Sweet Romance16 min read
The Yin-Yang Pot
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I never thought a bowl of soup could decide how long I live.
"I told you not to come back," I said to the helmet of steam rising from the table. The steam answered only with the smell of chili and bone.
My name is Griffin Farley. People used to call me easygoing. I used to think life answered to calendars and job offers, not to old legends or to the way a cook ladled oil into a pot.
"Griffin," she said as if the word could thin the air, "don't be dramatic."
She—Gia Perrin—sat across the table in the exact tilt I remembered from college, the same tired smile that used to make me give in to bad jokes. But she had been gone three years. I had buried her, said the good words at the graveside, watched the dirt fall and tried to make sense of the silence.
"You're not real," I told her. "You're not supposed to be real."
Gia's mouth made a small, sad curve. "I am as real as the cold in your chest and as real as the red broth in front of you."
Ruben Alvarez, the owner, watched us with hands that betrayed too many nights of grease. He had that rough tenderness some cooks wore as a badge.
"This is a place of meeting," Ruben said, almost polite. "I told you to be careful with the Ba General statue. He watches."
I bowed my head because the Ba General statue near the door had eyes that felt alive. I had already, stupidly, bowed to it. Older folks called it Ba Manzi, a local patron spirit that kept things from going too wild inside the tunnels where Ruben's place lived. "Keep the line," Ruben added. "Eat and go."
"Eat and go." Gia laughed—soft, empty. "That old rule never stopped us when we were kids."
The pot between us had two sides—the old, raw red that burned with pepper and chili; the other side, a pale, bone-white broth that looked like milk. "Yin and yang," someone had taught me in a geography class in college. "Balance."
"You always ate the white," I said. "Now it's reversed."
"Tonight you eat red," Gia said, voice small but firm. "One bite of white, Griffin, and you won't come back."
"Is this a joke?" I asked, tasting fear on my tongue. "You were—"
"I was what I was. Now there's a rule." She put a piece of thin lamb into the red, pulled it out quickly, and with the same motion she had used in our dorm years, she placed it into my bowl and pushed it toward me.
I had believed death separated things cleanly. I had been wrong.
"Why here?" I asked later, when the steam thinned and the noise of other diners crept back in. "Why this tunnel, this shop?"
"This place draws the ones that miss," said an old man who'd come to sit at a corner table with empty eyes that didn't match his body. Boyd Blackburn—he called himself a retired tea seller, but his ways were like a man who'd made peace with the unordinary. "They come when the living put out an invitation."
I remembered the first time Gia and I shared a hotpot. It had been an act of mercy: I couldn't handle spice, she loved it. The hundred-first pot had meant something we never reached. Our number stopped at ninety-nine.
"You ate the pot," Ruben said quietly. "You chose."
"I didn't choose," I said. "I was sad. I wanted to see her."
"You saw her," Boyd said. "You chose a price."
Later, in my memory and in the pages of warnings my mind kept handing me like a trembling child, I learned the rules.
If a living person lights a fire in the half-dark spots of the city and sets out a yin-yang pot—one white, one red—someone tied to them can come. The living eats red. The dead eats white. The meeting lasts until the pot cools, until dawn, until the Ba General blinks.
"People warned me," Gia said once, folding her hands like a small child. "But I wanted to see you. I wanted to be near you."
"That's the twist," said Boyd. "Grief makes strange beds for people."
My nights turned thin after that. I tried to leave town, tried to pretend it had been a dream. "Heal with time," I told myself. I bought the first ticket out. I felt safe in the logic of planes and miles.
Then, in the sterile boxed light of my hotel room, someone knocked at the door and a tray with a small, hot yin-yang pot arrived.
"Your wife ordered this," the desk clerk had said, wide-eyed, as if placing my life on the hallway console was a common act that morning.
"She's—" I began, but the word died. The pot steamed. A pair of chopsticks lay collapsed on the side like an invitation.
I screamed, cursed, and slammed the door. "Gia! If you're a ghost, go to the tomb you're supposed to be in!"
A laugh, light and familiar, answered from behind the bathroom door. Water ran. I remember the perfume of her hair that no human could have left on the towel.
I did what any frightened man does: I fled to the shelter of the same tunnel that had given me the first visit.
Ruben had wrapped the Ba General in cloth in the morning. He looked tired and fearless at once. "You didn't think I would let a pot like that out without notice?" he said.
"Why would you let it out at all?" I asked.
He shrugged. "People come for more than soup. Some want to bargain. I run a place that takes in people who have nowhere else. That night, you lit the candle."
I met with Boyd. Boyd had a friend—Joyce Legrand—an old woman with a voice like a gate closing. She knew names and parts of bodies. She had a mouth that smelled of menthol and old cards full of promises.
"You want to stay alive," Joyce told me one night, in a room that smelled like mothballs and stew. "We can help you. Or she can keep you."
"Help me how?" I asked, breath shallow.
"Two ways," Joyce said, tapping an ash into a saucer. "You can try the high road—clever rituals that take nine bowls and nine people and cost more than you've earned in this life. Or you can do the simple thing: bring us a living vessel who trusts you."
"What do you mean?" I asked. The words felt like cold iron.
"You listen," Joyce said. "You let us move into someone else. A living girl who comes out of trust—she gives herself without fearing the end. We take her life warmth. You take your beloved back."
"That's—" I wanted to throw her from the window. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to let the Ba General strike me dead. Instead I bowed my head.
"You have five days," Joyce said. "After that, the stitch starts to fail. She only borrowed a body for so long."
"Five days," I whispered.
I thought of the life I had, the drifting job, the debt I never quite faced. Five days. An animal in me wanted to survive. A better animal wanted to run away, honest as punishment.
Then a message popped up on my phone: "Hey Griffin! Free ticket to Chongqing! Wanna explore? — Elora."
Elora Wagner—she had been a student of mine at a workshop. Bright, trusting, the kind of smile that didn't think the world would hurt her. She had written with that wide, careless hope. She wanted a trip.
I told myself I could not. I told myself this was insane. Then I thought of Gia's smooth throat and the seam marks I had seen at the neck in the hotpot's light and I answered: "Come."
She arrived cheerful and willing. Her cheeks were like an outstretched invitation. "You lead," she said. "I'm here for an adventure."
The plan Joyce imagined was not kind. It was precise.
"Be gentle," Joyce told me as she prepared, her hands steady on the herbs. "You make it seem like love. You make it seem like a favor. The girl's trust is the bridge."
"Isn't this murder?" I asked, under my breath.
Joyce smiled. "We rehouse spirits. Deaths happen like weather—sometimes they are accidents."
That night, in the tunnel place, I felt the Ba General watching like the whole city holding a breath. Elora came in laughing, naive and beautiful.
"Try the white side," I said, thinking of the cheap life I would give for Gia. "It's a trick of the shop. Try both."
She dipped a piece into the pale broth and laughed when it tasted plain. She ate, trusting me. I watched her hands like one watches a delicate animal.
The moment came slow and then very fast. I remember hearing Guang, the sharp sound like a bell, and all the world folding into a small bright box.
When I woke, I was not in my body but in hers for a stretch of hours. Relief poured through me like hot water. Gia's voice answered me, soft inside my own head. But that salvation had cost Elora something I couldn't name then.
Joyce's gang—Neil Torres and Valentin Ramirez among them—were two men who had always kept their hands where backs were soft. They smiled as the potion worked. They cleaned the traces like mechanics. Boyd muttered prayers and paid men to be quiet.
Then the stitch began to strain. Something about the way life is measured—heartbeat and breath, the way faces are forged by memory and habit—will not be stolen clean.
A crack in Joyce's plan appeared not by law nor by conscience but by a small voice that refused to be kept mute. Elora—whose body I had shared and used—found a way to speak. Maybe it was the window left open by guilt, maybe it was a shard of courage she didn't know she had. In public, at the town market, she screamed.
"Stop!" her voice cut like a bell.
People turned. The market was full—food stalls, a man selling knickknacks, a child with a balloon. The crowd that gathers in such places is quick to point and slow to judge in private—but in public they judge with the sharp cruelty of a small town looking into a mirror.
"What's wrong?" a vendor asked.
"That woman!" Elora—still wearing Gia's dress—pointed to Joyce, who had come to collect final payments and to finalize the trade. "She stole a life!"
Joyce's face was calm as a river's surface. "Child, you are confused."
Boyd stood behind Joyce, hands folded, old and oddly steady. Neil Torres and Valentin Ramirez kept near the back, faces like shut windows.
The crowd's eyes flicked. Rumors are always hungry for proof. Some people laughed. Some took out phones.
I felt my stomach drop like a stone. I had believed the plan would end in a quiet room, with rubs and coins and promises. Now Joyce's crew stood under the sun and the market's gossip.
"She is lying," Joyce said, voice low, and then, with a charm that had fooled many, she smiled. "This girl is sick. She confuses memory with fantasy."
"Don't lie to them," Elora said. "You used me. You used me because I trusted him."
"Because you wanted to go on an adventure," I said, because my voice would not be silent any longer. "You said yes to him. You were sweet and trusting. And they promised you a cheap show in return for your life."
The crowd moved closer.
"Just a minute," said a woman with a baby at her chest. "You need proof."
Neil Torres laughed, a low nervous sound. "Proof of what? Of old wives' tricks?"
A teen with a phone began to record. "This is content," he said, eager.
"Listen," Elora said. "She does a trick with her hands. She can switch faces. She can dress dead men and put hearts in wrong chests. She will do it again to another girl."
"Show us," someone demanded. "Show us the trick."
Joyce spread her hands and a smile turned to a peel of silver. She walked forward like a queen. "If you insist," she said. "Then you will see why men like you cross our paths."
The punishment scene from here must be long and plain, because bad people must be undone in public, with all steps and emotions and witnesses.
"Alright," said Joyce, voice small now. "Let's show them."
She reached into the satchel at her side and pulled out what looked like a worn, small mirror. Boyd murmured something that I could not hear. The crowd closed in.
"You see," Joyce said, facing the crowd. "We have ways. We trade. Sometimes a life is borrowed, sometimes it is lent. It keeps us alive."
"You're a thief," a stall-owner shouted.
"I'm a survivor," Joyce answered. Her voice had changed. There was a flash in her eye, a hunger like a furnace.
Then Boyd stumbled, and that gave the first crack. He fell against a stand of ceramic bowls, sending them clattering. Someone gasped. A small girl screamed. The sound was like a stone hitting water.
"You lied to her," said a man who'd been listening. "She didn't know. She loved him."
"Yes," said another. "Who gave you the right?"
Phones had been drawn. A hundred tiny screens recorded Joyce's face. For a moment she looked triumphant—then shock crossed her features. Neil Torres's jaw worked. Valentin muttered, trying to bargain with someone invisible.
"Stop!" Joyce cried, and suddenly her mask slid. The smile she wore dissolved into a human face with flinches and breaks. She reached for the crowd as if to steady herself but felt only the roughness of the world.
"You think I am afraid?" Joyce said, but the sound was hollow. "You don't understand what we do."
"Explain to the families," Elora said, voice steady now. "Explain to the mothers whose daughters fell for your stories."
A cluster of women formed. One of them pushed forward and slapped Joyce across the face. The slap echoed like a judge's gavel. Joyce's eyes widened.
"Don't you dare," Joyce hissed. "You piece of—"
The man who had been recorded already had shared the clip. Within minutes, the town's chatter spun like a top. An old boyfriend of Elora's mother—who knew cutters and carries and had once been a cop—approached, phone in hand.
"You stole a body," he said, voice low and terrible. He was not theatrically loud, but his presence made people step back. "And you sold the method."
People shouted. "Arrest her!" "Send her to hell!" The market became a chorus of accusation.
Joyce's face crumpled. She went through the changes anyone who thinks they're untouchable goes through: first surprise, then anger, then a quick scramble of denial, then the pleading stage.
"It was a mutual thing," Joyce said. "It was consent—"
"Consent?" The word tasted wrong in the air. A woman who sold dumplings spat. "You took advantage."
Joyce's mouth trembled. "They came willingly," she murmured. "They came for money, for work—"
A boy shouted, "Show us the body! Show us how she did it!"
Joyce's hands flew up. "No—no, you don't—"
Neil and Valentin tried to hustle her away. But the market's tide turned. People surrounded them. Someone blocked the path. A quiet middle-aged man who had been watching with slack eyes stepped forward and placed himself between Joyce and the exit.
"You paid me," the man said. "You paid for a silence you never kept. You made me help once. Help me now to set it right."
Joyce's denial broke like glass. "Please," she begged, voice dripping into tears. "I needed the money. We needed to survive."
"Survive?" The market repeated the word like a cross-examination.
A woman whose daughter had a missing friend in a small town stepped forward. "You killed a girl," she said, and the sentence made Joyce's legs wobble. "You moved her soul."
"Not moved," Joyce whispered. "Saved. Relocated."
"Save yourself," the woman said. "Tell us where the others are." She looked like a steel trap closing on a lie.
Joyce could not. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish's. She had arranged a system of theft and survival for years, counting on secrecy and the terror of ghosts to keep her safe. She had not planned for the honest courage of the living to gather like rain.
The crowd shifted. Phones pointed like a jury. The video spread fast. Newsmen arrived. Someone called the police. A police van rolled into the square with lights dull and bureaucratic. Even policemen who had seen strange things were human; in public, their uniforms must be correct and their records clean.
The policemen asked Joyce to explain. Her story began with slick words and ended with sobs. She went through the stages in front of everyone: grin, then scowl, then denial, then apology and finally, the last stage—a quiet, broken tone as she asked for mercy but saw none.
"I didn't mean to—" she said.
"How many?" a policeman asked.
Joyce sobbed. "More than you know. We took them because they offered. Because people are desperate."
The crowd's faces hardened. Some wanted immediate vengeance. Some wanted the law to take slow and measured steps. For a long moment, the market held its breath. Then a woman stepped forward with the small photograph of a missing girl and put it into Joyce's hand.
"Look at her," she said. "Say you didn't ruin this girl's life."
Joyce turned the photo over and over. Her hands shook. She could not meet the woman's eyes. "I—"
"Shame," someone hissed. "Shame on you."
Joyce's sentence of humiliation arrived in stages. First, she was televised being led through the market to the police van, the cameras catching her face and the red bruise where the vendor had hit her. People recorded, uploaded, and spoke. They named her on radio and on social feeds. The small-town justice that moves in the square did not mete out cruel physical harm at first; it did something worse—exposure.
Joyce's friends, those who had once whispered her name with respect, turned away. Neil and Valentin tried to bargain; their words slid off the crowd's anger like oil from a spoon. "It was a business," Neil said, voice high. "We were dealers in livelihoods."
"Dealers of death," said a woman whose child had vanished, and then the phrase caught light.
The final blow was small and public: a woman who had lost a sister took from her handbag a bowl of white broth and scooped it toward the pavement. "If this is your trade," she said, "then let the law pour what you pour."
A policeman accepted, blunt and steady, and poured the pale broth on the ground in front of Joyce. The act was symbolic but heavy. The steam that rose smelled of bone and herbs and something like old paper. People around murmured and took pictures.
Joyce flinched as if burned. Her gaze flicked to the camera. In a market of witnesses she had nowhere left to hide. She tried to make eye contact with me. "Griffin," she mouthed, a single word like a plea. "Forgive me."
I had no answer for her then. Part of me wanted her to burn with the shame of being unmasked. Part of me wanted to be smaller and kinder, to step forward and say nothing helped. But the public's punishment is not only meant to wound; it is meant to stop others from following.
"You're under arrest," the policeman said in a voice that balanced the law and the crowd. "For human trafficking and taking advantage of the vulnerable."
Joyce's reaction moved fast through the sequence I now knew. First, she looked proud—tiny and short-lived. Then, disbelief. "You cannot," she said, with shock. "You can't do this."
Then she tried to deny, voice getting louder, frantic, pushing blame outward. "I didn't do it alone!" she cried. "They wanted it. They came willingly!"
The crowd hissed. Someone spat. Her eyes shifted. Then she broke. The smile fell away and the face of a tired woman who had learned her cunning too early collapsed into a child's pleading.
"Please—I have grandchildren," she moaned. "Please, for them—"
Around her, people whispered and shook their heads. A few in the crowd, those who had once considered her a neighbor, dried her tears with swift, hard hands. Others took pictures. The story splashed across feeds within the hour. Comments poured in: "Shame," "Justice," "How many?" "Who else?"
Neil and Valentin were handled differently. They were shoved against the market wall, pulled faces of men who had been exposed. Neil's arrogance dissolved into tears. Valentin denied until the tell-tale look of a cornered animal showed itself. He begged. He swore he would fix it. The crowd had little patience.
Boyd Blackburn, the old man who had helped at times, sat down on a crate and trembled. He said, "I thought it was small things, mercy runs both ways." He looked at the sky like a man who had been tricked by his own memories. The crowd had mixed feelings about him: sympathy shaded with anger.
As their confinement became certain, as the police wrote their reports and the market closed around a silence, the public punishment turned into something quieter but no less sharp. Villagers who had been initially curious now offered statements. Volunteers formed to find other victims. The faces of those who had been lost were pinned on a board like a town's declaration of warning.
Joyce's collapse happened slowly in the police van, hands cuffed, the cameras catching her like a specimen on a stage. Her face changed from fury to pleading, to quiet, to blank. She mouthed names under her breath—names of people who had been complicit in other towns. Her eyes were wide and full of old bargains.
This was public punishment. The market had seen a predator unmasked and recorded her shame for the whole place to keep. It wouldn't erase what she had done, but it stopped her from doing it in that square again. It made others look, and to look is the first step of stopping.
After that, news spread. Journalists traced the pattern. A dozen families came forward. The police followed small leads. Neil and Valentin were charged. Joyce's network showed more fingers when the pressure came. In court, the recorded phone videos played again and again. The jurors saw a middle-aged woman begging on her knees and men who had traded away young lives shrugging like junk dealers. People in the gallery whispered and shook their heads.
Watching it from the far end of the room, I felt a complicated thing: relief that the conspirators were unmasked; guilt that Elora, the bright trusting girl, had paid such a heavy price for my cowardice.
In the weeks after, there were hearings and statements and apologies that read like weathered scripts. The guilty were not all sent to the deepest cells. Some were given long sentences; others made deals that bought them a quiet life behind probation and service. The public had demanded spectacle and the law had responded with its cumbersome justice.
The market, which had punished in the open, remained the place of truth. People still remembered the day the crowd closed around a small old woman and would tell the story to newcomers as they poured tea.
As for me, I stepped away from the hubbub and watched the legal machinery trip and clank. Justice, when it moves, does not always feel like revenge. Sometimes it feels like the slow settling of stones in a riverbed. For families who lost daughters, the sight of Joyce in handcuffs gave a small, bitter comfort—an answer to the question of "why."
But answers were not all that I needed. I had to face what remained of me and what I had become.
"Why did you do it?" I asked Elora one night when she could speak and the bind that had kept her voicing truth loosened.
She looked at me like a child who had learned an adult lesson. "You asked," she said. "You looked like you would break. I thought I could help someone I trusted. I should have guessed I was being used."
"Do you forgive me?" My own voice sounded older than my face.
She took my hand. "I was young. I trusted. You were the one I trusted. Forgiveness doesn't erase what happened. But I don't want to keep being angry forever."
"I deserve to be punished," I said.
"You deserve to live knowing what you did," she said. "Not to run."
I stayed. I stayed through hearings and through the long nights when Gia's voice would come and sit beside me like a cool thing. She was still present sometimes, and sometimes not. The Ba General statue at Ruben's shop watched over us like a small soldier.
The townspeople kept their eyes on the tunnels. Ruben shut the shop for a month and then reopened with less air and more light. Boyd left town for a while feeling the shame of his help. Neil and Valentin pleaded guilty; their faces in the public square became a lesson.
In the end, I learned the worst lessons slowly: regret is a cold companion but it teaches a man to look where he once turned away. Gia—who was now neither fully gone nor fully mine—couldn't be recaptured without betraying someone else. I could not get back what I had taken. The law had its part; the market had its part; my own conscience had the rest.
One day, months later, at the market where Joyce had been unmasked, I passed a small stall and saw a pot much like the one that had started this. A woman sold kebabs and laughed with a friend. She had no knowledge of stolen lives. The Ba General watched from a corner, cloth over his sword, and the world turned.
I thumbed the small seam at my throat that had once shown stitches in a dim light, and felt nothing but the thin skin of living. Gia's laugh ghosted across my name like wind. "Don't start again," she said, as if she had been reading my mind.
"Not again," I promised, and meant it.
Later, when the seasons had shifted and the town had a new kind of quiet, Ruben handed me a small package.
"Don't lose it," he said. "It calms the steam."
Inside was a tiny bronze Ba General charm, sword at rest.
I kept it in my pocket. When the world felt too close to old choices, I touched the metal, felt its cold, and remembered the market, the crowd, and the public punishment that had peeled back the dark.
It had been ugly and necessary. People had watched, spoken, and made the law follow the light. The bad people were not all mended, but they had been shown to the public and their faces would not be welcome under the same sun.
The next time someone asked me whether I'd ever eat a yin-yang pot again, I smiled, something small and rueful, and said, "Maybe—if it's just soup and nothing else."
"Griffin," Gia's voice said that night, near and gentle, "that will be enough."
I put my hand over my chest where a borrowed warmth once hummed and where a brave girl's trust had been spent. "It will be enough," I told the Ba General, who seemed to nod.
I had kept my life. It had cost too much. People in the town told the story like a warning: never make bargains in tunnels where the wind never settles.
And the pot—the yin-yang pot—sat in a shop, an ordinary thing. But when someone came to the door asking for more than flavor, the shop owner and the market remembered the day the crowd called them to watch.
The Ba General's sword flashed once in the sun and then, like all small soldiers, went back to sleep.
The End
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