I kill him not because I want him dead but because I want him eternal. For there to be a ghost story, after all, you must first make a ghost. Call them revenants, onryō, lemures, utukku, phi tai hong, whatever you like; the vengeful ghosts are always the strongest. Why otherwise would so many different cultures, separated across time and space, millennia and mountains and oceans, all develop their own mythology related to such entities? Why would they pass down so many cautionary tales for the prevention and avoidance of malevolent spirits, as well as such varied rituals for their placation, banishment, and exorcism? Because as long as man has lived and died upon this earth, so we have existed alongside our restless dead. We learned quickly that the dead who lingered longest were those cut down by violence or denied the proper burial rites. Most remain bound to this world until they can complete their final business, but some get so twisted up by rage they refuse to let the living have a moment’s peace ever again. They become myths in their own right, fueled not just by emotion but by their legend itself.

So I will kill him, and I will bury his heart beneath the floorboards, and I will weep nightly upon his unquiet grave so that he may never know a moment’s sleep. I will make such a ghost of him that he will haunt me until the end of days. This way nothing – not his fickleness, not his stubbornness, not even death – can ever truly part us.