My Name Was Hanging from the Chest of the Headless Corpse

When the 1,928th corpse handled by Luo Wuqi was carried into the shed, it had nothing above the neck. The cut ran clean across the collarbones, one stroke, flat and utterly without hesitation. He crouched down, turned back the straw mat, and opened the collar to examine the lividity first. But when he slipped his fingers inside, he touched a two-inch wooden plaque. Its red cord lay against the heart. Three characters were deeply carved on the front and traced in ink: Luo Wuqi.

The twenty-odd people outside stepped back, clearing three feet of space. Four gray-clad officers from the Duyu Bureau arrived at once. A young constable pressed a cinnabar seal onto the shed post, sealed it, and strung up a cord. The plaque is on you, and the body is in your shed. By the rules, if the victim can't be identified, they start with whoever carries the plaque. The charge is murder and discarding the head. In three days, your name will be struck from the register.

Being struck from the register was worse than murder. Your name would be scraped from the ledger of the living and the dead, and no one would remember you ever existed. His mother had disappeared the same way.

From among the onlookers, Chen Er shouted that there had been a light in Luo Wuqi's room last night. Without looking up, Luo Wuqi replied, "Half the garlic shoots by your east wall froze to death last year. You replanted them, digging two feet down. I count how many there are every day."

As laughter rippled through the crowd, he pried open the dead man's fingers and held the palm up beside the cord for everyone to see. A thick layer of calluses covered the base of the hand. Four raised ridges ran from the web of the thumb to the heel of the palm, polished smooth and gleaming, with indelible black lodged in the creases.

Those weren't embroidery calluses. They were rope calluses, the kind made by hauling lines and bracing riverbanks. There wasn't a single knife callus on those fingers, and the web of the thumb wasn't split. Those hands had never held a knife.

The plaque had been hung on the body after death. The red cord had left only a shallow mark. There was no bleeding, and the flesh hadn't stiffened.

The young constable stared at the palm for a long time without replying.

He had seen the severed neck, but the deadline for striking the name from the register still stood.

And where had the black fibers in the dead man's palm come from? What rope had rubbed them there?