The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M.H. Boroson

of spirits and the world of men? He had no kind of red string to guide him.
    There was something I was missing. Without something like a red string, the spirit on my shoulder shouldn’t have been able to find his way across the realms. Not unless he was anchored somehow, tethered, as though he was part of a living body.
    I thought for a moment about the human body, the amazing dynamism of it all: the way vital energy flows along meridians, rising from the Bubbling Springs on the soles to the Upper Cinnabar Field in the skull, giving life to the spirit of each organ, the spirit of each limb, the spirit of each …
    And then I had a sinking feeling. It felt like a piece of glass had fallen from the top of a building, fallen slowly and in infinite quiet, and shattered to a hundred pieces at the bottom.
    “You,” I said to the eyeball spirit riding on my shoulder. “I know what you are.”
    He looked at me, curious. “What am I, Li-lin?”
    I couldn’t speak. I felt words choke in my throat. “You’re his eye,” I managed to squeeze out. “You’re the spirit of my father’s eye.”
    Mr. Yanqiu leaned back quietly.
    “But it makes no sense,” I continued. “In order to send you to me in the spirit world, Father would need to … he would need to …”
    I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud. He would need to gouge out one of his own eyes.
    The eyeball nodded. “He’s recovering in the infirmary now. You’re unconscious in the cot next to his.”
    “Why would he do something like that?”
    “He could tell your red string had been broken. You needed a guide to bring you back to the lands of the living. He sent me.”
    “No,” I said, “no. It makes no sense. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that. Not for me.”
    The spirit of his eye looked at me sharply. “But he did.”
    Mr. Yanqiu was the spirit of my father’s eye, but he had been without conscious thought until Father’s spell. He didn’t know Father as I did. My father wouldn’t do this for me. There must have been some other reason, something I didn’t grasp yet.
    I lowered my head and walked to the infirmary’s front door. The string of cloth talismans formed a barrier, and I felt it push against me, a sensation like a gathering wind. There was no going forward against the force of the barrier. But then the talisman with my name on it opened a path for me. It felt like a tree had been interposed between me and the wind; I heard the roar of it go on to each side of me.
    I moved past the barrier, and Mr. Yanqiu dropped off my shoulder with a yelp. I turned to see him flopped face-first on the ground behind me, pushing himself up. “How undignified,” he said.
    “You can’t make it past the talismans.”
    “Obviously not,” he said, brushing off dust from the street with his tiny hands. He had the injured look of a man whose pride had been wounded. My father’s spell had locked him out, excluded him. Treated him like any other strange monster.
    I looked at the eyeball spirit, concerned. “Listen, Mr. Yanqiu. I’m going inside to join spirit with body. I’ll probably be in there for a few hours, to talk with Father and Dr. Wei. Do you think you’ll be safe out here until I can come back?”
    The eye gave me a shrewd look. “You won’t come back,” he said. “Once you’re back in your body you won’t even be able to see me.”
    I blinked at that. “You don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know that I have yin eyes, do you?”
    “Yin eyes? That means you can see spirits?”
    “Yes.”
    With a tiny white hand he scratched his chin, or, where his chin would be if he had a face. “Am I a yin eye?”
    “Hm,” I said, stalling. “You are … that is, Father does not have yin eyes. But now you are a spirit, and maybe it depends which eye you were. I do not know whether you are yin.”
    “Harrumph,” he said.
    “Do you think you will be safe?” I repeated.
    “I can take care of myself,” he said, with a scowl in