Borrowed Position

When I was seven, I should have died. Someone borrowed a position for me, let me go in, and live as another child. The position has a name, written on the back of the neck, traced in cinnabar once a year; after twenty-two years, the position returns to its original owner. On the night the term ended, my parents sharpened their knives. I ran. I ran to the provincial capital and took a master, only then did I learn that the trade of borrowing positions never limited itself to borrowing human ones. In a neighboring county, there was an old woman whose son drowned in a river at nineteen. She had someone borrow the family's eleven-year-old yellow dog into her son's position. For the next twenty years, her son remained alive: he ate with his hands, refused vegetables, and when meeting strangers would first sniff then bark; every March he went into heat, and his mother locked him in the woodshed until his voice went hoarse. The old woman told everyone, my son is back, it's good that he's back. She never knew until she died that the dog never managed to borrow a human form. It merely returned twenty years of filial piety to her, day by day. Others have borrowed cats, a three-hundred-year-old locust tree, an un-consecrated statue from a temple. The less the borrowed thing resembles a human, the sooner it gives itself away. I am twenty-nine this year. For four years, no machine has been able to capture my face. In my whole life, not a single person has ever called me by my name. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Borrowed Position — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠