Undertaker

Title of work: "The Embalmer" Introduction copy: My name is Meng Lai. My roommate is an undertaker. Yes, the kind that puts makeup on dead people. When I first moved in, my mother was so nervous that she sent me three pounds of mugwort overnight and asked me to soak in water and take a bath every day. I said Mom, she won't turn me into a specimen. My mother said, shut up. My roommate's name is Shen Du. He is 1.75 Meters tall and as thin as a telephone pole. All the clothes in the closet are lined up according to color. There is only one pot, one bowl and one pair of chopsticks in the kitchen. When I first entered her home, I thought it was a model apartment. Later it was discovered that it was not the case, but that she really lived like this. But she has very expensive hands. With the highest technical subsidy in the city's funeral parlor, she can sew the dead body back together in any shape. She earns twice as much as me, but she rides in the back seat of my electric car home from get off work every day. The wind blows her hair into my face, and the shampoo is unscented. She doesn't even buy scented shampoo. I asked you why you don't even care about taste. She said the smell would stay on the body. I said, that was work, you are off work now. She thought about it and changed it to a peach-flavored bottle the next day. Oh My God. I stood in the bathroom for a long time that day. That bottle of peach tastes exactly like mine. Her hands would move on their own in the middle of the night. Make a sewing motion and sew out the air stitch by stitch. I was scared to death when I first discovered it, but then I got used to it, held her hand, and started saying that the person named "Ultraman" at the branch sent another package today. Her hand slowly loosened in mine. She doesn't speak, but she can hear. She did the last thing for many dead people. Some people were badly broken, so she stitched them back together stitch by stitch. When the stitches were finished, the family members took one look at them and cried, saying, "It's him." She just stood there, silent, and then went to wash her hands. As she washed her hands—— (The following content was discovered by Shen Du) She washes her hands for a long time. It's not because she can't wash it clean, it's because she needs time to change from "a tool in the operating room" back to "a person who goes home". Meng Lai didn't know I was writing this. She thought I was working overtime filling out record cards. Her electric car was parked downstairs, and she used an old towel to pad the back seat because she said I was too skinny and uncomfortable to sit on. Not really. Her back seat was the softest part of her old electric car. I am Shen Du. I am an undertaker. I have a pair of hands that have sewn thousands of bodies, and I have received the highest score in the provincial technical assessment. My salary slip ranks first in the plastic surgery team, and I now have two bowls in my kitchen. The other one is from Menglai. There is a yellow cartoon chicken printed on it. She said it was chicken stewed with mushrooms. I don't know why she uses this kind of bowl. But every time after washing the dishes, I would point her chicken towards my white bowl. Like talking. (Meng Lai's note: She thought I didn't know. I know. I also know that she kept all the chili sauce bottles sent by my mother, washed them and put them in the back of the cupboard. Dudu, have you finished writing? Come out and eat oranges after you finish. Today's is not finished.) Purpose: This article is unfolded from the perspective of Shen Du, a corpse plastic surgeon. Through the daily body repairs she handles in the plastic surgery room of a funeral home, it presents a core proposition: when a person faces death for a long time and is being slowly consumed by her career, what keeps her in the world of the living. Shen Du has the steadiest hands in the city's funeral parlor. She can deduce age based on bones, restore eating habits based on teeth, and infer the position of the injury based on the direction of the wound. Any broken body in her hands can be restored to its original appearance. But this profession is also consuming her - facing the silence and weight of death for a long time, her hands will automatically perform suturing movements in the middle of the night, and her emotions are slowly being stripped away from the world of the living. Meng Lai is her roommate. A person who is completely opposite to her: talkative, gluttonous, always lively at home, her mother will ask her loudly on the phone what she ate today. She didn't know the name of Shen Du's PTSD. She just held Shen Du's hand that was doing suturing movements in the middle of the night, and then started talking about how many packages had arrived at the outlet today. She filled the kitchen, filled the windowsill with orange peels to dry, and made Shendu's empty living room look like there were people sitting there. What this article attempts to show is not how one person is "cured", but how one person is caught by another person's daily life. Shen Du stitched up the body to allow the deceased to complete the final journey with dignity. And her roommate sewed her up in an unorganized way - not with needles and threads, but with the back seat of the electric car every evening, with the endless sugar oranges on the coffee table, and with strips of peeled and re-peeled orange peels. It is "You are sewing death, and I am sorting life. When we put it together, we are complete."