Death Flashback
The moment I touch a corpse, I see the last images before their death.
My name is Shen Huai, a forensic assistant. This is my job: translating those images into abrasions, fractures, laryngeal contusions—into things that can be written in an official report.
What can't be written in the report, I write for myself.
On my first day, a fall case. The victim was pushed off by his own cousin. In his final moment, he was still calling him "brother."
The case was closed. The obsession faded. I thought it was all over.
Then someone slipped a note into my drawer: "Shen Laotou's grandson—you can read them too?"
Shen Laotou is my grandfather. A man who spent his entire life as a wuzuo—a coroner's assistant in the old days. He died two years ago. Officially, an accident.
He left me a notebook. Inside, the rules of reading the dead. A photograph with someone's face scratched out. And a single line, written before all the rules:
"I have wronged you."
Every death report holds something the forensic examiner could never put into words.
This one—this report—is mine.