My grandfather is dead.
Eighty-four years old, passed away peacefully. I rushed back from the provincial capital for the funeral and found that he had left the coffin shop to me - not to my second uncle, not to my cousin, but to a useless grandson who was in debt and had not been home for four years.
The shop is not big. It has two wooden doors at the end of the alley. White lanterns hang at the door.
Grandpa left a notebook with seven rules.
The rules state that cypress coffins cannot see daylight, nanmu coffins cannot contain iron objects, and do not respond to sounds coming from the coffins.
I think the old man was confused before he died.
Until that night, the coffin lid moved on its own.
A finger, white with long nails, stretched out from the gap and tapped twice on the edge of the coffin.
Boom. Boom.
Like knocking on the door.
Then a woman called to buy a coffin. Her mother died at the age of fifty-three, suffering from a heart attack. The burial place she wanted was the old cemetery in Nanling City that had been vacated three years ago.
The seventh page of the notes is blank. But on that page, a word slowly emerged.
"Return."
I later learned that the business my grandfather had been guarding for forty-six years was not the coffin shop.
It's a ferry.
And what I took over was not a shop.
It's a contract.
