miCRo: “Fried Rice” by Tina S. Zhu

Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: Tina S. Zhu offers a compact ghost story in this flash piece, following a pair of twins navigating life without their mother and younger sibling; while they’ve been lost to divorce rather than death, their absence still leaves an echoing resonance throughout the story. But even hauntings have their vulnerabilities, and the narrator and her remaining family fight back with everything from a stick vacuum to moves cribbed from martial-arts movies.

Listen to Tina read “Fried Rice”:

Fried Rice

Ghosts erupted from the wok when Ba made us fried rice. The ghosts sizzled up from the eggs and burned the rest of the vegetables as me and my brother Kevin tried to fight them off with broomsticks and Ba went looking for the vacuum. The gray smoke they emitted ate at our broomsticks, creating this wailing screech like the sound of metal scraping pavement. 

Ba came back with the stick vacuum, and the ghosts couldn’t gnaw through that. The fire alarm started ringing, and the ghosts started singing to the beat of the alarm. Ma would have known how to fight them off, but she had moved back to China with our baby sister after the divorce, saying she was sick of this country and how the ghosts here didn’t follow any rules. 

Don’t let the ghosts take your names, Ba said over the hiss of the wok harmonizing with the ghosts. Don’t let them steal your spirits. 

If the ghosts wanted to be Lily and Kevin like all the other Asian Lilys and Kevins out there, they could have my name as long as they left Kevin alone. Kevin must have thought the same thing because that was what twins were for, so we beat them away from the food with all the moves we learned from Ba’s favorite kung-fu movies. The smell of soot and burned rice and oil drenched all of us as the ghosts started flipping the light switches on and off. Ba ladled out the unburned fried rice on pale plates. 

Look at your rice, I said, pointing to my brother’s plate. It looks kind of like Ma’s face. See the burned eggs? They look kinda like eyes. 

Don’t say her name, Ba said. Don’t let her steal your spirits too.

Tina S. Zhu writes from New York. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, X-R-A-Y, and other places, and she reviews books for Strange Horizons. You can find her at tinaszhu.com.