“I took over my grandfather’s teahouse, which only opens at midnight.
Guests arrive at the Xu hour and the gods are sent off at the Yin hour. The ‘people’ who come never pay with money from the living world.
An old woman in a shroud pays me in hell money. A faceless customer always sits at the third table in the corner. And there’s the woman in the red bridal gown who appears on rainy nights. Her fingernails are black, and she smiles as she asks me, ‘Didn’t your grandfather tell you who this teahouse is for?’
It isn’t until I find a page of blood-red writing in the ledger that I understand: ‘On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, close the doors, or die.’”
