Vessel, Skin, Daughter, Stranger

SUMMER 2026, SHORT STORY, 4800 WORDS

The first weird thing was that my mother texted me the Sunday before finals week. I didn’t see the message until she called me, which was when I knew something was wrong, because finals week was the only American institution she held sacred.

“We need you to come home,” she said, without even a Hi, Jessica. “Dad woke up.”

I was on the silent floor of the UCLA library, but the girl next to me was crying over what looked like a linked list diagram, so I figured it was okay for me to aggressively whisper into the phone. “Oh, good.” Then I wondered why it was her giving me the news, not my older sister, who had been sending me clipped texts through the procedure. “How is Maggie?”

“She’s fine. She’s with him right now,” my mother said impatiently. “You need to leave soon, to avoid rush hour.”

I still had two finals left, one for a pass-fail anthropology class that didn’t really matter and one for my biochem class, which did. “My last final is on Thursday, I can drive over that afternoon—”

“There’s a problem. We don’t think it’s actually Dad.”

“Oh.”

I closed my flashcards. The girl next to me was still crying when I rushed from the library, almost knocking over the guys drawing dicks and overly detailed Gundams on the glass walls.

When my father was dying, my mother said one of the judges of the dead, who she talked to in her dreams, owed her a favor. She put a note of introduction into my father’s sleeve and told Maggie and me not to cry when he kicked it, because his spirit would be returning to his body soon anyway. Then she told us we should probably cry a little at the funeral, because people would look at us funny if we didn’t.

My mother also wanted me to pick up Isaiah Chen, and didn’t budge when I protested. She said his house in San Marino was on the way from UCLA to Arcadia, which was true, but I wasn’t protesting because I thought it was out of the way. I was against the idea of having him in the car because we were exes. Specifically, we had broken up because I tried to use his body as a vessel for my tenth-grade book boyfriend.

At the time, my mother hadn’t yet instilled in me that you can only implant a body with a corporeal spirit. And I had seen what she’d done with Christerpher, the family cat who was on his fifth or sixth life now, and I thought I could do it too—which, I couldn’t.

Isaiah was waiting for me in his driveway, JanSport backpack slung over his shoulder. I was pretty sure my mom wanted me to pick him up because she still had dreams of the two of us getting married. She and his mom went to the same church. Isaiah and I had made sure to hide that we were dating. I wasn’t sure what he was getting out of this.

“Hey,” he said, getting into the car. He’d gotten his ears pierced since I’d last saw him. Black studs.

We had texted casually after heading off to our respective colleges—Caltech for him, UCLA for me—which mostly consisted of How have you been? once a month, except that one time he had swiped up on my Instagram story and we sent paragraphs back-and-forth about whether it was ethical to wear Abercrombie and Fitch. This was our first time talking in real life since our parents made us take an awkward photo at graduation. His term ended earlier than mine, so he had already finished his gauntlet of finals.

“Hi,” I said, reversing the car out of his driveway. Which, in my cowardice, was all the tension I could take before bursting out, “Do you know why my mom wants you there?”

“No clue. I don’t really understand that spiritual stuff your family gets up to, to be honest.”

I felt the specter of my tenth-grade mistakes looming over us like an abandoned mall.

“Look,” I said.

He waited. We passed the HMart where we had illegally bought soju and the parking lot where he had given me my first kiss, back when the 626 Night Market was still cool. I felt the specter of our tenth-grade fumbling car sex watching us from the backseat.

“I, like, don’t write Ren Umberking fan fiction anymore,” I said lamely.

To my surprise, he laughed. I had forgotten how easily the sound could fill the car. “We were fifteen,” he said.

I pulled into the residential streets. “Still old enough to understand the general concept of consequences. I mean, people were getting pregnant at fifteen.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But consider that I’ve just spent a semester in data structures and algorithms. So, you know. Sometimes the bodily possession seems better.”

I told Isaiah to stay in the car while I went in first. I hadn’t been home since the funeral, and I wasn’t sure what state it was in. Considering the present dilemma, I was also wary of providing my mother another body. I remembered the things she could do. The Renners two streets over never did figure out where their daughter’s body went after the funeral; I didn’t know precisely either, but my mother made enough from that job to get us an ice cream maker we only used once.

The house smelled of incense and whatever soy sauce braise my mother was simmering on the stove. A dark shape bounded toward me as I slipped my New Balances off.

Christerpher rubbed himself against my ankles, purring. I scratched between his ears as I tossed my keys onto the shoe rack.

Thin scars ran along his neck like tallies. Five scars, one for each time my mother had pulled him back from the morass of the underworld.

Maggie was sitting on the couch. When we were young, my mother wanted for Maggie to go to medical school and for me to follow in her occult footsteps. I’m not sure at which point our destinies swapped, but now Maggie was the one who arranged the food that my mother offered to the hungry ghosts, and I got to take biochem classes at the number one public school in the nation.

From the way she slumped into the cushions, I didn’t think she liked the ghosts any more than I liked biochem. I wondered if she also curled up in bed wondering how much longer she could stand her life, but we never talked about whether we liked what we did or not, on some unspoken agreement not to realize the grass was greener on the other side.

I opened my mouth to speak.

My mother’s footfalls against the stairs interrupted me. She wore a grey-tinted plastic visor and pink capris.

She greeted me in Mandarin. “If you came home more, you wouldn’t have gotten so skinny,” she said; the fussiness of her ministrations didn’t belie the affection underneath. “It takes a stranger in your dad’s body for you to remember us.”

“Where is he now?” I said in English.

The house showed no signs of struggle, the picture frames of the four of us at Wild Animal Park, of Maggie and I in too-fancy dresses at piano recitals, no more crooked than normal atop the mantle. The bible quote décor was as incongruous against the incense sticks as ever.

She headed toward the kitchen and gestured at me to follow. “I let him go. He was actually the oldest son of the Shen family, do you remember the ones from Alhambra? They sent him to the underworld with melons because the archivist of the dead was craving them. His spirit must have gotten mixed up with Dad’s when he was sent back. I did charge them for the body, though. We spent so long putting it back together!”

I’d grown up with stories about how the various practicing families journeyed to the underworld and back as if it was as easy as a quick trip to the grocery store or dropping off an orchid for a sick friend. That was probably why I had tried an adjacent summoning on Isaiah.

“Oh, and did you bring Isaiah like I told you to?” my mother continued. “I made that kimchi he used to like. I still remember when he came over for New Year’s Eve and we made dumplings. Such a grateful boy. Always said Thank you āyí. You should be more like him.”

“You’re not going to try to put Dad’s spirit into him, are you?” I said.

She scooped a heaping of rice into a bowl, topped it with bok choi and soy-braised chicken drumsticks. “The judges of the dead will only let a spirit return to the original body, or another body very close to death. If you were more studious like Maggie, you would have remembered,” she said. “And that boy is strong and healthy. He’s going to live a long life with a lot of kids.”

She gave me a meaningful look.

I took the bowl and winced when the porcelain burned my skin. My mother’s hands were caked in callouses. “Then how are you planning to get Dad back?”

“You’re going to the underworld to find him,” she said.

Before he died, my father was dying for a long time. My mother wouldn’t tell us the exact diagnosis, because she said it didn’t matter, we were going bring him back after he was gone. When I asked why we didn’t just kill him now so he could be in a healthy body sooner, she said that wasn’t how it worked, and the blonde nurse gave me a really weird look. My mother reprimanded me about the appropriate volume at which to talk about what she called these family affairs.

“Not every family is as special as ours,” she said. “Death means something different to them.”

Sometimes, I wish we really could have let him go sooner, because now when I think of my father, I think of the man who kept insisting I was Maggie until I stopped insisting I wasn’t, instead of the man who kept buying peanut butter Uncrustables at Costco even though my mother reprimanded him. He was too soft, she said.

Eventually, we stopped helping him up the stairs after his doctor visits, and he slept in the guest room instead. When we got the news that he was dead, I was relieved, which was good, because I don’t think I would’ve known how to cry. I’m not sure when I stopped thinking of him as soft.

Under our mother’s behest, Maggie went to the Yeos armed with only her Venmo account to negotiate my safe passage through the land of the dead. The Yeos had an ancestor in the underworld who possessed many casks to his credit, and I would need that ancestor to loan me silver and gold to throw at the ghosts of the brigands and robbers: restless spirits who would grasp at me, tear off any coin of flesh if not properly warded off. The underworld was a very dangerous place. The Wangs’ second son had recently not returned from a ritual, and journeying to the underworld wasn’t like normal dying—you couldn’t be resurrected if something went wrong.

I wouldn’t be able to be resurrected, if something went wrong.

Maggie didn’t meet my eyes as she closed the front door behind her. She took the keys to my Prius, which was technically the family Prius. The ritual would happen in four days, the Thursday of my final, which I guess I’d already thought of as a kind of death anyway.

Isaiah and I retreated to my room. My mother was too preoccupied sorting through her casks of poisons to give me a surreptitious glance.

Or maybe she just didn’t care anymore; I’d always made sure to hide that Isaiah and I were actually dating before, but her opposition to boyfriends dissolved as I walked across the high school graduation stage. Now it was about how soon I could have children of my own, little apprentices who could shoulder the burden of the family traditions for another generation.

So it was ironic that the first time Isaiah saw my room was four years later. The pink walls my parents told me I would regret; the dresser that was now always half-empty; the mountain of stuffed animals at the foot of my bed—I hadn’t been able to take them all to my dorm room.

“This is insane,” Isaiah said, slumping into the pink plastic IKEA chair.

“It’s not,” I said, even though I’d been thinking the same. It was safe when I thought it; it was an accusation when he said it. He was an outsider; he didn’t understand. He couldn’t.

“Your mother is casually planning to poison you,” he said.

When the Shens sent their eldest son to the underworld, they cut him with their ceremonial blades. My mother had first met the judge for the dead on an assignment from her own mother, and she often told me how her own mother had bound her wrists and drowned her, because she believed it was the purest death, the one that most preserved the body.

That’s how my skin is so clear, she’d say. The water became part of me.

I nudged my porcupine plush with my foot. “Is that why you’re here? To get some voyeuristic pleasure out of seeing the life fade from my eyes?”

“Exactly. I heard my ex was finally getting her great comeuppance, and I couldn’t resist,” he deadpanned.

“You’re fucked up.”

“Yeah?”

We both smiled before we realized what we were doing. Then we looked away.

The room suddenly felt so small, surely not enough space to fit two whole bodies without suffocating. I wasn’t sure if it was that I had grown or that I was too used to being alone in it, staring up at the plastic stars on the ceiling as if they could rearrange into a reassuring divination if I strained my eyes hard enough to deserve one.

The last time I’d slept in this bed was the night after my father’s funeral. I didn’t have classes for another week, but I couldn’t bear to watch my mother cut the meat of my father open and replace the faulty organs like she was remodeling an old house, so I went back to UCLA early.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye to my father,” I said, picking at my already ragged cuticles. “My mother wouldn’t let me. She said it was bad luck, and we would be seeing him again soon anyway.”

My father dying was one of the lightest times of my life.

I don’t know what else to call it, that lightness. I still went to every biochem review session and did terribly on the exams anyway, but that was okay for once, because my father was dying and nobody could expect a girl with a dying father to do perfectly in university. When I wondered how far my eleventh-floor dorm windows opened, it wasn’t just frustration at being a shitty pre-med; it was grief, which was much more deep and powerful and real.

Then he died, and death was as good a get-out-of-all-culpability-for-personal-failures-free card as illness. But it made me wonder what the expiration date on tragedy was, and whether a better daughter would have wondered at all.

All this to say: even if I wished my mother had been a little more considerate, that I didn’t have to frantically make facetious excuses to my TAs about why I couldn’t make it to my finals, I was sort of relieved to be sent to the underworld, because it gave me permission to feel less bad about my finals. Dying was, after all, worse than a test score.

I supposed I could have driven back to UCLA, taken my anthropology final before returning to my mother on the fourth day. It was what I would have done two years ago, as a freshman.

I didn’t. I stayed at my house and slept eight hours a night and didn’t get out of bed for hours after I awoke. I ignored the email from the TA asking where I’d been, and if I wanted to consider a makeup. For lunch, my mother made us green beans in garlic sauce, tofu skin salad, air fryer honey chicken wings, and we ate the leftovers for dinner.

After dinner, she spooned me doses of different poisons, testing for my reactions. I only threw up once.

“I want to make sure it hurts as little as possible, when you go to the underworld,” my mother said, cleaning the carrot-speckled vomit with the same unperturbed understanding she’d worn in my younger, sickly days. Maggie had long fled to her room. “The Shens are like barbarians with their knives. But poison—it doesn’t have to hurt at all.”

She threw the soiled paper towels away and measured out the next spoonful of oleander extract. I spat out the last traces of bile.

As it turned out, my mother hadn’t invited Isaiah for nothing.

“I was wondering if you could stay for the ritual. It’s good for the journeyer to have some earthly tether, so it is easier for her spirit to find its way back to her body,” she said, as I stared at the wall and contemplated whether it might be quicker to just kill me with hammers.

But Isaiah didn’t look weirded out. “Of course, Megan āyí.”

My mother beamed. “Did you know the Wangs’ second son?” she said.

Isaiah nodded. “I was in the Computer Science honor society with him.”

“His family thought they didn’t need a tether, and then he didn’t come back,” she said, like this was a salacious secret, some tidbit on who had kissed who on the playground. “That’s why we need you for Jessica.”

“Oh.” Isaiah managed not to look stricken, but I knew him, I had seen him pull himself together to tell me it was over. His hands were folded behind his back. “I didn’t know that about Ethan. I thought he was still at Berkeley.”

He left quickly after that.

“Couldn’t Maggie have been the one to tether me?” I said, as I watched him go, carrying a box of persimmons and a jar of radish kimchi my mother told him to give to his own mother.

Christerpher darted for the open door. For a moment of unreality, I thought my mother would let him leave. She liked to remind us how we were the ones who wanted the cat but she was the one who fed him and replaced his litter and brought him back from the dead. But she scooped him up, nudging the door closed with her hip.

“Maggie didn’t want to,” she said, which I pretended didn’t hurt. “She’s going to be at the hospital during the ritual, monitoring if Dad’s spirit comes back into one of the dying patients.”

“You can make me die to find Dad but you can’t make her tether me while I’m doing it?”

She set Christerpher down. “It’s an honor, the journey to the land of the dead,” she said. “Your ancestors have done it for centuries. Your father dropped you off at school for years, don’t be ungrateful.”

I took Isaiah out for lunch. It was an apology for my mother being the way she was, though neither of us said it. We got brothless ramen, which we both claimed we were into before it started blowing up on TikTok. Then we went to Daiso, which was the local ritual post-meal ritual—I’d walked these aisles of stationary, aisles of niche silverware, with my BioBowl team, with my friends, and with Isaiah too. The panda erasers were nostalgic.

“I don’t need a pizza cutter,” I said, turning the plastic wrapping over in my hand. “I don’t eat pizza that much. But if I don’t get it, I know there’s going to be some moment where I go I really should have bought that pizza cutter.”

He fiddled with a pack of Hi-chew. “You’re really going to go through with it?”

I didn’t look at him. “I mean, it’s just three dollars.”

He sighed. “Jessica.”

“You’re the one who joked about bodily possession being better,” I said. “Wait, I think that’s Grace Kim over there, let’s go this way instead.” I didn’t like Grace Kim because her Instagram photos were the first time I had gotten insecure about posing in my own photos and Isaiah didn’t like Grace Kim because she brought in her mom to complain when the QuizBowl team benched her.

We escaped to the snack aisle, where walls of Turtle Chips loomed over us. I hadn’t eaten them in a long time. I contemplated how my body would metabolize them when I was dead.

“Well, the difference between you and me is that I’ve been thinking of switching my major off computer science and you don’t seem to have thought about telling your mother no at all.”

“But you haven’t,” I pointed out. “So the comparison doesn’t really work.”

“I guess,” he said.

For the first time, I saw how haggard he looked. The artificial lights greyed him out. I wondered if Daisos were like airports or kindergarten playgrounds when you came back as a high schooler—spaces of unreality.

“Why are you here, Isaiah?” I said.

He sighed. “I got into your car that first day because your mom gave me a call asking me to help you.”

“You didn’t even know what she wanted you to help with?”

“I knew it was her asking.”

I pressed my lips together.

He looked apologetic, at least. “I’ve known you for nine years.”

Nine years was long enough for me to notice that he fought with his mother, yes, but the extent of his punishments seemed to be getting his Switch confiscated when he was younger, his car privileges revoked when he was older. His mother never threatened not to resurrect the family cat the next time if he didn’t get that 89 to a 90 by the end of the month. His mother would never mix poisons for him.

I used to be proud of it, the way I was proud of the dark circles under my eyes or the way my nails could slice open my skin, until I heard the other plastic-visor aunties at church muttering to themselves not to invite my mother or me to their next retreat. I insisted my father be the one to drop us off at school from then on, because I wanted to punish her and liked to see her pretend not to be hurt. She was the occultist, but I was still her daughter.

Then Grace Kim turned the corner and saw us, and I realized how close together Isaiah and I had been standing.

On Wednesday, my mother gave me a dose so strong I passed out.

“This is good,” she said, when I fought back to consciousness. “We’re finding the capabilities of your body.”

Isaiah didn’t look at her. He was looking at me. It was a shame that I still cared about him—the thought was like finding a mosquito bite after a morning of idly scratching at the itch: unsurprising and yet still a discovery, and it ached more than the poison beneath my skin. What was I supposed to do with it, the caring?

Behind him, the shrine was mostly complete. There, in the middle of the salt circle, surrounded by incense sticks and gold and silver ingots, was where I would collapse for real tomorrow. Isaiah brushed the hair out of my face.

I wondered if it was such a terrible thing if I didn’t return. You didn’t have a body to hurt with, in the underworld.

I was young the first time I saw my mother bring a woman back from the dead. I only remember going to school the next day, telling my friends how cool my mother was, and could their parents reach inside a woman’s body and hold a liver in their hands? I must have missed the teacher’s expression, but when my mother pulled up to the pick-up curb that day, she told me to stay in the car while she talked to the office ladies.

My father asked me to have more patience for her struggles. She had displaced herself from her normality so that we could grow up in a land of high caliber schools and dim sum or brothless ramen joints on every street corner. We owed it to her sacrifice. We owed her everything, and she was allowed to collect anytime she wanted.

I texted Isaiah: promise me you’ll seriously think about switching off computer science

He texted back within the minute: promise you’ll actually try to come back from the underworld

my gpa is going to be unsalvageable

I reached out to Ethan Wang, during the first winter break. I thought he was ignoring me. I miss him a lot. I’d miss you too

I don’t want to go. I just want to stay even less

You can leave without going to the underworld. There are other places to go

Isaiah came over early Thursday morning, while my mother was still at TS Emporium, because she’d gotten a bit neurotic this morning and decided the ritual needed fresher herbs, I deserved all the best treatment because I was her daughter, and she loved me.

Isaiah and I sat on opposite ends of the couch, limbs arranged hesitantly, as if we didn’t know how to put our weight onto the cushions. Maggie had taken the Prius again.

Christerpher nestled next to me, perfectly content. I ran my fingers along his parallel scars, which he usually minded but didn’t today. When I was a teenager and generally looking for reasons to hate my mother, I’d looked for ways he’d come back wrong, that the deaths had changed him at all. But he was the same as the day my mother had finally relented and got us a kitten, swearing she wasn’t going to be the one to take care of him. A little older, maybe. More tired. That was it, though. When my mother came back, I would find out for myself how getting resurrected changed you. Maybe it gave you a better appreciation for life. Maybe it fixed you.

A dread was building behind my ribs. I wasn’t even sure if the dread was particularly inspired by the thought of imminently dying; it felt much older, the desire for the next hour, day, week to never come. I thought of the poison searing down my throat, and I didn’t want to be here anymore; I wanted never to touch the ceremonial vial; I wanted to grasp it and empty its contents down my throat. I was supposed to be taking a final right now.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said in Isaiah’s general direction.

“Neither do you.”

“Why are you?”

“Well,” he said. “I’ve never been good at saying no either.”

I looked at Isaiah looking at me. I thought of how he’d kept going to church long after I mustered up the courage to tell my mother I wasn’t going anymore, even though we were both atheists. I thought about how easily he’d agreed to come even before he knew about Ethan. I thought about what I owed to him that I didn’t think I owed to myself.

“Do you want to watch that new Yin Ha movie?” I said.

He met my gaze. He kept his expression neutral. “Isn’t it releasing this weekend?”

My mother would be wrapping up in the emporium line about now, threading her arms through bulging reusable Aldi bags. “Actually, there’s a showing in an hour. We’d have to leave soon if we want to make it to Harkins on time. Especially since my sister took the car.”

“I’m glad you still budget time to line up for the overpriced special popcorn tubs.”

“But are you interested?” I said. My hand had stilled on Christerpher’s neck, so each of my fingers overlaid a tally of puckered skin.

Isiah nodded, extricating himself from the couch. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Claire Jia-Wen is a speculative fiction writer originally from the 626 and has been published in khōréō and Clarkesworld. A Viable Paradise and Clarion alum, she is currently a PhD student studying human-computer interaction.

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