Zhiguai, Glitch in the Matrix Tales, and Notes on the Strange
Glitch in the Matrix Tales
I had horrible insomnia as a kid. It certainly didn’t help that my house is old and makes weird noises at night. I heard a noise one night that I still have no explanation for. There I was, 11 years old, lying wide awake in my dark bedroom for the third straight hour. Suddenly, I heard something. It wasn’t any of the creaks or groans I had become accustomed to in my years of sleeplessness. It was a heavy, pained …
Lady Zhao, the wife of my second son, Ruchuan, was a sensitive and enchanting young woman—one of those people who make you glad to be near them. My wife, Mistress Ma, continually boasted to others about Lady Zhao’s character and literary talent, as well as her needlework. She said that Lady Zhao talked with such charm that one could happily listen to her for a whole day. This was all true. We could not have hoped for a better daughter-in-law. …
Read MoreTwice Goodbye by Ji Yun, The Emperor’s Librarian (1724-1805)
Three friends and I went to a concert at the biggest venue in Mexico City. One of my friends is a woman (this is important for the story). So, the concert ended and we agreed on a meetup point outside the venue so we could get a cab and leave together. There were about 100,000 people there, so we inevitably got separated before going to the meetup point. We waited for my friend for about 15 minutes, then we started …
It seemed as if time had decided to move a day back, alluding to my own possible mistakes. The first birthday that I spent with my significant other, I wrote her a poem. September 26th. For three years straight, I read her that poem. She’d laugh, smile, and say how grateful she was. But this past year, that didn’t happen. I was in my dorm, waking up from a long night of essay writing, when I decided to call her …
I went to high school in a lonely, relatively normal town. Often, a few of my friends in the grade below my own would tell some interesting, haunting stories at lunchtime. By my sophomore year, I had heard it all; but I wasn’t ready for a haunting story about a ghost girl in school. My friend Carlos’ geography class was very late in the day. The heat was often blistering as school had just started back up, and this was …
Recently in China, a snake girl was reported in a village in the far north – about three flying or twenty driving hours from my hometown in Yantai. It’s very cold in this part of China, a Canadian kind of cold. The snake girl who lived in the village was about thirteen years old. Before she became a snake girl, she was just this typical Chinese girl – with two ponytails in the back of her head and with skin …
My classmate shared the following experience with me. It occurred in 2016 when we were in eighth grade, shortly before we took our senior high school entrance examinations. We had just temporarily moved to a room in another building for class because our usual eighth-grade classroom was being used as a test site. Our classrooms served multiple purposes. One of these purposes was as a study area at night. After one such night study session, just as everyone was getting …
“I only vaguely remember the incident, but one night both of my grandparents were woken up by a loud sound. My grandmother swore it was a shotgun. My grandpa said it was a car backfiring since there was no one nearby who would be shooting — we lived pretty far from anyone. They bickered over it for a bit then went back to bed. About 15 minutes or so later, the phone rang. It was my aunt. Her husband had …
So I work at a local restaurant, and last night I experienced possibly the strangest, most unexplainable thing of my entire life. It was a very busy Saturday night, with hundreds of people coming in to eat. Obviously, it gets pretty loud in the restaurant. Customers talking, workers yelling back and forth, the clanging of dishes and appliances, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary right? Well, that’s where the strangeness comes into the picture. As the night went on, there …
This happened a few months ago, before all the quarantine, but I still can’t stop thinking about it. We live on a farm and my husband also owns his own construction business. He turned one of the old barns near our house into his business area where he keeps all of his trucks, equipment, office etc. you have to pass our house to get to this particular barn. It was a Saturday and he went alone to finish a job. …