I live in a temple, and you live in a house. When you visit me, you run slender fingers across my shrine. I don’t know how to respond to this. I’ve been alone for three hundred years and I’m dusty and small. I want to ask you to stop kissing my feet but the words stop in my throat. Kiss kiss kiss. My throat is petal-colored and from where I sit I can see flowers. Dead people in my fettering lungs. Even in a temple there is food on the floor, rice in the walls. I don’t understand it. I will them to stop but it keeps coming, like a tidal wave. Without asking, you clean the food up with a wet cloth. I don’t ask where you got the liquid, or why you pull your lungs out of your chest before me. Where are you from? My questions pull from deep inside my chest. I hope you find solace. You keep crying and crying, salt strung across your eyes. You don’t come by for three days straight, I’m starting to get worried. When you do appear, you’re green and begging. I’m trying to help but there’s a glass casing around your soul. I can see through it, your soul all shriveled and dripping wet, but I can’t do anything. All these barricades I can’t pass through. Pressing my fingers to your temple, it is soft and beats quietly. All of this heart. I shrink back without touching you again. No more petals. Maybe you leave or disappear. Either way. Behind the temple, the sun lifts into the sky. I can’t see it.

Abigail Chang is a writer, editor and designer currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. The EIC of SUNHOUSE Literary, her work appears in or is forthcoming from Salamander, Redivider, the Normal School, Puerto del Sol, Los Angeles Review, Diode, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @honeybutterball or at https://abigailchang.carrd.co.