The neon signage of Geylang’s back alleys did not bleed; it leaked. A slow, toxic drip of hot pink and emerald green that pooled in the grease-filmed puddles of Lorong 19. It was October 31, 2026. In Singapore, the humidity didn't care that the calendar dictated autumn; it hung over the city-state like a damp wool blanket fresh from a boiler room.
Uncle Ji-hoon wiped the back of his neck with a threadbare hand towel that had once been white but had long since settled into a defeatist shade of dishwater grey. At seventy-two, Ji-hoon’s joints functioned primarily as barometers for impending rain. He sat on a plastic red stool outside his shop—Eternal Rest Funerary Supplies—watching the evening traffic. His inventory was standard for the district: paper Ferraris, cardboard iPhones, and stacks of Hell Bank Notes meant to be burned for the deceased during the Hungry Ghost Festival.
But tonight, the world was upside down. The Western ghost festival had leaked into the tropics.
"Stupid," Ji-hoon muttered, his voice a gravelly rasp shaped by fifty years of cheap clove cigarettes and unexpressed grievances. "Dressing up like demons to ask for candy. In my day, if you saw a demon in Geylang, you ran to the temple. You didn’t give it a KitKat."
Across the narrow alley, a sudden explosion of neon green light illuminated a stack of plastic crates. A figure tumbled out from behind the industrial dumpsters, knocking over a broom with a sharp clack.
Ji-hoon didn't flinch. In this neighborhood, late-night noises usually meant debt collectors or drunk tourists. But this was smaller. Much smaller.
It was a boy. He couldn't have been more than eight. He was wearing an oversized, vibrant yellow t-shirt that hung down to his shins like a nightgown, paired with blue denim shorts that were currently smeared with black alleyway grease. His hair was a chaotic nest of black spikes, and he was clutching a small, heavily bruised orange pumpkin to his chest as if it were a rare diamond.
"Hey!" Ji-hoon barked, his voice cutting through the hum of the nearby compressor units. "What are you doing digging in the trash? You lose your parents?"
The boy scrambled backward, his eyes wide and hyper-alert, mirroring the feral cats that fought over fish heads by the coffee shop. He looked at Ji-hoon, then at the rows of paper mansions inside the shop, and finally down at his pumpkin.
"I’m not lost," the boy said, his voice cracking with a fierce, fragile bravado. "I’m practicing. For the boundary."
Ji-hoon stared at him. "The what?"
"The boundary," the boy repeated, taking a cautious step closer, though he kept the pumpkin hoisted like a shield. "Between the living and the dead. It thins tonight. Don't you know anything about Samhain?"
Ji-hoon let out a short, dry bark of a laugh. "Samhain? You think you're a Celtic druid, brat? Look around you. This is Geylang. The only thing thinning tonight is my patience."
"My name is Ren," the boy said, ignoring the old man's cynicism. He stepped under the harsh fluorescent bulb of the storefront, revealing a smudge of dirt across his nose. "And this is Jack." He pointed to the pumpkin. It wasn't carved like a traditional American jack-o'-lantern. The cuts were jagged, crude, and looked as though they had been hacked out with a dull butter knife.
"Your pumpkin looks like it survived a bus crash," Ji-hoon observed, lighting a cigarette. "Why aren't you at home eating dinner? Your mother must be looking for you."
Ren’s expression shifted. The frantic energy vanished, replaced by a sudden, heavy stillness that felt entirely unnatural on an eight-year-old’s face. The psychological armor clicked into place, invisible but palpable. "My mother is dead," he said evenly. "She passed away during the Qingming Festival. My aunt says she’s gone to the Western Pure Land. But I looked it up on the internet. Tonight is the night the veil drops. If you wear a disguise, the bad spirits pass you by, but the people you love can find you. I came to meet her."
The cigarette stayed stationary between Ji-hoon’s lips. The smoke curled upward, stinging his eyes, but he didn't blink. The raw emotional stakes of the alleyway had shifted instantly from a petty nuisance to a profound weight. Ji-hoon knew about dead mothers. He knew about the quiet, cavernous rooms they left behind, rooms that never quite filled up again no matter how many paper luxuries you burned for them.
"You're wearing a yellow t-shirt, Ren," Ji-hoon said softly, his tone losing its sharp edge. "That’s not a disguise. That’s a target for a traffic accident."
"It’s a light," Ren insisted, his grip tightening on the pumpkin. "So she can see me through the fog. The Celts used turnips. Did you know that? They carved faces into turnips because they didn't have pumpkins in Ireland. The turnip was supposed to hold the soul of Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil."
"I know about Stingy Jack," Ji-hoon grunted, leaning back against his shop counter. "He was a cheapskate who couldn't get into heaven and wasn't allowed into hell. So the Devil threw him a burning coal from the fires of the pit, and Jack put it inside a hollow turnip to light his way through the darkness forever. A story about a man who belonged nowhere." Ji-hoon looked down at his own calloused hands. "A very Asian story, if you think about it."
"Why?"
"Because we spend our whole lives trying to find a place to belong, brat. And when we die, our children burn paper houses for us because they're worried we're still renting in the afterlife." Ji-hoon stood up, his knees popping like firecrackers. "Come inside. It’s going to rain. If your pumpkin gets soggy, Stingy Jack is going to be very annoyed."
The interior of Eternal Rest Funerary Supplies smelled of sandalwood incense, stale air, and dried paper paste. Ren walked through the aisles with a sense of reverence that bordered on the comical. He poked a paper Mercedes-Benz with his index finger.
"Does this actually work?" Ren asked. "If you burn this, does my mom get to drive it in the spirit world?"
"If she has a license," Ji-hoon said, walking to the back room. He returned carrying a small, paring knife and a thick candle. "Your carving job is terrible. If your mother sees that pumpkin, she’ll think you were attacked by a dog. Give it here."
Ren handed over the bruised gourd with a look of high-stakes gravity. Ji-hoon set it on the glass display case, right next to a paper model of a double-story bungalow with a miniature swimming pool. With the precision of a man who had spent decades meticulously folding paper structures for the dead, Ji-hoon began to reshape the jagged eyes.
"You see, Ren," Ji-hoon murmured, his knife shaving off neat curls of orange flesh, "the Irish used turnips because it was what they had. Hard, stubborn roots pulled out of cold mud. They dug them out to remind themselves that the ground holds both our food and our ancestors. When they went to America, they found pumpkins. Plump, loud, bright. An upgrade, they thought. But the spirit stays the same."
"What spirit?" Ren asked, his chin resting on the edge of the glass counter, his eyes reflecting the dull glow of the store's overhead tube lights.
"The spirit of negotiating with the dark," Ji-hoon said. He sliced a neat, wide crescent mouth, adding sharp, comical teeth. "We do it during the Seventh Lunar Month. We feed the wandering ghosts sweet soup and roasted pork so they leave us alone. The Westerners do it tonight with candy. It’s all a big celestial bribe. Humans are terrified of what happens when the lights go out, so we make a deal with the shadows."
He popped the candle inside the pumpkin and struck a match. The flame flared, casting a warm, jagged grin across the rows of paper ancestors waiting for their fiery transit. Ren’s face lit up, the fierce, defensive posture of a grieving child melting into pure wonder.
"Wow," Ren whispered. "He looks like he just ate a very sour lime."
"He looks like he’s ready to face the Geylang traffic," Ji-hoon corrected, blowing out the match. "Now, listen to me, brat. Your mother isn’t going to wander into Lorong 19. Do you know why?"
Ren’s smile faltered, his shoulders tensing up again. "Because I didn't carve it right?"
"No," Ji-hoon said, leaning over the counter until his wrinkled face was level with the boy's. "Because the Western Pure Land has an excellent transit system. It’s not like the MRT. No breakdowns. If she’s there, she’s sitting under a jewel-encrusted tree, listening to divine music, and drinking tea that never gets cold. Why would she come down to this humid alley to look at an old man’s funerary shop?"
A tear, fat and heavy with months of suppressed grief, escaped Ren’s left eye, cutting a clean path through the alleyway grease on his cheek. "But I miss her. My aunt says if I cry, my mom won't be able to cross the celestial bridge peacefully. So I have to be happy. But being happy all the time is really hard."
Ji-hoon’s chest tightened. It was a familiar, suffocating ache. He looked at the paper houses surrounding them. He had built thousands of them, sellable comfort for the living wrapped in the illusion of luxury for the dead. But nobody ever bought anything to hold the grief itself.
"Your aunt is talking nonsense," Ji-hoon growled gently, reaching out with his rough, calloused thumb to wipe the tear away. "Grief isn't a wall that blocks them, Ren. It’s the string on a kite. You hold onto it because it connects you. If you don't pull on it occasionally, how will she know you're still down here holding the other end?"
Suddenly, the sky broke. A tropical downpour slammed against the tin roof of the alleyway with the force of a thousand scattering marbles. The air instantly cooled, smelling of wet concrete and ozone.
Before Ren could answer, the bell above the shop door jingled violently. A young woman drenched from head to toe, her hair plastered to her skull, burst into the shop. She was clutching a wet umbrella like a weapon and panting heavily.
"Ren!" she shrieked, her voice a mix of terror and profound fury. "I’ve been driving around the entire district for three hours! What are you doing in a funeral shop?!"
Ren shrank behind Ji-hoon’s plastic stool. "Auntie Mei..."
Mei marched over, her sandals squeaking loudly against the linoleum floor. She looked at Ji-hoon, her eyes flashing with defensive maternal panic. "Did you kidnap my nephew? I will call the police! I will—"
"Calm down, young lady," Ji-hoon said, his voice entirely unbothered as he took a slow drag from his cigarette. "If I wanted to kidnap a child, I’d pick one that doesn't smell like a dumpster and question my knowledge of ancient Celtic history."
Mei stopped, her breath catching in her throat as she noticed the glowing pumpkin on the counter, its comical, jagged grin beaming out into the dim shop. She looked down at Ren’s grease-stained t-shirt and then at the paring knife in Ji-hoon’s hand. The realization hit her all at once—the date, the makeshift lantern, the stubborn, heartbreaking resilience of her nephew's unresolved goodbye.
Her anger evaporated, leaving behind a profound, exhausted vulnerability. She dropped her umbrella and sank onto the spare plastic stool next to Ji-hoon.
"He wouldn't stop talking about the veil thining," Mei whispered, covering her face with her damp hands. "I told him his mother was in a better place. I thought... I thought if he forgot about the funeral, he’d stop hurting."
"Forgetting is for people with bad memories," Ji-hoon said, sliding a box of cheap tissues toward her. "The boy has an excellent memory. He even knows about Stingy Jack."
Ren peeked out from behind Ji-hoon’s legs, observing his aunt's tears with wide eyes. "Auntie Mei? Are you crying because of the kite string?"
Mei looked up, confused. "What kite string?"
"The one connected to Mom," Ren said, stepping out and carefully lifting the pumpkin from the counter. He held it out to her like an offering. "Uncle Ji-hoon helped me fix Jack. He says we can pull on the string sometimes. It won't break the bridge."
Mei stared at the little glowing gourd, then at the grumpy old man who looked like he hadn't smiled since the British left Singapore. A hysterical, breathless laugh bubbled out of her chest. "A pumpkin in a Chinese funeral shop. Your mother would think this is absolutely ridiculous."
"She liked ridiculous things," Ren said, his voice bright with a sudden, joyful certainty. "Remember when she tried to bake a birthday cake and accidentally set the toaster on fire?"
"And we had to eat McDonald's on the balcony while the smoke cleared," Mei added, a genuine smile breaking through her exhaustion. She pulled Ren into a tight, damp hug, bury her face in his chaotic, spiky hair. "She’d be laughing her head off right now."
Ji-hoon watched them, his own phantom strings tugging quietly at his heart. He reached into a drawer under the cash register and pulled out a small, beautifully crafted paper lantern shaped like a traditional lotus flower, normally reserved for the Mid-Autumn Festival. He handed it to Ren.
"Here," Ji-hoon grunted. "A cultural exchange. Take the pumpkin home, eat some candy, and next year, come back during the Hungry Ghost Festival. I’ll teach you how to burn a paper mansion properly so your mother doesn't think you're cheap."
Ren took the lotus lantern, his eyes shining. "Can we burn the pumpkin too?"
"Absolutely not," Ji-hoon said, shooing them toward the door as the rain began to taper off into a soft mist. "Pumpkin smoke smells terrible. Go home, brat."
Mei stood up, picking up her umbrella. She looked at the old man, her expression filled with a quiet, boundless gratitude. "Thank you, Uncle. How much for the carving and the lantern?"
"Ten dollars," Ji-hoon said, sitting back down on his red plastic stool and picking up his hand towel. "But since it’s Samhain, I’ll accept a tribute of two KitKats if you pass by the convenience store."
Ren giggled, waving furiously as his aunt led him out into the damp Geylang night. "Happy Halloween, Uncle Ji-hoon! Don't let Stingy Jack catch you!"
"He wouldn't dare," Ji-hoon muttered under his breath. "I’d charge him rent for staying in my turnips."
He sat alone in the fading green and pink light of Lorong 19, watching the aunt and nephew disappear around the corner, the small orange glow of the pumpkin lantern bobbing between them through the tropical mist like a stubborn, unbreakable soul.
Disclaimer
This fictional story blends Celtic and Chinese traditions for creative purposes.
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