She Heard Old Things Speak

My name is Lin Zhiqiu, and I restore old things. Other people fix objects. I repair the words left unsaid inside them. The moment my fingertips touch an old object, I can "hear" echoes of its owner's voice. A clock that had been stopped for twenty years let me hear an old man say "Don't push me" just before he fell to his death. A gold pen buried in the mud along a riverbank led me to the wronged spirit of someone tricked into copying out a "confession" before being silenced. An old, yellowed photograph quietly linked my father's disappearance ten years ago to all these cases. I give countless old objects a voice and help the dead get justice. But there is one thing I've been waiting ten years to hear: the music box my father was repairing when he disappeared, left only half-finished. This time, I'm going to hear it all the way through.