The Mined-Out Zone

Building 17 on Jianjing Street, in the western suburbs of Hualing City, had been sealed for twenty-four years. It was due to be demolished in August.

Shao Tiecheng's job was to inspect the empty building: go in, measure the rooms, take photos, put up the seals. He got 180 yuan a day, paid in cash. He had a knack that kept food on the table: press the back of his hand against a wall, and he could tell whether the pipe on the other side was warm, and whether there was a void behind the wall or solid earth.

That day, he counted five doors. The register listed four households.

The extra door had lost all its green paint. Its hinges had been freshly oiled, and seven or eight layers of white scratches from keys marked the area around the keyhole. On the concrete floor of the hallway, a shallow groove ran from the stairwell to that door, worn into the ground by years and years of footsteps.

The ground beneath this building was hollow. Eighty years of coal mining had taken the coal and left one mined-out cavity after another. The ground sank a little more each year. The building tilted, the doorframes no longer shut, and winter afternoons grew dark at half past four. The utility tunnels became the only place in the city that stayed warm all year round. Some rooms developed a routine because of it: someone would stoke the stove at dawn, then someone would call him to dinner, calling him by name.

His older brother had disappeared behind this building when he was fifteen. That year, the police station concluded that he had run away from home, and his household registration was never canceled. Twenty-seven years later, in a 1992 register, a household booklet, and an observation log, he recognized the same handwriting.

Every March, someone went to the concrete post in the north and repainted it red.

A trail of barefoot prints lay in the snow.