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The Dry Well
In a village-in-the-city rental, a dry well sounds at midnight as if someone is rinsing rice; the landlord says it dried up twenty years ago.
The Sluice
The man who has kept the sluice for ten years hears his name called from the black water below on New Year's Eve.
The Sealed Stove
On a heating-less winter night, tiny footprints appear in the coal ash beside a stove that was sealed shut.
The One the Kiln Kept
An old kiln master in a mountain hollow fires small burial figurines for the surrounding villages. Each dawn the stacked clay figures have shifted in the night, and one unfired figurine appears that he never made — as if the kiln is keeping count of the living.
Midnight Records: The Paper Child
Gou the paper craftsman breaks his own rule and models a paper child on a dead boy; on the seventh night the cut paper flowers lie in a ring, and the paper sleeve sways as if to reach them.
Midnight Records: The Porcelain Mender
Zhou the porcelain mender mends a celadon bowl for a widowed old man at night — and beneath the glaze a tiny picture of a lantern-bearing child appears, the very image of the man when young.
Midnight Records: The Watchman's Drum
Old Fan keeps the night watch for forty years; on snowing nights a second drum keeps the third watch for him — from a red lacquered coffin in the Bai family yard.
Midnight Records: The Night Ferry
Old Cui ferries a red-coated woman across the misty Qinghe River one night — a woman who had no bus to miss, and who leaves behind his late wife's brass locket, not a footprint.