I walk into the tent, a deep redness drowning the walls behind the lamps as I find my seat. The show begins and a truck rolls into the tent and topples over on to the grass. The truck is full of goats.
The ringleader, her red chintz outfit cropped and gold-edged, goes to get the goats out and they run into the crowd, one lagging behind. It is heavily pregnant and the first kid is crowning. The ringleader rushes forward and holds onto the legs of the kid and it emerges, blood and fluid raining onto us. She picks up a balloon filled to bursting with a viscous, dark liquid and smiles fiendishly.
My friends and I emerge from the tent dripping with blood, and walk to the bathrooms where we could take a shower and change into clean clothes. We laugh at the conclusion of the show and go to find everyone else.
I see him right there, so I run up and we kiss, each one held tight. The sun has set on the festival landscape, tents of heavy red material sink into the humid air, soft string lights hang still and the sound of people laughing echoes off the dark grey buildings that surround the field. He wants to go to the shop over here.
As I wait I find a house that I know will lead to out. When he is done we enter.
This place is for dinner parties with Chinese women, who dress in traditional, floaty hanfu and laugh with precisely painted lips behind a fan. The rooms are all modern white dining rooms and they do not belong but it is where they must be. I am not Chinese and I will not understand how these dining rituals work. I would make a fool of myself.
We pass through room after room, in an inward spiral corner after corner, table after table. It is now a haunted house and I must close my eyes if I want to leave. If I saw even a sliver of the things this house contained then I will surely be frozen in fear forever. I hit things and hear many sounds as I run with my eyes closed and arms outstretched, racing to find the end when suddenly the noises had gone faint and the air felt warm, steamy. I open my eyes to find myself alone on a tall metal walkway in an industrial room lit only by a red light on a metal machine and the bright spit of a fluorescent bulb in the next doorway. Above me are two cracked, red leather punching bags swinging from a beam.
I hear voices and clamber up a punching bag to on top of the beam and watch. It’s my job to scare them. A mother and her young girl come around the corner, already on edge by the rest of the haunted place.
I wake up.
I’m in the building.
She’s upstairs.
The woman who kills my grandmother.
I saw it happen. She is in her apartment, the door unlocked when a needle is picked up and my grandmother forced out the balcony door. Confusion, taunting, begging floats through the apartment.
A slash and my grandmother topples down the side of the building.
I’m in the building.
I go upstairs.
I’m in her small apartment and she’s running after me. My grandmother isn’t there. I lock the door and pick up the needle, part of a half-finished project on the bedside table.
The woman is forcing her way in and I run to the balcony door. It is tied shut with cord and a precarious, broken floor is visible on the other side, no safety rails in sight.
The woman is in the apartment.
She looks down at the needle in my hand and, smiling, pulls out a small knife just as I open the door.
She follows me out and taunts me. Her words don’t exist and I struggle to grasp what she says as I desperately look for a way out.
Out of the corner of my eye I spot a man watching from his window in the apartment adjacent to us. He is too far away to help but will act as our witness. In between us the empty lot whispers sand into the wind. Between me and the ground is rusted tin roofing, jutting out from several levels.
The woman lunges, slicing my arm and pushing me off the balcony.
I roll down the many roofs and end on the ground.
She has killed my grandmother and now I must find our witness.
I wake up.
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