Twelve people lie on beanbags in a darkened room, facing a wide, bright screen. In every projected frame, there is a clock face visible—on a wrist, a mantelpiece, a tower in the distance. The audience is silent and suspended. Occasionally, a watcher might wonder what time it is on the outside. People get up and leave. Others enter and take their place. Time is ever present, ticking by, minute by synchronised minute.

*

The blade of the sword cut so swiftly, so cleanly, it barely left a mark. The blood told another story: bloomed flowers clung at skin, spread across bedclothes, and soaked into the woven mats. It is said that the lovers had lingered in the room at the inn for days on end, refusing food and water, devouring only each other, until their appetites could no longer be sated, even as they shuddered unto their deaths.

*

Two hundred people sit in a theatre. The lights have been dimmed; the stage is spot lit. The filmmaker is speaking: no copies exist save for the original print in the room. The film is sent across countries, it passes through hands, through the machine; it deteriorates with every screening. One day, it will simply fall apart and cease to exist. Every single person who appears in the movie is dead, even as they eat, drink, and breathe out great clouds of smoke. No one else seems to know or care that it is the seventh lunar month, or that we are all already ghosts, shuffling towards the final flickering sign.

*

The stench of death is its own sickly perfume. First it was birds, then rodents, then the cold, stiffening body of the cat itself. When the heart stops beating, blood in the veins stills, and the body begins to consume itself. Bruises bloom under the skin, the body bloats, then decomposes into fluid. Someone holds up a skull up to the sun: worms feed on what we can no longer see, digesting death into their wriggling, glistening selves. Listen—you can hear their jaws opening and closing—they are, in fact, singing—