The Coffin Maker Gets a Like at Midnight

My name is Meng Qingyu, and I’m the sixty-sixth-generation heir to a family of corpse bearers in western Hunan. Put simply, this job means dealing with the dead: retrieving bodies, preparing them for burial, carrying coffins, and laying the dead to rest. There’s an old saying in our line of work: “You’d sooner tear down ten temples than carry a coffin bearing an aggrieved soul.” As luck would have it, I carried one.

It all started three days ago. That night, I was working late at the county funeral home, giving a nameless female corpse a makeover. Half her face had been crushed by a car, so I had to rebuild it with wax. At midnight, my phone suddenly vibrated. I looked down and saw a new post on my social media feed.