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The Elevator Shaft
Lao Zhou has been fixing elevators for thirty years. At the bottom of a shaft, he finds a rusted tin box. The letters inside stop in the winter of 1997.
Want Want Little Steamed Buns
Every night at 3 a.m., a silent man buys the same two items at a convenience store. The night-shift girl grows curious—until the night he finally speaks.
Settling Up
At a late-night kitchen in the city's outskirts, a debt twenty years in the making comes due. But not the way you'd expect.
The Final Walkthrough
On moving-out day, the landlord brought a handwritten checklist he'd been using for twenty-eight years. She had lived there three years, yet knew far less about the apartment than the old man who had spent decades listening to footsteps from the floor below.
The Tin Box at the Bottom of the Elevator Shaft
An elevator repairman with twenty years on the job discovers a rusted tin candy box at the bottom of an elevator shaft. What was inside held all the answers a woman had been waiting half a lifetime for.
After the Last Bus
He missed the last bus and found an old man waiting at the stop. Both knew no bus was coming, yet neither got up to leave.
The Grave-Master
Old grave-master Zhou Shen reads the 'earth-eye' to lay the dead to rest; every family he buries stays at peace. Only one cenotaph on the west slope pushes up fresh soil each Qingming. He has always said it holds a nameless traveler's clothes—until his granddaughter asks, and digging down he remembers it holds his wife's miscarried, unborn child, and the new earth each year is the child's hand reaching for the surface.