It was November 2020, and Poppy—nicknamed for being the size of a poppy seed, once upon a time—was supposed to be ten weeks grown. Thanks to the virus raging across the world, my husband, toddler, and I had seen no one (other than my stepson) for ages. We had our announcement planned—we would hop on a Zoom call with my family, then my husband’s, with our toddler wearing a “big sister” baseball shirt to announce my pregnancy.
Instead, my husband and toddler (sans her special shirt) joined the call without me. He told everyone I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t make it, which was accurate enough. I was curled up in another room, unable to stop bleeding, unable to stop crying.
In the months following my miscarriage, I became obsessed with ghost stories. I knew, rationally, that Poppy had never been much more than a dream my husband and I held in our hands for a brief time. Still, I couldn’t stop imagining the life she might have led if that dream had become a real baby, a person we could’ve known and loved and learned everything there was to learn about.
My obsession turned into a novella, in which I wrote about a mother dealing with ghosts and the grief of losing her child. I started to research ghosts—specifically ones connected to Chinese folklore (which is rife with them). I explored the history of bound feet—something recent enough in generational memory that my dad recalls his grandmother’s pain as she walked on her tiny feet, her toes broken and bound when she was a child.
While anachronism can mean an error in chronology (an actor wearing sneakers in a 17th century historical film, for example), I’m more interested in the second definition—that of a person or thing that’s out of its chronological place. Ghosts are people frozen in time, pulled out of their own age and thrust into a new, unfamiliar world. They do not belong to the now; and yet, they linger. Often, the world has continued without their consent while they remain, clinging to grievances of a time long gone, of betrayals by people who have since died.
Through ghost narratives, we can explore that past which is never truly gone. It is a way to shine a light on the many deaths and injustices that have been swept under the rug. To take a more visceral look at the world we have today, at the foundations upon which everything we see was built upon.
And yet, ghosts are—like all anachronisms of their type—also a gauge for the inevitability of change. When faced with a vengeful spirit from the nineteenth century, we cannot help but see how much has shifted since the date of their death. We see the way our sensibilities have changed, the ways in which they would not understand modern life. The moral growth (hopefully), whether deep and tangible or mere societal veneer. The improvements made, the new inventions, the things once considered treasures that we no longer value.
Sometimes I think that Poppy haunts me, but not in a spine-tingling, run-or-hide sense. She’s there in the way I can’t stop writing about ghosts or places that feel frozen in time—like a 300-year-old Beijing opera house that stays largely unchanged while the city builds itself up into modernity around it. Poppy is there in the way so many of my characters are grieving, and she’s here in this essay, a forever-tender spot that reveals itself whenever I dare to dig deep.
When I think about what it means to write and publish a piece, I think about how it is a form of preservation. All publications eventually become anachronisms. When something has been written recently enough, we can pretend they are essentially of the now. But the more time passes, the more we begin to see the ways in which the world, our sensibilities, our concerns, have changed. I have received countless book recommendations from friends and acquaintances that come with a disclaimer along the lines of, “it was written in [decade], so there’s some iffy stuff in there, but the story is good.”
And that’s what’s fascinating about ghosts, about anachronisms, about centuries-old opera houses, about books that were written decades ago. Even when everything changes, humanity, at its core, does not. We can find connections across time. We can relate to the pain, the trauma, the rage of ghosts. We can learn from writers long dead.
There are stories that explore this on page. Sometimes it’s through an immortal or long-lived being who has been alive across ages no human life could span—The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and How to Stop Time by Matt Haig come to mind. Other times, it’s someone stuck in one place and age while the world moves forward, as in One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston or (as aforementioned) in ghost stories. To me, these become the most fascinating types of tales, for they, too, will age in the years that pass after publication, adding layers to a story that already plays with the steady, reliable flow of time.
Now, when I think of Poppy, I think of my sadness, of my pain and my hurt, of the before and the after. I now live forever in the after, in a world where I will never stop thinking about ghosts and what-ifs and all the small chances that led me here. A world that continues to shift, to change, to move further away from the one where Poppy existed, for a brief time, as a beautiful dream.
Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer who is eternally enthusiastic about sharks and appreciates a good ghost story. Over a dozen of her short stories and essays appear in Clarkesworld, Apex, Nightmare, Fantasy, PseudoPod, and elsewhere. Her debut novella, Bound Feet, was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and her next novella, Demon Song, will be published by Titan Books in 2025. Kelsea’s first novel, It’s Only a Game, is published by Bloomsbury. Find her on Instagram and Twitter as @anovelescape or visit her website kelseayu.com. Kelsea lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, children, and a pile of art supplies.
Photo by Eduardo Goody on Unsplash
