Garden -2001- | Meteor

She was walking home from the night market, a sticky red lychee popsicle melting down her wrist. She took a shortcut through the old Shilin district, past the abandoned housing development that everyone said was haunted. Locals called it the Meteor Garden—not because of stars, but because in the early 80s, a small meteorite had supposedly cratered there, and the developer, hoping to cash in on the miracle, built a series of modernist concrete pavilions around the impact site. The project went bankrupt during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Now, the pavilions stood like broken teeth, their flat roofs sprouting ferns, their empty window frames gaping at the sky. A rusty gate, perpetually unlocked, led to a maze of cracked plazas, drained fountains, and one central rotunda with a domed ceiling painted with a faded, chipped mural of the zodiac.

It started, as these things often do, with a popsicle. meteor garden -2001-

They would lose. They would win. They would lose again. Dao Ming Feng would send assassins (metaphorical ones, mostly), Shancai’s father would open a new stall, and F4 would fracture and reform like a broken bone. But in the meteor garden, frozen in that single moment, they were two teenagers holding onto each other in the dark, defying gravity. She was walking home from the night market,