Another Coffin

The next morning Hui Nan arrived at school dreading what she would find. The fear was justified.

At the entrance to Class 4's classroom, a crowd had already gathered — students and a few early-arriving teachers pressing together at the door, nobody willing to go in. Hui Nan pushed through. Inside the classroom, centered in the open space between the desks, sat a coffin.

It was lacquered dark red, painted with the same designs Hui Nan had seen on the first one — the one Uncle Du the coffin-maker had supplied. The room had gone silent in the way rooms go silent when something is very wrong. The windows were all closed. The smell of varnish and something underneath it — damp earth — hung in the air.

"What is going on?" Zhang Yao appeared at Hui Nan's shoulder, his voice unsteady.

"Someone called the principal?" Hui Nan said to the crowd. Several students nodded.

They waited. Principal Chen Daipeng arrived and stood at the door looking at the coffin with an expression Hui Nan couldn't read. Then he turned and spoke quietly to a teacher about getting the students away from the building. Someone called the police.

While the adults debated and the students were herded out, Hui Nan noticed that the lid of this coffin was slightly ajar — just enough to see a strip of interior. Without fully deciding to, she walked to it and looked in.

Inside was Uncle Du. The coffin-maker. He was dressed in the neat plain clothes he always wore, eyes closed, entirely still. He had been killed and placed in his own craft.

Hui Nan stepped back. She bumped into Zhang Yao, who had followed her. He looked into the coffin, went gray, and grabbed a desk for support.

Then the classroom door flew open. Zhai Jia walked in.

She was still wearing the white garment from last night, her face now stripped of the makeup, though traces of white powder still clung to her hairline. Her eyes were very bright. In her arms she cradled something large and heavy, wrapped in cloth.

No one moved.

Zhai Jia walked directly to the front of the classroom, set her bundle on the teacher's desk, and turned to face them all. She looked out at the room — the coffin in its center, the remaining teachers in a half-circle, the faces of students pressed against the corridor windows.

"I have something to say," she said. Her voice was steady now, clearer than it had been in days.

She never got to say it.

Three police officers in tactical gear burst through the door and shouted her down. One of them barked an order. Zhai Jia looked at them without moving, without any expression of fear.

The first officer raised his weapon.

Someone screamed from the corridor.

The shot was single and very loud. Zhai Jia dropped.

In the frozen moment that followed, Hui Nan could hear the sound of the bundle sliding off the teacher's desk and hitting the floor, and from the cloth wrapping — the sound of something spilling: glass beads, rolling and bouncing across the tiles in every direction, a colorful scatter of them tapping against coffin wood and chair legs and the soles of their shoes.

Zhai Jia's bead bracelet. She had wrapped it and brought it here.

Hui Nan walked to her and knelt. Zhai Jia's eyes were open, looking at the ceiling. She was still breathing, but just barely, the sound of it wet and uneven. Her eyes tracked slowly until they found Zhang Yao, standing a few paces away. She looked at him with great intensity. Her lips moved.

Hui Nan leaned in to hear.

The words were a nursery rhyme. A new one — not the one about the pockmarks. A new one, with new names.

By the time Hui Nan had pieced together enough of it to understand what Zhai Jia was saying, Zhai Jia had stopped breathing.