Sweet Romance15 min read
The Mengpo Bowl and the Promise by the Bridge
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I still remember the first time the King of the Underworld smiled at us.
He stood under lacquered lamps, the hall full of ghosts in collars and borrowed clothes. He held a small, shining trophy—"Model Husband of the Underworld"—and he laughed like a living man who had finally come home.
"Javier Brown," the King announced, "you have shown a life here of patience, of care, of gentle stubbornness. The Underworld awards seldom smile, but tonight we do."
I watched him walk to the stage, and he gripped that trophy like it meant more than any crown. I clapped because my hands moved before my head did.
"Look at him," an older ghost woman beside me said, her voice a rustle of shawls. "Delphine, you're blessed. Above all, you had parents to pamper you, and below, you have a husband who adores you. Look how your Javier beams."
I forced a laugh.
"Yeah," I said without much sound. "Lucky me."
He came back down late. He reached for my hand and squeezed. The crowd around us hummed like a creek.
"You're jealous," Javier said later in our bed, but he said it kindly.
"I am not—"
"—and yet you are," he finished, smiling in that careful, private way he saved for me.
We lived in the Underworld long enough to collect routines and scars. I learned that not every ghost kept promises; some clung to grudges so tight that their teeth rattled. Javier had his past, and sometimes the echoes of it woke us both.
"Don't worry," he said, brushing a phantom fold on my sleeve. "No one here will replace you."
That didn't stop my nights from shrinking.
Every time I woke gasping, I would lay my hand on the sheets as if to test whether they remembered how to be warm. I feared him suddenly coughing blood again. I feared the surge of the part of him no one could tame.
He had a vigor that could burn a room, and some nights it frightened me. So I asked to sleep in separate rooms.
He looked at me when I suggested it. He sat across from me on the couch, legs folded, robe draped over his knees like a prince pretending not to care.
"Are you sure?" he asked after a long time.
"I can't sleep when I'm waiting for you to cough," I said, honest to the point of stupid.
He waited. I felt like I was bargaining with a sky.
"Okay," he said finally. "Monday I go to the guest room."
I almost cried. "You could bargain with me," I whispered. "You don't have to agree so fast."
He hugged a pillow and stood. He moved slowly, like a man who had learned to measure steps by heart.
"I'll go," he said. "Tonight."
He left with a small, lonely silhouette. The house felt too large without him.
I tossed and turned until my heart had nothing to give. I couldn't bear it, so I grabbed another pillow and slipped into the guest room.
The door wasn't shut. I nudged it open. The bed was a mound under the quilt, and it trembled in tiny waves like it was trying not to make a sound. I imagined him curled there, eyes closed, choking back something. My legs moved on their own.
I flung the quilt away.
"Wait," a voice behind me said softly.
"Javier?" I breathed, then turned.
He came out of the bathroom in a robe, hair still damp, and froze at the doorway.
"Who—" I started.
He said, "Delphine."
"My grandpa?" I heard my own voice say stupidly because grief will do odd things to the tongue.
There, framed by the guest room lamp, was Abel Dawson—my grandfather—shivering under the covers like an injured sparrow.
"Grandpa?" I reached out and held his hand. He trembled; his fingers were surprisingly warm.
He blinked at me like the world had rearranged.
"Where's the dance?" he whispered, voice cracking with a thousand small memories. "My partner."
That night, my surprised grief folded into new relief. He had found us.
Months after I reached the Underworld, he had not been one of those fading spirits. He had woken here young in the face, old in memory, and he came hunting for the one person he loved most—my grandmother. He had aged gently in the living world, and something cruel had sown him elsewhere. You don't expect the dead to remember the smell of jasmine or the feel of a hand on your shoulder, but Abel Dawson had all of that and more.
In the years I had lived below, I had asked every who-knows-who about my grandmother. Some souls said she had already turned; some whispered that she might be a child somewhere else. The Underworld had its rules: a bridge called the Broken-Heart Bridge and a bowl called Mengpo soup. Drink, cross, forget everything, and step into a next life. Not every spirit chose the drink, and not all were allowed to refuse.
"Do you want to cross?" I asked him in the guest room.
He looked at me. "Where you go, I go," he said plainly. "If you want to cross, I will cross."
Javier squeezed my shoulder from the doorway. "Delphine," he said, "if you choose to drink and move on, I'll do the same."
I laughed at him, half in affection, half in terror. "You're clingy," I said.
"Only to you," he murmured.
The Underworld hums with bureaucracy. Souls are sorted like parcels. Some are sent to the Reception Hotel to wait for families; some are marched to darker places where their misdeeds are carved out in pain. One day while Javier and I were walking the river path, Judge Huan's clerks guided two long lines of newly arrived souls. One line looked like tourists—chattering, curious, clutching old photos. The other line was shadowed; their feet were chained and their eyes held a storm.
Evelynn Kuznetsov was at the center of one such chain. She met my eyes once and snarled.
My friend in the clerical office—a ghost who used to help with paperwork—lowered his face and said, "Do not go near that one, Delphine. She's dangerous."
"Why?" I asked.
He told me about her: how she had bought her freedom once and been spared execution, and then used every leverage to damage others. "She died in prison yesterday," he whispered. "Beaten. Some relief for the ones she hurt, some sadness for how life keeps folding."
The chain of her arrival moved on. She kept turning her face, and every time she looked back at me and Javier, the hate was a tangible thing like a thorn.
Later, at a festival of lanterns, a group of onlookers gathered as punishment rooms were shown in the public square by the King of the Underworld. It was a time when the Underworld wanted to teach lessons. The King liked to make examples.
Evelynn's name was read aloud.
"Let it be shown that Evelynn Kuznetsov," the King intoned, "used wealth and influence to rearrange the lives of three families. She took, coerced, and broke. Her punishment shall be both correction and display."
She was marched to the center of the square, chains clinking like dry seeds. I stood with Javier and Abel among the crowd. The circle around her was dense with faces—victims, clerks, neighbors from lives past, curious ghosts. Someone snapped a picture with a living phone that the lost had smuggled in. The lighting made Evelynn look smaller than in life.
"Stand," the King said. "Let the world remember what cruelty costs."
She raised her head and shouted, "It's not true!" The words burst like a snapped string.
"Do not deny in the face of evidence," the King said. "You will experience instead—"
He made a gesture, and a long table was set up. On the table lay jars with things that were not alive but remembered living: fragments of letters, broken dolls, tiny shoes, reports folded and stamped, and pictures that had been ruined by coercion.
"By the law of balance," the King said, "you will carry their memories for a time. You will live each hour of what you did to them."
They bound Evelynn's wrists with bands that glowed faintly, and at the first touch of the bands she sagged with the weight of other people's memories. Eyes bulged. Her lips trembled.
"Now," the King continued, "first, the day she stole a child's laughter by taking his mother away. Let her hear it without solace."
A whisper started. The crowd hushed. The band tightened. Evelynn's face convulsed and then contorted into the small shape of a wailing child. She stumbled forward, crying with a voice that once belonged to the stolen child. People who had been present that day—the mother, now an old woman in the audience—covered her mouth and sobbed openly.
"Next," the King said, "the nights when she pushed a family into darkness for profit. Let her sleep through their hunger."
Evelynn collapsed, trembling, as visions of thin bowls and empty rooms weighed on her like iron. Her cries echoed, and some in the crowd crossed themselves even though their hands passed through air.
"Do you still claim innocence?" the King asked once the first wave ended.
She tried to speak. Her mouth formed excuses, then shamed itself into silence. She groped for denial and found only echoes of the people she had harmed.
"Then," the King said softly, "let her watch."
A screen rose, not of cloth but of memory, and the scenes of her actions replayed for everyone. The first time she had seen herself as a benefactor, telling lies for a price; the first time she'd smiled as someone else cried; the meeting where she'd paid to erase a sentence in a file that made a man lose a job—every moment was on display. The crowd murmured. Some people had tears and some had nods like judges.
"Do you see?" someone in the crowd called out. "She looks small now."
"She did not grow small by accident," another answered. "She was made small by her choices."
Evelynn's face changed, a performance of all stages: cocky, bewildered, then flaring into denial. Her fingers clawed at the bands. Her eyes flashed with the same old arrogance.
"Stop this," she said, voice breaking into fragments. "Stop! It wasn't—"
Her sentence died under the weight of those she had hurt.
The King signaled, and two rows of the families she had harmed stepped forward. They stood before her. Some spat in the dust at her boots. Some wept with a kind of weary triumph because at last they could be seen.
"Look them in the eye," the King said.
She did. At first she was stupefied by recognition, then defiant, then the color drained from her, then she folded. There was a ripple through the audience—a collective letting go. A living child in the crowd took the cloth from his ears and placed it in Evelynn's hands. It was a small gesture, but more cutting than any sentence.
"Forgiveness is not yours to demand," the King said. "But penance you will perform."
So they made her stay in the square for three days' measure by Underworld law. She would carry the losses, hear the sobs each dusk, watch the faces of those she broke, and answer their questions. She could not speak to escape; bonds tethered her tongue until she had listened to the last story.
On the first evening, Evelynn attempted to scream at one of the families. The sound that came was a child's whimper, a reconstructed sound of each wound she had inflicted. A woman who had lost a daughter wept while watching the woman who had bought her silence now twist and turn in shame.
The crowd did not boo, not in the way that would delight her; they watched with somber attention and the occasional gasp. Some recorded it, some prayed, some silently turned their faces away.
Over time, Evelyn shifted through stages: the arrogance that had defined her was ground down by repetition; denial cracked and gave way; in the nights when she was forced to listen she became hollowed like a turned-out shell. At the end of the measure, when the King called for her to speak, she could hardly form a sentence. Her voice was glass.
"I'm—" she began. The words fell, small.
"Spare me," she whispered, then looked up at the faces of those she'd harmed. Her face bowed. "I… I never thought—I thought—"
"That is the arrogance we took today," someone in the crowd said. "You thought you could buy consequence away."
She sank to her knees. People around the square shifted, some took photos, some clutched their children protective. A few of the families stepped forward and shoved their old grievances with stern faces. She tried to plea, to bargain, to buy back the soft pieces of herself. The King, watching, only nodded once.
"Let her live with what she took," he said. "Let her find ways to restore what money could not unbalance."
By the end, Evelynn's posture had the slow unmake of a person who had met the collective truth. She had gone through denial, rage, bargaining, and ended in a shame that was not meant to break, but to teach. The crowd's reaction moved from raucous pleasure to quiet recognition that punishment could be more than spectacle; it could be a mirror. People left the square talking in low voices, some crying, some reflecting.
Abel Dawson, standing beside me, tapped my shoulder.
"Did you see?" he said. "They took from her, but she will have to put back, piece by piece."
Javier's hand tightened around mine. He was quiet.
That scene lingered in me longer than any award. It was a reminder: the Underworld could be spiteful and kind in equal measure. When someone had been cruel above, the court below did not merely snap fingers. It made them walk in the shoes of those they had harmed.
Between the public punishments and small, private moments, life in the Underworld spread like a map. We made a home that was warm in the winter of our second lives. There were festivals, and we sang in low voices. Javier and I argued; we kissed; we found ways to be absurd together. He had this terrible, tender habit of cutting the crust off my bread without asking, and one afternoon he did it in front of a cluster of old soldiers and lawyers who watched like a jury.
"He's always like this with you," one of them commented, eyes soft. "He does not do it for anyone else."
"I know," I said, trying not to smile.
At night, when we were deciding whether to cross the Mengpo Bridge and drink the soup that would let us forget, it seemed both a kindness and a knife.
"My dad—my living parents—they loved me," I said softly. "I don't know if I can give them up."
"Do you want to cross?" Javier asked, gaze flat and careful.
"I want to." I stopped. "And I don't."
He laughed, the sound like a bell. "You are hereby certified indecisive," he joked.
He looked at the small bowl I kept on the shelf—our little map of choice. We had spoken to the woman who dealt with the drink, the caretaker who brewed the Mengpo soup. She was odd and gentle, leaning on the bridge like a midwife of forgetfulness.
"Can you be exempted?" I asked Janus-faced.
She smiled like someone who had been asked for impossible things all morning. "Once, maybe. But rules are rules. The Bridge is jealous."
Months slipped to half a year. Abel found favor with some clerks because of his dancing. He told everyone, with cheeks flushed, that his partner under the lanterns had been the one who could spare us the drink.
"She can do favors," he said. "She remembers me."
When Abel announced he had spoken to the woman under the Broken-Heart Bridge—"the Mengpo," he said because old men like to call names plainly—our mouths dropped.
"She can get you one bowl," Abel said, beaming like a lottery winner. "But no more."
"One?" I repeated. "What does that even mean?"
"It means," Javier answered, "one of us could keep our memories while the other crosses with a clean slate."
"Which means we might not find each other in the next life," I said the obvious thing everyone feared.
"Yes."
For days, we argued gently, sighed, and circled each other like two cats who both wanted the same warm patch. Javier's face, usually calm, would tighten when I imagined him without me. I realized then—he was afraid, too.
"If I promise to look?" he said finally. "If I promise to find you, will you let me keep this life somehow?"
"I can't make you promise things my heart can't hold," I said. "Those who've gone have not always been found."
His hand found mine and held it like a tether.
"Then choose," he whispered. "If you drink, go. If you don't, stay."
In the end, the cups were presented to us on the day we chose. The Mengpo woman laid two bowls before the bridge: one was the real bowl, thick and dark, steaming with oblivion; the other was a mimic, an empty cup of theater. She would not tell which was which. The rule was cruel in its fairness.
Javier looked at me. "Pick one. If you remember, you promise to find me."
"What if you remember?" I asked. "What if you are the one who remembers and not me?"
"Then we'll both have reasons," he said with a smile like a child's dare, like someone who trusted fate to a ridiculous degree.
I cried then, but not because of sorrow only. I drank the left bowl in one long gulp.
"Delphine," Javier whispered, "I'll find you."
"I'll wait for you," I said, voice breaking, and I turned and walked to the bridge.
The world blurred, then became something else: a river of light, a road, a life unwinding forward. I thought of my parents and how they had loved me, how that love had been a cradle. I thought of Abel dancing again and again in the square. I thought of Javier, who had given me a laughing, angry, patient life I adored.
I do not know if I got to the shore first. I only know that I carried a small grief like a pebble in my pocket and a promise like a thread around my neck.
After the crossing, I woke in the bright place of a next life, awash with small comforts and new breaths. I kept the pebble and the thought. I lived and studied and grew. Sometimes in the quiet hours I would touch the thread—my memory of him—and feel as if someone far away had done the same.
Years later, after the long circle of days had worn us both into new faces and new ceremonies, the story of the Underworld stayed with me like a name whispered. Abel Dawson had left our house to the living; the servants who had not passed had kept the lights warm for us. People we met in the next lives asked about old griefs, and sometimes the ache sharpened into music.
I am Delphine Chapman. I had a sister once, Jules Cruz, who had gone before I was born; my parents named me because they wanted a living echo. I had a first-love in a classroom under a flicker of a generator. His name, in the life beneath the lanterns, had been Javier Brown.
In that classroom when we were teenagers, I had a habit of falling asleep on my desk. Once when I woke with a small wet spot on my lip, I found a new deskmate: a pale boy whose eyes were as quiet as a pond.
"You're here," I said without thinking.
He looked at me, and he said my name as if he had always known it.
"Delphine," he said.
The whole class laughed. "Delphine Chapman is going to call everyone husband if you let her," someone teased from behind.
He didn't laugh. He just turned his pen, slow and precise.
The first time I kissed him, the evening lights went out in the library. We were studying and pretending not to be. I saw a shadow move and leaned in. For a moment the world froze.
"Why did you do that?" he asked later, more amused than angry.
"There was a mosquito," I said quickly. "I was protecting you."
"With your mouth?"
He smiled, a small, private smile. That night he became mine and for a long time I belonged to him.
Our school principal, Miriam Benjamin, later revealed she had known him from his hospital days. She had been a roommate in a ward where pale breath was a currency. She looked at us both as if we were fragile things she might break if she didn't lift with care.
"Those two?" she said later to a colleague. "Let them be. I've seen worse make something beautiful."
At graduation he told me he would apply to the same university.
"Why do you want to be with me?" I asked.
"Because the world fits better when you are close," he said simply.
We promised many small things to each other. We promised to try. We promised to keep an eye out for the other. The promise was not grander than that. It was simple enough to be wearable.
I cannot tell you whether the thread between us held. I can only tell you that when I first thought I had to decide between forgetfulness and the hope of search, I made a small, clumsy choice: I drank. I walked the bridge. I left nothing behind except a vow.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night of other lives, I would find a small scrap—an old photograph in a dusty album, a bookmark folded in an old book—and my heart would quicken. I would whisper his name and send the wish out like a paper boat.
"Find me," I would murmur to the dark.
And in some strange way, he always seemed to reply. Letters sometimes arrived from people who had known him; stories drifted like leaves. The world rearranged itself around the possibility that some promises are stubborn.
Years later, when an old man danced beneath the Underworld lanterns and told everyone a secret about the woman who could spare memories, I thought of Abel Dawson and smiled. Old men like simple victories.
Abel had been the one who insisted on arranging the Mengpo favor. He had always been an optimist.
"When you left," Abel told me once in a second life, "I kept dancing. I met the woman by the bridge. She nodded. She said 'one cup' and I said 'one cup will do.'"
"You said that to the woman who erases memory?" I asked.
"Yes." He winked. "Some favors are worth the trouble."
On a quiet night, by a small river of memory, Javier and I sat together again—old men perhaps, or perhaps two ghosts who had decided to be together in whatever shape the world offered.
"Do you remember the Mengpo bowls?" he asked, poking the river as if to stir up the past.
"I remember the way your hand shook when you promised to find me," I said.
"And you remember the smell of jasmine your grandfather liked," he said.
"I remember him dancing with a girl who looked like he was remaking the world."
We laughed then, the kind of laugh that tilts the sky.
"Do you regret keeping your memory?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "But more often I don't. Because the grief is the price of the love."
Javier put his head on my shoulder.
"If anyone asks you," he murmured, "tell them that we tried. Tell them that when I was offered the choice, I would pick the same."
"Would you?" I asked, surprised.
"Yes," he said, and then he squeezed my hand because even in declarations he was quietly sincere.
And that is my story—about awards in the Underworld, about the Mengpo bowl that nearly split us in two, and about a punishment in a public square that tasted like mercy more than vengeance. It is about a grandfather who danced himself into audiences and managed to wink favor out of the bridgewoman, and about the promise that kept two people looking for each other across ages.
As for Evelynn Kuznetsov: she did not vanish into silence. She spent her measure listening and, slowly, she took small steps toward reparation. The square had taught her a kind of humility, and when she bowed her head before those she had harmed, some of the crowd softened. The punishment did not make her saint, but it made her human.
"Will you find me?" Javier asked once, very late, when the lamplight was a soft smear.
"I will," I said. "If a map could be nothing but a string between two people, then let ours be that."
He smiled. "Then wait for me by the Broken-Heart Bridge. If you see a boat with a moon painted on its sail, jump on."
I smiled back. "If I see it, I will."
When I left the Underworld to step into a life that smelled of bakery bread and late-summer rain, I tucked the memory of him into the corner of my mind like a pressed leaf. Sometimes, long after the cup was drunk and the bridge crossed, when the world felt too loud or too empty, I would fold the leaf out and listen. The sound I heard was small and constant: "Delphine."
And sometimes, that was enough.
The End
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