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The Last Metro Platform
Lao Zhou cleans the terminal platform after the last train. Once the shutters fall, a station attendant in an old dark-blue uniform paces the empty platform in the camera's blind spot. He later learns of a young attendant who died saving a passenger who fell.
The Last Order
A delivery rider takes an order to a mountain villa on a stormy night. When he arrives, there is no villa, only a graveyard.
The Cold Ward
A nurse on the night shift hears a call bell ringing from a ward that has been locked for twenty years.
The Empty Room in the Urban Village
Xiao Wu rents a room in the urban village astonishingly cheap. At night he hears a neighbor's chair dragged and a tap dripping — but the wall is solid, and the room has stood empty for years since a lonely old man died in it. He begins leaving a bowl of hot food by the wall.
The Night Shift at the Funeral Home
Lao He has worked the night shift at the north-end funeral home for six years. On the first and fifteenth of every lunar month, the third cold-storage cabinet taps from within — three soft knocks. He later learns of an old man who died alone, and a daughter who comes every Qingming to paste a note on that very cabinet.
The Man Who Collected Footprints
For forty years Old Qiu has mended the shoes of Linhe Town and read its people by their soles. When three of his customers drown one after another in Willow River—each wearing shoes he repaired, each sole caked with the same red backwater clay from where a woman died last year—the cobbler sees a pair of feet keeping count of footprints for the river, and finds his own shoes marked too.
The Comb Maker
In Tanxi Town, old Shen Changgeng has carved wooden combs for women for forty years. Years after his bald-headed wife died, a long black strand appears wound in a comb he never gave her - and afterward, every comb he finishes carries a strand that belongs to no living customer. As his hands grow cold as well water, Shen stops fighting it, and combs the empty chair where she once sat.
The Clock Shop
A watch repairer hears a mantel clock, silent for twenty years, begin to tick at night; its pendulum keeps the rhythm of his father's last breath.