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It’s the bells.
It’s the god damned bells.
The flags — red, blue, yellow, and black — billow from the wooden pole. Mountain of fruits stacked on a silver platter. People gathered around praying, mumbling, chanting. These things are mostly performative. But the bells, those stupid golden bells the shaman is shaking, they do move me. I mean literally move me. Something about the sound draws me in. I levitate through the wood, glide pass the people, and I find myself summoned amidst the ceremonial grounds. Some weird ghost biology, I think.
“She is here. I feel her presence among us. She is here.”
The shaman, garbed in a pristine white hanbok embellished with red and gold bows, announces. I roll my eyes. Oh yes, I am here. In fact, I have been here. 457 years to be exact. I haunt the land of the people who murdered me.
I got married into the family when I was sixteen. A run-of-the-mill arranged marriage, really. The night before my sixteenth birthday, my father in law and the men of his family visited my family house in the mountains. Four grown men sweating and wheezing in their silk dopo squeezing into our tiny living room was quite a sight. Me and my sister peeked through the wooden doors as the men discussed. My father sat across them, dignified and calm as always. A good man, my father was. A virtuous man. He knew the ways of philosophy and prose, but he was unbelievably dense in the world of material wealth. Thus, the humble house and gauche men with oily faces coming…
