his impending loss with a smile that grew and grew, just as his hand did, with each passing turn. Yi tried to see her father as her father; that was her dad just playing cards with her mom, normal as always. But the image of him dragging a corpse to their home was burned into her mind. It troubled her that her mother didn’t know, that she could sit across from her husband as though nothing was in any way different. Yi figured somewhat bitterly that nothing really was different. Maybe her mother did know about it. Maybe her father had been retrieving corpses for far longer than she knew. Her parents, occupied with their game, only smiled and nodded in acknowledgement when she let them know she’d be upstairs, studying in her room.
•••
The stairs leading to the attic felt coldly mundane. She flicked on the switch and the light above her at the bottom of the stairs flicked on in turn. She pictured her father last night, dragging up a body, replaying the thuds of the corpse’s feet hitting the steps in the middle of the night. She whipped her head around one last time, ensuring that she was alone, and then tiptoed up the steps.
She paused when she reached the top, holding her breath and listening to the sounds of her family below. It was nothing but the idle chatter of her grandparents and her parents. There was the shuffling of cards, the shuffling of chairs, the shuffling of tiles. She sighed, relieved. They had started a new mahjong game. Good.
Slowly, she opened the door.
Light streamed into the attic from the far window, soft and grey from the ocean beyond. It filled the room with a careful touch, as though gently placing a hand on each dead body that hung by their ankles from the rafters, and welcoming Yi to enter into the forbidden.
Without thinking, Yi closed the door behind her.
The attic was bare except for piles of ropes and the bodies, hanging from their ankles. She froze as she took it all in: rows upon rows of bodies hanging from the ceiling, their dead eyes—if they had them—staring back at her.
She expected, for some reason, a stinking pile of corpses, thrown haphazardly onto the floor. Instead, these were neatly arranged in rows of three, lacking the smell of dead things decaying. Everything about what she saw before her felt wrong. Nothing foul ever wafted through the wood from the attic, nothing to give away what was up here.
The attic was faintly musty—although she thought that might just be the wood—and dust floated along on the streams of light from the window. She stood still, not daring to move. Would they hear her downstairs? she wondered. Would the floor of the attic creak?
The bodies, hanging from the rafters, were still clothed. Not that Yi felt that helped in any way. Most had become slack-jawed—if they had jaws left—while others, Yi realized with a shudder, were missing entire parts. Not just parts. The flesh on the bodies farthest from the entrance seemed to have melted off. They were bone and cartilage, somehow still held together and clothed and hanging as dry skeletons from the rafters. And the closer they were to the entrance, the more flesh remained on their frames.
Yi stepped forward despite her nerves screaming to run, despite the pricks of fear that cascaded down her neck. She walked past the newest corpse and searched for the man she found dead from the cold, huddled in on himself on the side of the road. It wasn’t far behind the latest body that she found a man whose arms were still curled and whose legs were still bent. His skin seemed to have faded away from his face and down his arms, leaving muted red muscle exposed to the air. She could only see the blueish tint of his skin from the exposed calves where gravity pulled down his pant legs.
Yi stopped herself there and wouldn’t let herself get any closer. She stood as far away from each body as she could, her skin crawling with grief and anxiety and the faint urge to throw up. It followed her out the attic and into her room.
•••
Yi ran a hot shower, stepped into the scalding water, and scrubbed her skin clean. The showerhead rattled as water poured out and she stood under the shaky stream, hoping that the warmth would calm her nerves. It did, a little. Warmth for her muscles and steady white noise for her thoughts.
A ball rolled out from the bottles of soap and shampoo, small and chalky but pleasant-smelling. It fell into the tub by her feet and the steam filled the shower with unknown green scents. It was bright and earthy and fresh in a way she only imagined the world could have smelled like before.
And, despite the reprieve, her eyes drifted upward to the attic.
•••
In the mornings before she went to school, Yi watched her father with quiet, maddening suspicion. She realized she was more afraid of him than she was angry at his actions or grieving for his memory. The bottles that rattled out from the edges of the Zhu house made her jump now, as though the house was watching her and wanting to speak.
When the days were clear, she gave her house a proper look-over on her way to school; it stood as it always had—imposing on its stilts, misshapen and confused—with the dust around it picking up with the wind. Sea-spray hit her face, and it smelled a bit like the thing in the shower: bright, fresh, and earthy. Not quite as green, though. That bit was hard to explain.
•••
The next heatwave came with dry, hot wind. She watched from inside as the dust picked up and obscured her view. The world became a dull, yellow cloud with shadowy forms dancing within. A knot grew in her throat as she watched it, picturing herself wandering about in the storm. Would she feel heat or dust? Would it coat her lungs and mouth and throat? And then, Is there anyone out there right now? Would they join the others in the attic?
Something rattled onto her desk. She turned to find a small jar filled with a clear, somewhat milky liquid. She turned it around before opening, watching the liquid inside move like water. It smelled fruity and sweet, and she took a drink. Coconut, she thought. She didn’t know how she knew that, but it parched the dryness in her throat that she imagined into place.
•••
Yi sat at the top of the stairs and caught her father as he headed to bed in the evening. He frowned. “Go to bed,” he said. “It’s getting late.”
“I, uh,” Yi stammered. She swallowed and tried again. “What’s in the attic?”
His expression didn’t change. “Storage. Lots of old pictures and just stuff from everyone else who lived here.”
She breathed in deeply, unused to pressing her parents. “Okay but, is it?” Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Yi, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know what’s in the attic!”
“I told you.”
“Then why can’t I go up there?” She caught him before he could respond, his mouth half-open. “How does this house know?”
Her father pressed his lips together. “Family secret.”
“I’m family!”
“You aren’t old enough.”
“Dad…”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Yi could feel the tears welling up but she forced them down, adjusting herself to keep her voice steady. “I’ve been up there,” she said, louder than she anticipated. “I saw them—the people.” Those words, this time, came out quiet.
She looked up to her father’s face, expecting him to be angry that she had violated the trust of the house and family. Instead, he nodded. And he sighed.
“It looked bad outside today,” she continued. “I-I wasn’t sure if you were going to… y’know.”
“I think we’ve been okay,” he said. “The house hasn’t been slowing down.”
“Dad—”
“That’s what it does. It’s what it needs. This house needs… people. And in return, it looks after us.”
•••
Yi sat and waited.
The bodies hanging from the rafters disappeared slowly. The bones of the oldest corpses had finally started to fade away, and she noticed that a finger bone vanished every time the waves below rattled the house.
The body of the man who froze to death had lost the skin from his legs now, and exposed muscle was starting to peek out from beneath the pant legs. Then it disappeared some more, seemingly shrinking upward toward his ankle as a bottle of dark mushroom soy rolled out from the walls.
She picked it up and raised it to the light. A deep, brown liquid sloshed inside the bottle. She popped open the lid and gave it a taste.
The house provided. Her eyes wandered across the corpses in the rafters—nine of them, she counted, and she was sure there had been more. They hung curiously; skeletons still held together despite their lack of flesh.
“I’ve never killed anyone,” her father had said. “I was taught to look for… scraps. And that happens a lot now.”
The wind whistled as it rushed past the Zhu house. She felt the wood rattle and watched another finger bone fade away from existence.
The house provided. But what else did it do?
•••
“How long has this house been in our family?” Yi asked her grandfather one day, after a particularly blustery night where the grasses around their home flash froze as they bent to the will of the wind.
“Many, many years,” he replied. “Before the world went dry and the cities flooded. We’ve had this house since the days we could count on the seasons and the emperors sat in yellow.”
Yi nodded and sipped the oolong tea the house gave her.
“There used to be a garden,” he continued. “We grew a lot of choi.”
“Years ago, right? When the grass wasn’t dead?”
Her grandfather shook his head but smiled. “The house provides. The land around the house used to be covered in choi and soy and even peanuts. My own parents were just too tired of taking care of it.”
•••
One day before school, Yi stuffed a full bamboo shoot into her pocket. She snuck it out of the kitchen the day before, thinking carefully of what one plant could really do, of what it would mean if it survived. She waited for her parents to return back into the house before she dug a small hole with her foot in the dry, dusty ground. She fell to her knees and dug in deeper with a flat rock. Then, she plopped in the bamboo shoot, burying the base in the ground. She wasn’t sure what to expect. It sat in the dirt, the tip poking up to the sky, just steps away from the stairs leading up to their porch. A moment passed and then the ground darkened around it.
Yi reached out to feel the soil and pulled away when she felt that it was wet. Heart beating with anticipation, she swallowed and watched the shoot slowly turn green. Her mouth was dry with nervous energy, and she rushed off down the path to school.
