When I was eight, someone poked a hole in my window.
Through the little hole, I saw someone standing in the courtyard: Aunt Yun, my mother's best friend.
Moonlight fell on her face. She was smiling. As she smiled, her features disappeared until all that remained was a blank sheet of paper.
The paper figure was smiling at me.
The next day, I dug up a little paper figure beneath the old locust tree. My birth date and eight characters were pasted to its chest.
Aunt Yun said, “Don't be afraid. I'm your aunt.”
But she had no shadow.
Before Grandpa died, his mouth was stuffed with the ashes of paper money. In the ancestral shrine, he left me a blank memorial tablet with my name pasted on it.
On the shrine's walls stood 373 tablets, arranged in perfect rows.
Every one bore the name Shen Mo.
I was the 374th.
Aunt Yun said I never lived past eighteen in any of my lives. In every life, she killed me.
To stay alive, I apprenticed myself to a yin opera troupe: human by day, ghost by night. The operas we sang were not plays, but fate.
The troupe leader had no face. The human-skin mask he wore was my father's.
My father said, “Your fate lies in the tomb of the tomb guardians.”
Three hundred and seventy-three versions of me were buried inside. Every one wanted to die in my place.
But I don't want to die anymore.
