The night I received my brother’s wedding invitation, I dreamed that everyone in the village was sitting at the banquet wearing burial clothes. Mother smiled as she helped me try on a qipao. “A bride’s dress only turns properly red when it’s dyed with blood.”
When I reached the mountain village, my brother dragged me into a cellar. “Everyone in the village died three years ago!”
Deep inside the cellar hung seven female corpses, all exactly my size. Each wore the same scarlet wedding dress, with a wooden tag stuck into her heart:
“The eighth. Born in the Year of the Metal Tiger, at the hour of the Pig. A blood sacrifice.”
