Edited from a magazine story I wrote a long time ago. Tragic ending.
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the Ghost-Face Gu. Take one pair each of black musk swallowtail butterflies and red-bellied spiders, a pair of arsenic moths, the dead pupae of three-eyed scorpions and poisonous centipedes, then add a woman’s fingernails and hair. Use plant fibers to spin threads and bind them together. Keep everything in a jar for seventy-seven days and nights, then take out the living eggs and make someone swallow them. They hatch inside the abdomen and bore their way out. The death is so gruesome that they are called Ghost-Face Gu.
Theme: Misplaced devotion and love that was never meant to be.
