My Jam Jar Ghost

I caught a ghost the other day. There were many ghosts in Mrs. Tan’s house, but this was the first one I’d caught. It happened when I was reading aloud a story about a girl and a dragon to Mrs. Tan. I thought she was asleep, but she asked me to repeat the name of the girl. Ai Ping, I said. I looked at her and wondered if it was her who’d spoken or one of the ghosts because I’d replaced the girl’s name with mine when I was reading.

Mrs. Tan’s son paid me to read to her for an hour every evening. He lived down the street, but he said he couldn’t stay with her himself. He said it was complicated and I wouldn’t understand. So, I didn’t ask why and went every day after school. Sometimes, I stayed for an extra hour or I’d put the radio on until the national anthem played at midnight. Sitting with a dying woman who never talked back was peaceful, and the ghosts never did anything more than tug at my hair on occasion. It was better than all the screaming and yelling that went on in my own house. Sometimes, I stayed the whole night. If Mrs. Tan’s son saw me leave in the mornings, he never asked me why either.

The ghost I caught had floated across the room quite nonchalantly. It hung in the air—sometimes opaque, sometimes gauzy. I snagged it just as it turned white against the dark green curtains of Mrs. Tan’s room. I pinched its tail and coiled it around my index finger.

It didn’t look like much, this long white worm of a ghost. It didn’t feel like much either. It had no weight, only a sort of damp coldness which tugged my finger like a string on a helium balloon. It was hard to believe I’d caught a ghost so easily. Collectors used all types of traps and special lights, but there were so many ghosts in Mrs. Tan’s house that I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to pluck a small one out of the air just like that.

I pressed my thumb against it to keep it from unraveling while I rummaged for something to contain it. I found a glass jar in the kitchen that looked like it would do the job. When I woke up in the morning, the ghost had wriggled into the spaces between the threads in the lid and was already half out of the jar. I pushed it back in and tightened the lid. I put the jar in a fishbowl filled with water and weighed it down with a can of sardines. I told Mrs. Tan I’d caught her a dragon and I thought I saw her smile.

My ghost didn’t seem to have friends. I kept it on Mrs. Tan’s bedside table when I was reading to her, but no other ghost came looking for it. And there were many others, big and small ones that were all over the house: in the backs of cupboards and ceiling corners, under the beds, in the trees out in the garden, under the sink in the bathroom, behind every door, and even amongst the pots in the kitchen. I guessed the ghost I had must’ve been a bit of an outcast.

It stopped trying to escape after I put it in the fishbowl and stayed curled up at the bottom of its jam jar. If I tapped the jar, it would perk up a little. I wondered if ghosts could die if they were already dead. I wondered which made them sadder, wandering around all alone and being ignored or the attentions of a captor and a glass jar prison.

I attempted to sell it. There were people who collected these things, although mine was hardly an impressive specimen. I put up a post on eBay: Small ghost for sale. Low maintenance. There were two inquiries. They wanted photographs, but I didn’t have the equipment to take a photograph of a ghost. It didn’t show up when I used the camera on my phone. They wanted to know the exact measurements and condition of the ghost. I replied: Approximately eight inches long. Condition is fair. They asked for its pedigree and origin. I stopped replying. Anyway, I was getting fond of it, my first ghost.

I thought of releasing it in a place where it had friends or where there were ghosts of the same kind, but I didn’t know where worm-like ghosts hung out. The black, pumpkin-faced ones liked to play under Mrs. Tan’s bed and the banshees usually lounged in the trees, but I didn’t know about the plain, quiet ones like the one I had. It seemed to me that my ghost might get bullied by the alpha ghosts. So, I kept it in the jar while I tried to figure out what to do.

One night, not long after I had caught the ghost, Mrs. Tan took a turn for the worse. Her every breath sounded like a drowning gasp. I called her son, the man who paid me to watch her. He came quickly and held her hand, his head bowed low. He did not see the ghost that came out of her mouth with her last breath, a white wisp approximately eight inches long.

I opened the jam jar and let my ghost out. It squirmed a little this way and that, straightening its kinks after being stuck in the jar for so long. The two of them, my ghost and Mrs. Tan’s, floated towards the door together like a pair of jellyfish tentacles. A pair of dragon worms. I could’ve reached out and caught them both. I could’ve given them to Mrs. Tan’s son in a jar, but it felt right just to let them be. The same way it felt right just to let the man cry.

Shih-Li Kow is the author of Ripples and Other Stories and Bone Weight and Other Stories. The French edition (translated by Frederic Grellier) of her novel, The Sum of Our Follies, won the 2018 Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. She lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. www.shihlikow.com