A Hundred Days with the Reaper

Part One — The Terms

Chapter 1 · The Tablet with Her Name on It · Se-ah · One hundred days left · Rain

Rainy days are good for the work. The ink takes longer to dry.

Moon Se-ah kept the workshop window open a hand's width. The sound of the rain came in, and the damp came in, and the smell of ink unfolded slowly inside it. Three years now, the same seat, the same posture. Her left knee goes numb first, then her shoulder knots, and somewhere around there a tablet gets finished.

Today's lot was three paulownia funeral tablets.

She had picked them up from Yeongnakwon that morning. The surface, sized with white chalk ground, takes ink faster than paper does. Wherever the brush passes, it sets. Which is why this work has no such thing as correcting. One stroke off and it becomes a different person, and a tablet that has become a different person gets burned. You only start again.

First one. She checked the order form, let out half a breath, and brought the brush down.

THE LATE IM SUN-DEOK

Eighty-one. Three years in a care home, the last four months unable to speak, the form said. Se-ah held the final stroke a half beat longer than usual. Writing the names of people who had lost their speech a little longer had become a habit. A habit with no basis at all — but this work was not kind enough to let a person do only things that had a basis.

The second was a man of fifty-four. The three characters of his name sat square, and the brush had an easy time of it. Some names help the person writing them. The strokes stand clear of one another, the weight is even, the last stroke falls naturally downward. Se-ah would feel briefly pleased when she met a name like that, and then feel odd about being pleased, and stop. How many jobs in the world involve appraising the feel of a brush while writing a dead person's name.

At the third she sat a long while with the brush in her hand.

In the name field of the order form it said: Unidentified (male, est. 60s).

One or two of these come every year. People found under the bridge in town, or along the highway. No fingerprints on file, nobody looking for them, so they are cremated by administrative procedure and interred by administrative procedure. Se-ah found these tablets the hardest. Not hard, exactly. There was simply nothing to write.

In the end she wrote the single character meaning the late and left the rest blank. That was the rule. One black character and a field of white. Se-ah looked at that white for a while, and then, low in the blank space, she put down a single very small dot. Not a period and not a stroke. A dot that meant nothing. Something she did in secret once or twice a year.

Something should be there.

For as long as a name is being written, that person has not entirely gone. That was the way Se-ah thought about it. They have already been erased from the files, erased from the bank, erased from the hospital system — and here on this piece of wood they are being born, just now. In black ink, in stroke order, one careful character at a time.

The last place in the world where that name is written new.

That was Se-ah's job.

She rinsed the brush, hung it, and straightened her back. Through the window she could see the yard. Wet earth, an overturned basin, and under the wall a single crape myrtle.

It had bloomed.

One flower so far. A small knot of deep pink at the end of a branch, nodding each time a raindrop struck it. Se-ah looked at it a moment, and what her grandmother had said on the phone that morning came back to her in order.

It's out. The crape myrtle.

So it's out. So what.

That flower lasts a hundred days. A hundred. That's why they call it the hundred-day flower.

I know, Grandma. I grew up under that tree.

That's exactly why I'm saying it. What do you know yet.

Se-ah had snorted and hung up. A conversation with an eighty-two-year-old always ended that way. Without a conclusion, but without losing either.

On a nail at the back of the workshop hung an old apron. Two hands wider than Se-ah's own. Three years in that spot, three years with nobody wearing it. Se-ah had developed the knack of not looking that way. Not looking is a skill too, and skills improve with practice.

Master Bae had known about the dots and pretended not to. He said it once. That is a pointless thing to do. And then the next week, when another unidentified tablet came in, he put a dot on it himself before she could get to it. A much bigger dot than hers. It is the most useless thing she learned in this workshop and the one that has lasted longest.

She wet the whetstone and set the edge of a chisel, put the chisel and mallet back in their places, and stood the three tablets in a row to dry. Now she would put the order forms back in the envelope, run them over to Yeongnakwon, and the day was done. There was a text from Eun-chae. Unni, I'm buying you gukbap this week. She decided to answer later.

Se-ah turned the envelope over and shook it.

One more order form fell out.

They said three.

It was new paper. Stiff, without a crease. The Yeongnakwon form, all right, but the intake-number box in the upper right was empty. In three years she had never once seen an order form with that box empty. Without much thought, Se-ah let her eyes drop to the name field.

文世娥

Her fingertips stopped.

She read the three characters twice. Three times. Then she laughed out loud. The laugh reached the workshop ceiling and fell back down awkwardly.

Someone with the same name.

Not a common name, but not an unheard-of one either. There are plenty of Moons in town. Down to the same characters is rarer, but the world does several rare things a day. Se-ah arranged it that way for herself and skimmed the field below.

Date of birth. March 17, 1998.

Se-ah blinked.

Address. 12 Seodong-gil, Yeonseo. Pilmukdang.

The rain suddenly sounded very loud. No — the rain was the same, and every other sound had gone. The refrigerator, the water off the eaves. Se-ah lifted the paper a little higher. Not because her hand was shaking but because she thought the characters might be faint. They were not faint. They were not printed. They had been written by hand. In black ink, in stroke order, one careful character at a time.

It was a good hand.

Se-ah was a person trained to read people out of handwriting. Whether the brush is held upright or laid over, where the breath is taken, which stroke a person habitually eases off on. This hand was not in a hurry. Not one stroke rushed, not one stroke hesitated. It was the hand of someone who had written the same characters for decades.

And in exactly one place, the vertical stroke of the character 世 leaned very slightly to the left. A habit. The kind everyone has one of, and never knows about their whole life.

Se-ah thought she had seen that lean somewhere. Where, she could not bring up.

In the intake-date box was today's date.

The intake-officer box was empty.

Se-ah set the paper down. Set it down, put both hands on her knees, and breathed. One, two, three. The method Master Bae taught her. When your hands shake, don't look at your hands, count your breath. Count to ten and it usually settles.

Around six she noticed that her right hand was holding a brush.

She had no memory of picking it up. A blank tablet lay in front of her, the brush was already charged with ink, and on the white ground two black characters had been drawn.

故 文

The body had moved first. A motion repeated perhaps eight thousand times in three years. You see the order form, you write the name. You see the name, the hand goes. Because that is Se-ah's job.

Se-ah put the brush down. It rolled across the worktable and fell to the floor, and as it fell it printed a single black dot on the boards. Strangely, the sound was what brought her back.

Someone is playing a trick.

She decided to think that. If she didn't think that, she could not get to the next thing. It wasn't as though nobody in town found her unlucky. The girl who walked out of that flood three years ago by herself. Se-ah knew every word people said behind her back. So a trick like this was possible. With enough malice, people will do anything.

Se-ah stood. She was going to open the door, wave the envelope, and say something to whoever was out there.

There was someone in the yard.

Under the crape myrtle. Black clothes. Black gloves. No umbrella.

Se-ah stopped with her hand on the door pull. It was a face she didn't know. Yeonseo is small, and a person born here and raised here knows nearly every face in town. That face was not among them. Early thirties, maybe, tall, shoulders straight, and nothing on his face that could be called an expression.

The rain was coming down hard.

The man was not wet.

Se-ah did not understand the fact right away. It was the kind of thing the eyes take in first and the head follows later. The line of his shoulders was dry. His hair was dry. The dirt at his feet had gone to porridge in the rain and there was not a speck of it on his shoes.

Without meaning to, Se-ah looked up at the sky. It was raining, plainly. The runoff from the eaves was digging a hole in the yard, and water was pouring off the tiles on top of the wall.

So Se-ah picked up the umbrella that hung on the doorpost. She could never explain afterward why she did. If someone is standing out in the rain you give them an umbrella — that was the order of things she had learned in Yeonseo. Nobody had ever taught her the order of things for seeing a ghost.

While she was raising her arm to open it, Se-ah saw.

Raindrops were disappearing above the man's shoulders. Not bouncing off, not running down. Just before contact, very briefly, simply gone. She thought her eyes were wrong and looked again several times and it was the same. It was less that the rain was avoiding him than that he was on the side of things that do not receive rain.

The umbrella stopped, half open, in her hand.

"Excuse me."

Her voice came out smaller than she expected.

The man turned his head. His gaze went past Se-ah to the worktable. To the tablet standing on it, to be exact.

To the two-character name, the ink not yet dry.

"That is a good hand."

He spoke. Through the rain it was unreasonably clear. There was almost nothing in the voice that could be called inflection. He paid a compliment and it did not sound like one. It was the tone of a person reading down a document.

"Excuse me. This is somebody's house."

"I know."

The man crossed the yard one step. Only one step, and with it the air in the yard cooled. Se-ah felt the skin on her forearms rise. It was June.

"That," the man said, tipping his chin toward the tablet. "You may finish it."

"…I'm sorry?"

"It is the name I am to collect today."