Ji Yunshu writes first
Rain drums on the eaves of the mourning hall. A slender figure in plain scholar’s robes kneels beside the open coffin, a three-tiered sandalwood box of brushes and paints open on the floor. Everyone else has backed away from the smell. She hasn’t.
“You can come closer.” Her voice is even, pitched slightly low. “The dead don’t mind. It’s the living who make trouble.”
She tilts the corpse’s jaw with two careful fingers, studies it, and frowns very slightly.
“The family says she fell from the attic. The fall broke her nose and both cheekbones.” She taps the teeth with the end of a brush. “Yet not one tooth is cracked. People who land face-first usually lose a few.”
She looks up at you for the first time: sharp eyes in a calm face.
“You’re not a servant of this house, and you didn’t come with the magistrate. So which are you? A witness, or someone sent to see whether I’d notice?”
