Spirits Abroad

she was grateful to that rabbit. It had been like a second mother to her, said Chang E.

What Chang E didn’t like was the rabbits claiming to be intelligent. It’s one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It’s another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.

Siew Tsin closed her eyes and fell off the bridge backwards. She fell forever. The light on her eyelids went from lurid red to warm gold. The smell of seawater was taken over by rain and fresh air. The clouds came up to meet her.

She never hit the ground.

Everything was much simpler than Byam had thought. Heaven and earth were not so far apart, after all

Because Prudence Ong never read newspapers or watched British TV, she maintained a spotlessly pure ignorance of the dragon throughout. She encountered the dragon in a rather more traditional setting. She met him down the pub.

The pigeons grew human bodies, all of which wore suits from Austin Reed. They marched in their thousands into architects’ firms, university admissions offices, food consultancy businesses, struggling non-profits; they stole colleagues’ lunches and strewed cubicles with green-gray feathers. Despite these minor eccentricities they made excellent workers: they had a firm grasp of commercial realities and never went on Facebook.

Fairies didn’t need words. Words got in the way. Words were a human thing. Fairies thought in pictures. No—they thought in feelings. No—

Feelings thought them.

“Hungry ghosts I’ve heard of before,” said the demon, “but I didn’t know got such thing as dieting ghosts.”

“If you don’t even know where you’re coming from, how can you understand where you’re going?”

“Eh, are you my demon or my feng shui master? Can you please concentrate on the road?”

“It’s not like it makes any difference if we have an accident,” said the demon grumpily, but it shut up.

“You are amusing,” said Zheng Yi. “Has it not occurred to you to be frightened of me at all?”
“You said I don’t need to be scared of you what,” said Prudence. “No?”
“Usually people don’t believe me when I say that,” said Zheng Yi pensively. “Humans are so narrow-minded. A little fire-breathing, a few maidens here and there, and suddenly you’re not to be trusted.”

Fortunately he was good at cooking. And he would have watered the tomato plants every day, except that this had two results: first, the tomatoes thrived; second, they grew faces and began to talk.