Day of Atonement

There are two moons hanging in the sky, one is full and the other is missing. The old man said that it was a steelyard, and God was keeping accounts. The Beluga Pawn Shop in Migratory Bird City does not accept gold or silver. It takes away your breath, sleep, and fear of the dark. It takes away everything you are willing to give up in exchange for a piece of "goods." Duan Sheng, a coffin bearer at a funeral home, was fired for telling a joke about hell at a funeral. He was so depressed that he pawned his "wake-up anger" for three months' rent. He looked pretty when he signed: "This business is good, I'm making money even while sleeping." What he didn't know was that the old ledger at the bottom of the cabinet contained something he pawned when he was seven years old - the interest column was red. From then on, he worked in a broken detective agency and got together with a group of weirdos: the most squeamish rich young man in the city, the detective who has no dreams, the newsboy who collects remedies for immortality, the legendary animal trainer who climbs trees when he sees a cat... And the girl behind the counter who can neither cry nor laugh. She kept accounts and he told jokes. She said they were not funny, but she told them for years. The days were poor, noisy, and unbelievably lively. It's just that no one thinks about it carefully: living has to pay interest, and interest depends on "remembering", and people are destined to become increasingly unclear about what they have given up. No one thinks about why the sun rises every day but the setting moon gets bigger every year. When they think about it, they realize that every joke is a pawn ticket, and every pawn ticket has an expiration date—including the world itself. The pawn shop doesn't lie, it just waits for you to forget.