A destitute village girl and her wicked mother-in-law

The clatter of dishes in the sink could not drown out my mother-in-law’s shrill voice echoing from the living room. “She’s so dull, so silent. That woman just stands there like a stone—useless! I told Mrs. Lam to find someone agile and lively, but she brought me this lumbering girl instead.”

I heard Dat, my husband, defend me with a grunt. “She’s fine, Mother. Stop being so difficult. Look at her—sturdy build, wide hips. The fortune tellers say she’s built to breed. You want grandkids, don’t you?”

My mother-in-law huffed, her tone softening with greed. “Has she conceived yet?”

“It’s only been a week, Mother. Give it time.”

I am Hong. I am only eighteen. A week ago, I was sold—effectively—to a man ten years my senior through a matchmaker. My family was desperate; my father’s gout had turned his joints into swollen, agonizing knots, and we had no money for treatment. For 150 million VND, I became Dat’s property. Everyone praised my 1.7m, 65kg frame as “healthy and beautiful,” but Dat chose me for a darker reason: he believed a sturdy woman could endure his relentless, carnal demands.

In this house, I was a ghost. My mother-in-law resented the money spent on me, and Dat treated my body like a chore to be completed. But the true shadow in the house was not me—it was Nguyệt, Dat’s first wife, who had died three years prior. They said she died of a sudden illness, her parents too far away to even say goodbye. But as I scrubbed the grease from the plates, I wondered if the walls of this house held a different truth.

Life with Dat was an endurance test. He was a man of insatiable and violent appetites, caring nothing for my pain, seeking only his own satisfaction until the early hours of the dawn. Exhausted, I often overslept, only to be met by my mother-in-law’s vitriol at 6:00 AM.

One morning, after Dat and his mother left for the city, I sought solace in the garden. Near the back fence, tucked under a lush patch of greens, I spotted something unusual: a pair of scarlet slippers. They were pristine, adorned with glittering stones that caught the sunlight. When I tried them on, they fit perfectly—as if molded for my feet. Enchanted and naive, I hid them under my bed.

Strange things began to happen. I would leave the slippers under the bed, only to find them inside my wardrobe later. Faucets in the bathroom would turn themselves on. One afternoon, while Dat was forcing himself upon me, I glanced at the wardrobe. A pair of glowing eyes stared back at me from the shadows.

“There’s someone in the closet!” I screamed. Dat checked, found nothing, and slapped me across the face for “ruining his mood.”

That night, I dreamt of a woman in white with blood weeping from her eyes. She pushed me into a pond—not of water, but of thick, crimson blood. “You took my husband,” she hissed. “Now you must die.”

I woke up screaming, drenched in sweat and shame, having lost control of my bladder in terror. When my mother-in-law returned, I confessed my fear. She turned pale but dismissed it. “It’s just a nightmare. I’ve had the house blessed.” But the neighbors whispered a different story. They told me Nguyệt hadn’t died of a fever. She had drowned in that very pond after a violent argument with her mother-in-law. Since then, her wails had haunted the garden—until the day I arrived. Now, the wails had moved inside.

The tension reached a breaking point when Dat returned home with two mistresses, mocking my “insanity” and demanding a divorce so he could move his new women in. But Nguyệt’s spirit would not allow it. Using the scarlet slippers as a conduit, she possessed my body.

I felt a terrifying chill invade my bones. My eyes turned blood-red, and my voice warped into a guttural snarl. I watched, trapped inside my own mind, as my body displayed supernatural strength, hoisting the mistresses into the air and terrifying them until they fled the house, never to return.

Desperate to reclaim her home, my mother-in-law summoned a powerful exorcist named Master Son. On the night of the full moon, they prepared a gruesome ritual. They slaughtered a large black dog, intending to use its blood to wash away the “filth” of Nguyệt’s soul.

As they began their chants, Nguyệt appeared, her form flickering in the moonlight. Master Son threw the dog’s blood upon her, and she shrieked in agony as her spirit began to burn and dissolve.

“Stop it!” I cried, rushing down from my room. I saw her eyes—not filled with malice, but with a profound, lonely sorrow. She wasn’t a monster; she was a victim of this family’s cruelty, just as I was.

I put on the scarlet slippers once more, allowing Nguyệt to enter me. The ritual fire was extinguished by the sheer force of her grief. Through my mouth, Nguyệt confronted her mother-in-law. “I died because you drove me to the edge. You threw me out like trash. Now you try to kill me again?”

The exorcists fled in terror as I smashed the ritual altar. My mother-in-law fell to her knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. For the first time, she saw the consequence of her malice. Nguyệt, moved by the woman’s pathetic state and my own pleas for peace, chose mercy over vengeance.

“Live with the guilt,” Nguyệt’s voice echoed through me. “Repent, or I will come for you again.”

The house fell silent after that night. With the help of a more compassionate medium, we spent a month performing rites to help Nguyệt’s soul find peace. She finally moved on, her spirit fading into a soft light, leaving a final whisper of gratitude in my ear.

Dat, terrified by the supernatural display, signed the divorce papers without a fight. He could not stand to look at me, fearing the ghost that once wore my skin. I took the money that was left and returned to my parents’ home.

Before I left, I took the scarlet slippers to the edge of the pond. I dug a deep hole and buried them, returning them to the earth where Nguyệt’s physical journey had ended.

I am back with my family now. My father is receiving his treatment, and my siblings are in school. I am no longer the sturdy girl sold for brick-laying and breeding. I am a woman who walked through fire with a ghost.

In the house I left behind, my mother-in-law spends her days chanting sutras, haunted by the memory of the daughter-in-law she killed and the one she couldn’t break. Dat remains a coward, living in fear of the garden shadows. As for me, I look at the horizon and breathe. The scarlet slippers are buried, and for the first time, the voices in the wind are silent.

This story follows Hong, an 18-year-old girl sold into marriage to save her sick father. She enters a haunted household governed by a cruel mother-in-law and a predatory husband, Dat. Hong discovers a pair of scarlet slippers belonging to Nguyet, Dat’s deceased first wife. Through supernatural encounters and a failed, violent exorcism involving a blood sacrifice, Hong realizes that Nguyet was a victim of the family’s abuse.

Hong allows herself to be possessed by Nguyet to save the spirit from being destroyed by a corrupt exorcist. In the end, Nguyet finds peace through Hong’s compassion, the mother-in-law is forced to repent through fear, and Hong successfully divorces Dat to start a new life. It is a tale of the bonds between the living and the dead, and the ultimate triumph of empathy over cruelty.