The Bones of Wen Shu Tang

When Wen Shu Tang died that summer, the heat over Dayton hung thick as boiled silk. The air shimmered above the sand, and the smell of pig waste from his farms carried for miles.

The town mourned him in the practical way small towns do, by gossiping. Most agreed that Tang had been a hard man, polite but private, fluent in English yet foreign in soul.

He had lived in the back of his laundry on Pike Street, above the ceaseless clatter of washing boards and steam. Some said they saw light in his window late at night, greenish, ghostly light, as if fireflies had taken to crawling along the glass in unholy patterns. Others dismissed it. Tang was an industrious man. Perhaps he read late, or experimented with detergents.

Only Brady knew better.

Brady was Tang’s only friend, a miner’s son who’d once hauled barrels for the laundry and stayed on as handyman. He was often summoned upstairs to fix leaking pipes or broken hinges, and though Tang always paid fairly, he never allowed him to linger.

“Some rooms are not for company,” Tang once said, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes.

After Tang’s death, the sheriff told Brady to collect the man’s belongings and find a relative in China. There were a few trunks of clothes, some ledgers, and jars of preserved ginger, simple enough.

Yet when Brady stepped into Tang’s quarters, the air was thick with camphor and decay. The walls felt damp, as though they sweated grief.

Behind a false panel in the pantry, Brady found a narrow door. Its key hung from a thin red thread nailed above the lintel.

The key was cold, too cold, even in August, and for a moment Brady hesitated. Inside lay a room Tang had never spoken of.

The place was small, low-ceilinged, and lined with dark lacquered wood. A circular table sat in the center, carved with dragons that seemed to writhe when the lamplight hit them.

Around the table were five figures, upright and still. Their bones gleamed faintly, bleached to the color of moonlight, dressed in tattered silks that had once been bright.

They were not whole skeletons. Each frame was a patchwork of mismatched bones, one with two left femurs, another with hands too small for its arms. Yet they were posed carefully, reverently, as if Tang had arranged them for dinner.

In the middle of the table stood a porcelain bowl filled with dust. It pulsed faintly, like something alive.

Brady staggered back, bile rising in his throat.

He told the sheriff, and within a day, the coroner came from Carson City. The discovery drew half the town to the laundry, people whispering in the streets while the deputies carried out the bones.

The coroner’s report came within a week: none of the remains belonged to Chinese individuals. Stranger still, no two bones matched, as every skeleton was a composite, an impossible gathering of the dead.

Speculation ran wild. Grave robbing, witchcraft, old-country, superstitions? Brady alone remembered Tang’s stories, told over cups of tea after long workdays, about “the hungry ones,” spirits that devoured identity and memory, leaving behind only fragments.

Tang had once said, “The dead are never gone. They are waiting for names.”

After the coroner finished, the bones got packed in a crate bound for Carson City. Brady signed the papers himself, relieved to see the wagon leave.

But three days later, word came that the crate had vanished somewhere between Silver Springs and the capital. No one ever found it.

Years passed. The laundry changed hands twice before burning in a freak fire.

But those who worked there after swore the walls sometimes creaked with voices, not words, but the soft, rhythmic sound of syllables trying to form. On windless nights, the scent of camphor and pig’s blood drifted through the ruins.

Brady dreamed of them nightly. In his dreams, the mismatched skeletons rose from their chairs and turned toward him. Their skulls were wrong, assembled from parts of many faces.

When they spoke, their jaws moved in discordant rhythm, and from the porcelain bowl came the sound of breathing, steady and deep. In one dream, Tang was there too, younger than he had ever been in life, his skin pale and waxen.

“You think you bury what you do not understand,” he said, “but it buries you instead.”

Brady woke to find sand in his bed and a faint mark on his chest shaped like the key he had once held.

Somewhere beyond the desert, in a place no map records, a table stands beneath a black sky. Around it sit six figures now, each dressed in rotting silk, waiting for another to join them.

The bowl in the center still breathes.