The funeral hall

The dinner marked the end of the student teachers' probationary period. From this week on, the new teachers at No. 4 Middle School would step behind the lectern as real teachers. And with that transition came the first inklings of an unpredictable future.

That morning, Hui Nan arrived at school to find Principal Chen Daipeng standing in front of the flower bed outside the teaching building, a look of alarm on his face. The bed that should have been full of blooms had been stripped bare — someone had cut every flower, leaving only dark exposed soil.

The school had no groundskeeper; the flowers were tended personally by Principal Chen. Hui Nan remembered seeing him watering them on her very first day, his face gentle and serene among the blossoms. "I built this bed fifteen years ago," he'd told her. "Every morning for fifteen years I've come here to water the flowers. Watching them bloom and fade, watching the students come and go — that's what education is. You tend with patience and care, and they reward you with joy and a sense of accomplishment."

And now, just days later, every flower had been cut down. Was it idle mischief, or something intentional? Hui Nan stared at the barren black earth and was suddenly seized by a wave of dizziness. She collapsed.

When she woke, she was in a hospital bed. The doctor said she had anemia from her menstrual cycle, compounded by severe stress — a sudden faint, nothing lasting. Rest would set it right.

Hui Nan was relieved it was nothing serious, but also quietly disappointed to have missed her first day of classes. As it turned out, she had missed more than that.

During evening study hall, Class 4, Grade 4 was in the middle of a chemistry lesson. Teacher Wang Qin stood at the front, finishing a daytime experiment she hadn't completed: a demonstration of ferric chloride reacting with potassium thiocyanate to produce a blood-red iron thiocyanate solution.

Chemistry experiments were popular with students — they offered a small spark of interest in an otherwise dull day. But the classroom was large and the test tube small, and the students in the back rows couldn't see.

Of the eight rows of desks, the front six were arranged by height; the back two were for students with poor academic records. But even these students were curious about the experiment, and they stood and pushed forward to get a better look.

Wang Qin looked at the students crowding up from the back and said with open contempt: "You lot pay no attention when I'm actually teaching, but the moment there's an experiment you all want a front-row seat. As if you could understand any of it."

She began adding potassium thiocyanate to the test tube of ferric chloride solution. In an instant the liquid turned a bright, vivid red — the color of blood.

"Blood!" A startled cry burst from one of the students standing at the back.

The sudden shout made Wang Qin's hand jerk; a few drops of the "blood-water" spilled onto her hand, and her irritation toward the back-row students sharpened. "A bunch of ignorant fools — what are you shouting about?!"

But as she spoke, she noticed that those students' eyes were not on the experiment. They were fixed on the second seat by the wall. Chang Di, sitting there, had five deep bloody holes in his wrist — still dripping. Blood fell drop by drop to the floor and spread into a small pool.

Chang Di continued staring at the lectern with the same expressionless face, as if the blood were not flowing from his own body. Wang Qin found his comportment genuinely unsettling. "Chang Di, your hand is bleeding. Go to the gatehouse and get Uncle Du's key to the clinic — there's iodine and bandages there. Go take care of your wound."

"Okay. Thank you, teacher." Chang Di remained expressionless, and walked calmly out the door, leaving the spreading pool of blood on the floor to sit there, making everyone uneasy.

"Hey, what's-your-name — Zhou Dong." Wang Qin called him to his feet. "Go wipe up that blood."

Zhou Dong had no choice. He went to the washroom, brought back a bucket and mop, and headed toward the second seat by the wall. The moment he extended the mop toward the blood on the floor, the classroom lights went out.

No one dared speak. Complete silence. And in the silence, footsteps in the hallway — then the classroom door was pushed open, and a gravelly voice spoke: "School is dismissed — there's a problem with the electrical circuit." It was Uncle Du, the school's gatekeeper.

The school cancelled evening study hall, and the fourth-grade students began filing into the dark corridor. For light, Uncle Du lit candles along the hallways and stairwells. The white candles threw pale light, and when a cold draft swept through, the flames flickered and danced.

"Gu — Gu Qing!" A student suddenly cried out in a panic. Everyone followed the direction of his gaze — and saw a face. Gu Qing's face.

A black-and-white photograph of Gu Qing, mounted in an old black frame, hung on the corridor wall. Students who had attended her funeral recognized it at once: it was her memorial portrait.

Where the images of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx had once hung, every single one had been replaced with Gu Qing's memorial portrait. The expression in the photograph — hovering between a smile and something else — seemed to hold a secret that the living could not know.

The flowers that had been cut from the bed that morning — missing all day — had reappeared. They had been gathered and bound into wreaths, one after another.

Candles. Memorial portraits. Wreaths.

The school had been transformed into Gu Qing's funeral hall.