Huaiyin Street has six shops in all: a coffin shop, a funeral-clothes store, an incense and candle shop, a joss-paper shop, an old pharmacy, and my family’s breakfast shop.
I grew up on this street and never thought anything was strange. I ground soybeans at five in the morning, served an old woman carrying a thermos, took a hundred yuan from her, then tucked the money beneath a light bulb and burned it to ash. I did that for eleven years. It had become routine.
Then, one early morning, the old woman didn’t show up.
A young woman came instead. She paid six yuan by scanning a code, drank her soy milk, and said it was delicious. That night, a black mark appeared in the palm of my right hand. I couldn’t scrape it off or wash it away. My father’s notes showed the same mark, with the words: “It reaches the heart in seven days. Once it does, you die.”
I went to see Uncle Wang at the coffin shop. He said, “You took money from the living. That old woman was a soul reaper. Since she didn’t come, you have to take over her job. Go to the funeral home and keep watch over a corpse for one night. You’ll earn a coin for your trouble.”
“There’s one ironclad rule when keeping vigil: no matter what she says to you, don’t answer.”
The girl from that morning was the one lying in the funeral home that night. At three in the morning, she sat up and handed me a copper coin. “Boss, could I have an extra spoonful of sugar?”
I couldn’t help answering. I was done for.
It's good-looking and good at logic and writing.