I Died Three Years Ago

Three years ago, there was a fire in Bincheng and I died in my rental house. Three years later, I was still working in a funeral parlor, stitching up, applying makeup, and encoffining dead people every day. Until a letter was delivered to me. There was only one sentence in it: "In that fire three years ago, you saved the wrong person." I went to check my death certificate and found that my name had been circled in red pen. The person who signed the contract was Qin Jianmin, a former plastic surgeon at the funeral home. He had worked here for fifty years and didn't even get paid on the day he resigned. No one knows where he went. From that day on, I started seeing things I wasn't supposed to see. Smiling faces in the river, footsteps in the fog, knocking on the door in the middle of the night but no one is there. There are three more words on the palm of my left hand. They are my name, carved in blood by something underground. Qin Jianmin told me before he died: You have become a half-door. The thing in the door will crawl out on you. I started to learn how to draw talismans, how to control water, and how to keep out things that shouldn't exist. There is a door under the funeral parlor, and there is also a door in the river. There are many doors in this world, and no one knows who is guarding them. I'm just a corpse stitcher. Now, I need to learn how to sew a door shut.