Old Liu's grocery store was located in the east end of town and had been open for decades. It wasn't a big store, selling things like needles and thread, soy sauce and vinegar, and also collecting utility bills. His most prominent trait was being stingy; he wouldn't turn on the lights if he could avoid it, saying he could save a little money.
Li Mei is a careless person. This problem, from childhood to adulthood, has never changed.
During the Spring Festival, she returned to her hometown, and her relatives gave her a lot of snacks, such as candies, cookies, and melon seeds, which filled her backpack. On the day she returned to the city, she was waiting at the train station and felt a little bland in her mouth, so she casually took out a "milk candy" from her bag, peeled off the wrapper, and threw it into her mouth.
Lao Liu's grandson, Xiaobao, received a thick stack of red envelope money this year. On the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, Xiaobao insisted on going to the bank to deposit it. Lao Liu couldn't dissuade him, so he took him.
Li Ming felt like an ant trapped in a giant gear. Every morning at 7:30 am sharp, he would wake up, squeeze onto the crowded subway, and then begin his unchanging workday. His job was to review the answers of the artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, ensuring they aligned with the company's values. Li Ming always found this work a bit absurd—having a human review an AI’s answers was like having an elementary school student grade a university professor's thesis, but this was what he needed to do.
The "Spring-Dodging Agency" opened a storefront at the end of the old street, the entrance so narrow it looked like a crack squeezed between two buildings. The sign was handwritten, the characters crooked and twisted, like the "ancestral secret recipes" found in old, neglected neighborhoods.
As the Spring Festival approached, the sound of firecrackers grew louder, seemingly about to shake the city. But inside the agency, it was eerily quiet. Old Liu sat behind the counter, slowly sharpening his kitchen knife, which was rumored to "dodge all disasters." He wore a grease-stained apron, his face wrinkled like an old newspaper crumpled by time.
Old Li, a diligent programmer at his company, had recently felt like a wind-up toy, repeating the same code, the same routes, and even the same coffee-drinking posture every day. But this year's Start of Spring was a little different. The company issued a notice that, in response to the "dodge spring" initiative, all employees would have a day off.
Old Li didn't quite understand what "dodging spring" meant at first. Later, through various push articles and WeChat groups, he gradually realized that dodging spring was to avoid clashing with "spring" on the day of the Start of Spring, which was said to ward off evil and eliminate disasters. Although Old Li found it a bit superstitious, the company had requested it, and he couldn't do much about it.
Old Wang is a projectionist at Happiness Cinema. He loves his job. Although he repeats the same actions every day, he feels like he's guarding the entrances to stories. Recently, the cinema has been showing "Ne Zha 2," which has been incredibly popular, with screenings packed so tightly it's almost absurd—a show every ten minutes. This means he has to spin like a top, but Old Wang remains conscientious, like a precision instrument.
This day, Old Wang was repeating his work, pressing the play button, waiting for the movie to end, and then immediately cutting it off to prepare for the next showing. But just as he pressed the stop button, a strange image appeared on the screen: not the usual credits, but a black background with a line of text in white pixel font: "What you deleted is our memories."
The air in the cabin, as if the oxygen had been sucked out, became dull and oppressive. Li Ming sat by the window, trying to look like a calm traveler. The small, red, crumpled thing in his hand, like a hot potato, made him restless.
It was nothing else but a firecracker, a firecracker that had clearly been lit, with only some paper scraps and charred marks left. It lay quietly in Li Ming's palm, like a time bomb that would detonate fear.