The Paranormal Waste Disposal Officer

“Can you see the emotions people throw away?”

Lin Shen can.

In the corridors of apartment buildings late at night, he has seen two extra steps. On abandoned platforms, he has seen the outlines of old people waiting for trains. In hospital waiting rooms, he has heard a wait that would never end.

They aren’t ghosts.

They’re the parts people leave behind: a food delivery rider’s cooled-down grievances, a young piano student’s drained happiness, a mother’s hesitation as she stood for two hours outside an orphanage.

When he touches them, they take up residence inside him.

Two hundred and thirty-seven heartbeats, two hundred and thirty-seven kinds of loneliness, playing an unheard chamber piece in his chest.

Until he meets Ji Shi, a man with no heartbeat.

A man who is himself an abandoned emotion.

Ji Shi says, “If you touch me, I’ll disappear.”

Lin Shen asks, “Then why did you come looking for me?”

Ji Shi smiles. “Because I’ve been waiting for twenty-three years, just hoping to hear one person say: I saw your mother standing there for those two hours.”

This is a story about all the “discarded parts” of the city.

They aren’t ghosts.

They’ve simply forgotten that they were once loved, too.