My name is Song Mi. During my senior year of college, the school shoved me into a community pharmacy for my internship. Honestly, I was a little happy about it. A pharmacy internship sounded way easier than working at a milk tea shop—no standing all day, no fake smiling at customers.
The old pharmacist training me was surnamed Zhou. Sixty-something, gaunt, his white coat hanging off him like a robe. He didn't talk much. Most of the time he sat behind the counter writing with a fountain pen, the characters tiny and crammed together, like he was keeping accounts for someone.
The pharmacy was on the ground floor of an old residential block. Not a big storefront. Push open the glass door and you'd get hit with that mix of Chinese and Western medicine smells. A cash register sat at the front counter, behind it a wall of medicine cabinets, and further in, a small break room with a fridge, a microwave, and a folding bed.
That's where Uncle Zhou slept on night shifts. Past that were the bathroom and a tiny storage room. In the corner of the storage room was a stainless steel sink—specifically for disposing of expired meds.
My first week, Uncle Zhou didn't let me do anything but memorize drug classifications and expiration dates. He said a pharmacy wasn't like a supermarket. A bottle of expired soda might give you the runs at worst. An expired bottle of medicine could end badly.
He said this while looking me straight in the eye, tone flat as if he were commenting on the weather. But I always felt like he was leaving half the sentence unspoken.
Wednesday night of the second week, Uncle Zhou had family matters to deal with and asked me to cover his night shift. He said hardly anyone came after nine—just lock up and stay inside, he'd take over in the morning. Before leaving, he pointed at the wall behind the counter and said one thing.
"Expired meds don't go straight in the trash. Open the packaging, crush the pills, flush them down with water. If any pill won't dissolve, don't reach in with your hand."
I was eating takeout at the time. Gave him an absent-minded "yeah" without a second thought. Uncle Zhou stood at the door and glanced back at me. His lips moved like he wanted to say something else. In the end, he said nothing, pulled the door shut, and left.
The evening crowd matched what he'd told me. After eight-thirty, not a single customer. I pulled the rolling shutter halfway down, flipped the "Open" sign on the glass door, and settled behind the counter scrolling through my phone.
Around eleven, I suddenly remembered—Uncle Zhou had mentioned earlier that day there were a few bottles in the storage room expiring this month. Said I should clear them out when I had time.
I've got this problem. Can't stand being idle. I think to myself, I can't sleep anyway, might as well get it done. Uncle Zhou shows up tomorrow, he'll give me a pat on the back.
So I went to the storage room and pulled every med marked with this month's expiration off the shelves. About a dozen boxes total. Mostly Chinese patent medicines. Two bottles of vitamin tablets.
I carried them to the stainless steel sink in the corner and flipped on the light. One of those old fluorescent tubes—flickered a few times before fully lighting up, bathing the corner in a stark, pale wash.
The sink wasn't big. Smaller than my kitchen basin at home. Old-style twist faucet. When I turned it on, the water came out carrying a metallic pipe smell.
I started with the Chinese meds. Opened the capsules, dumped the powder into the sink. The water scattered it instantly—swirling down the drain and gone. Ripped open the granule packets. The brown grains dissolved in the water, like those herbal cold remedies I drank as a kid, that same bitter-sweet smell.
I spaced out while flushing. Thinking about next week's thesis proposal I hadn't started. My mom calling yesterday asking if I'd come home for New Year's. The faucet kept running, the splashing turning the storage room into a waterworks.
It was around eleven-thirty when I got to the vitamin tablets. I checked my phone. I remember this clearly—the screen jumped from 23:28 to 23:29 right as that pill appeared.
The cheapest kind. Plain white tablets. Hundred-count bottles. Both bottles still mostly full. I unscrewed the first cap and dumped the pills straight into the sink. The little white tablets hit the stainless steel bottom with a soft clatter, like a pile of round paper scraps.
I turned on the faucet. The water hit, and most of the pills disintegrated right away—white powder spinning a few rounds before vanishing down the drain.
But one didn't dissolve.
At first I didn't think much of it. Figured it was stuck in some corner of the sink. I reached into the water to push it toward the stream. The moment my fingers hit the water, a chill shot through my whole body. Why was it so cold?
It was summer. Tap water shouldn't be this cold. It was freezing, like freshly melted snow, numbing my knuckles.
I didn't dwell on it. Kept reaching my fingers toward that pill. The water was still rushing, and the little white tablet just spun in place right under the stream, as if some invisible force was holding it there. It turned slowly. Round and round. Like an unseen vortex at the bottom of the sink was dragging at it.
When my fingers were maybe two or three centimeters away, the pill suddenly sank.
Not "washed away." Not "dissolved." It just dropped straight down and vanished. I froze. How does a pill sink like a stone? Without thinking, I kept reaching down, trying to feel what was going on at the bottom of the sink.
My index finger touched the stainless steel basin.
But the texture was wrong.
A stainless steel sink should feel cold, hard, smooth. What my fingertip touched was soft. A little cool, but not metallic cool. A coolness with warmth in it.
The best way I can describe it—like pressing your lips against an ice-cold soda can. That feeling right between cold and warm.
A mouth.
I touched a mouth.
The lips moved slightly and closed around my fingertip.
The sensation was so vivid that every hair on my body stood up at once. The lips were soft. Slightly moist. The pressure around my fingertip was light—like an infant suckling a finger.
But beneath those lips, I could feel a neat row of teeth. The teeth bit down gently, almost tenderly, leaving a ring of indentations around the second knuckle of my index finger.
I yelled and yanked my hand back.
Water still running. Fluorescent light buzzing. The storage room thick with the bitter scent of powdered medicine.
I looked down at my finger. On the second knuckle of my index finger, there was a ring of teeth marks.
Small. Very even. Like a… child's bite.
The bite marks weren't deep. The skin wasn't broken. But they were printed there, clear as day, like someone had branded my skin with ice water. I brought it closer to my face and could make out the outline of each individual tooth. Small. Square. The front teeth slightly wider, the ones on the sides tapering down in size.
Not adult teeth marks. An adult's front teeth wouldn't be that narrow.
My first thought was: how do I explain this to Uncle Zhou? Walk in tomorrow and say, "Uncle Zhou, the sink bit my finger"? The fear came second—the kind that arrives late, crawling up from the soles of your feet.
My fingers started trembling. Then my whole hand. Then both arms. I crouched by the sink, staring at those bite marks, my mind gone completely blank.
The faucet's splashing suddenly got deafeningly loud, like it was the only sound left in the room. I reached over and twisted it off. The storage room fell silent.
The buzz of the fluorescent tube reclaimed my eardrums. Humming. Humming. Merging with my heartbeat. The bite marks still hadn't faded. If anything, they were getting sharper, like someone was painting a picture under my skin with ice water.
I stood up, walked to the storage room door, cracked it open a sliver and peered out. The front of the pharmacy was perfectly normal. Empty street beyond the glass door. Yellow streetlight pooling on the tiles. A stray cat ambling past the dumpster. Too normal. So normal it scared me even more.
I didn't dare go back into the storage room. Turned on every light and spent the night behind the front counter. I examined the bite marks on my finger no less than fifty times. Wiped them with a tissue. Rubbed them with spit. Held them up to the light to see if I was imagining things. I wasn't.
The marks only started fading deep into the night. Around four in the morning, just a faint reddish trace remained—like the imprint a watch leaves on your wrist after you've worn it too long. By dawn, gone completely.
Uncle Zhou arrived at seven. He pushed open the glass door, walked in, took one look at me, and asked nothing. He went straight to the storage room. I heard him pause by the sink. Then he came back out. How long he stood there I don't know. Maybe two or three seconds.
He sat down across from me, poured a cup of hot water, and slid it over. The bottom of the cup tapped the glass counter with a soft clink.
"You reached in with your hand, didn't you."
I held the cup and said nothing. Uncle Zhou sighed. He took off his reading glasses and wiped the lenses slowly with the hem of his white coat. He wiped for a long time. Long enough that I thought he wasn't going to speak again.
"The pills that won't dissolve," he finally said, his voice low, like he was talking to himself, "are the ones someone on the other side is waiting to eat."
He put his glasses back on and looked at me.
"You reached in. They thought you were trying to take it from them."
I didn't quit after that. Not that I didn't want to. The school had signed me up for a three-month internship agreement. Switching placements mid-term meant redoing the whole approval process. My advisor would need a written explanation. I told Uncle Zhou maybe I could switch all my night shifts to day shifts. He said fine, but reminded me: "Day shifts have their own things too."
He didn't say what things. I didn't ask. I'd learned the number one rule of working at this pharmacy: don't ask what you shouldn't ask. Even if you asked, Uncle Zhou wouldn't answer. And even if he answered, I might not dare to hear it.
About a week later, I discovered a detail. That sink actually had a name.
I was reorganizing shelves in the storage room, squatting on the floor checking batch numbers, when I noticed a tiny sticker on the side of the sink. Yellow background, red text, like a nameplate on a piece of equipment. Four characters printed on it. So small you'd miss them if you weren't looking closely.
"Dissolution Pool."
That's not a word a normal pharmacy would use. I asked the clerk at the pharmacy next door. When their expired meds needed disposing, they just tossed them in the trash. The more conscientious ones bagged them up tight first. Nobody installed a dedicated sink in their storage room and labeled it.
I searched "dissolution pool" online. Every result was about crematorium furnaces. Nothing to do with medicine.
One afternoon, business was slow. Uncle Zhou and I sat behind the counter peeling tangerines. I pretended to ask casually: "Uncle Zhou, when was that pool in the storage room installed?"
Uncle Zhou stuffed a tangerine segment into his mouth and chewed for a long time before swallowing.
"Early eighties, I think," he said. "It was here when my teacher had this place."
"Your teacher ran a pharmacy too?"
Uncle Zhou gave me a look. A complicated look. Like he thought I'd asked a stupid question, and also like he was deciding whether to answer. In the end, he just said: "My teacher didn't sell medicine."
That was all. He stood up and went to help a customer. I sat there finishing the other half of the tangerine, squeezing juice out of the peel in my hand.
Once you start noticing things, traces are everywhere.
I began paying attention to Uncle Zhou's movements in the storage room. Every time he disposed of expired meds, he'd close the storage room door. But I could hear him talking inside.
Not a phone conversation. One-sided. Low. Like someone murmuring to a child. The voice was too soft—through the door I couldn't make out a single word. But the tone was unmistakable. Gentle. Patient. Almost ingratiating.
Like a grown-up coaxing a kid who won't eat. Spoonful by spoonful.
Every time he came out, the drain under the sink would make a soft noise. Like something letting out a long sigh.
One night in mid-October, it was my night shift again. Before leaving, Uncle Zhou specifically checked the storage room, making sure there were no expired meds on the shelves by the sink. He stood at the storage room door, looked around, then turned to me. "Don't go in the storage room tonight."
I said okay.
He said, "I mean it."
I said I know.
He stared at me for three seconds. In the end, he said nothing more. Picked up that worn black briefcase he'd used for over a decade and left. His footsteps faded beyond the rolling shutter. The street fell quiet again.
The first half of the night was uneventful. I sat behind the counter, watched two movies, ate a tub of instant noodles, video-called my girlfriend for forty minutes.
She asked how the internship was going. I said it was fine. Coworkers were nice. Work wasn't hard. She asked if the night shift scared me. I said what's there to be scared of—it's a pharmacy, not a funeral home.
After hanging up, I realized I'd said the wrong thing. Not because "funeral home" was an unlucky word. But because it suddenly hit me that a pharmacy at night really was more unsettling than a funeral home.
In a funeral home, no one moves. But in a pharmacy at night, all the medicine sits silently on the shelves. The names on the packaging stand out starkly in the dim light. Every name hiding something behind it.
Fever reducers. Painkillers. Sleeping pills. Life-savers. All of them silent. Waiting.
Around one in the morning, I was slumped over the counter, half-asleep, when I heard it.
Coming from the storage room.
Not a loud sound. Soft. Like something dripping onto the floor. Drip. A few seconds later, another. Drip. Like a faucet that hadn't been turned off all the way.
I snapped awake. I remembered clearly—Uncle Zhou had checked the sink before leaving. Turned off the faucet. It wasn't one of those old dripping types either. Brand new ceramic valve. Never leaked.
I stayed behind the counter. Didn't move. The dripping continued. Steady. Unhurried. One drip every five or six seconds. Rhythmic as a second hand. I told myself don't go to the storage room. Uncle Zhou said don't go in the storage room tonight. I grabbed my phone and started scrolling short videos, cranked the volume to max, trying to drown it out. But every comedian's laugh in those videos just grated on me. I tossed the phone aside and covered my ears with both hands.
The dripping stopped.
I thought it was over. Let out a breath. Then I heard a softer sound. Like someone's finger tracing along the gap under the storage room door. Fingernail scraping across the painted wood surface. A faint, teeth-grating friction.
I stood up. Stared at the closed storage room door. Same door as always. White paint yellowing with age. A "Staff Only" plastic sign hanging from the handle. Everything normal. Except for the thing seeping out from under the door.
Water.
Clear. Colorless. Odorless. Seeping through the crack beneath the storage room door, spreading slowly across the hallway tiles. Not much of it. Like someone knocked over a glass of water. But it wasn't still. It was flowing toward me. Like it had a will of its own.
I backed up. My heel hit the base of the counter. The water stopped in the middle of the hallway. Then it spread outward. A thin layer, covering exactly three tiles. The surface was calm as a mirror, reflecting the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.
Then ripples appeared.
Not caused by anything falling in from above. The ripples rose from beneath the surface. Ring after ring. Like something was about to emerge. I stared at that puddle. The reflection was wavering. The ceiling lights warped into strange shapes by the ripples.
I clenched my fists. Nails digging into my palms. The pain keeping me lucid.
At the center of the water, a face surfaced.
To be precise, the outline of a face. It appeared just beneath the water's surface, like looking at someone's features through frosted glass. I couldn't make out the details, but I could identify where the eyes were. The line of the nose. The shape of the lips.
The face was turned upward. Looking back at me. Its mouth opened slowly, then closed. Opened. Closed. Like it was saying something. But I couldn't hear a thing.
I raised my phone and snapped a photo. The flash went off. The water's surface rippled violently. The face's outline scattered, like a reflection stirred by a stone. By the time the flash died, the water had gone still again. The face was gone.
The water on the floor dried up within seconds. As if the tiles had absorbed it. The hallway was clean. Not even a water stain left behind.
I looked at the photo on my phone. Nothing there. Just hallway tiles and the closed storage room door. Normal lighting. Clear image. No water. No reflection. Nothing unusual.
But I didn't sleep that night. I kept every light in the pharmacy on and sat behind the counter until dawn. No more sounds came from the storage room. When Uncle Zhou arrived in the morning, I told him nothing. As usual, he didn't ask.
I thought about deleting that empty photo. My finger hovered over the delete button for a long time. In the end, I didn't press it. I moved it into a new album. Locked the album.
I realized what scared me wasn't those things themselves. It was something else. They were looking for me.
The third month of my internship. The last month. I learned more about what was behind that door.
Some of it I observed myself. Some of it Uncle Zhou let slip by accident. Some of it I found while sorting through old ledgers. That old iron file cabinet had a locked drawer on the bottom. The key hung from Uncle Zhou's belt. He never took it off.
But once, while I was helping him look for something—he asked me to find an expired prescription pad in the cabinet—I crouched down and saw that the locked drawer wasn't fully shut. A crack.
I didn't dare open it. But through that crack, I saw a stack of yellowed papers. The top sheet, one corner exposed, had a line written in fountain pen. The handwriting looked like Uncle Zhou's, but younger. Firmer.
"...three departed this month, two medication pickups, pool..."
The rest was covered. I grabbed the prescription pad and pretended I hadn't seen a thing.
What did "three departed" mean? I didn't get it at the time. Then one day, it clicked.
I started paying closer attention to the customers. Slowly, I noticed a pattern. Some of them, after leaving the pharmacy, would turn toward the deepest part of the alley. In that direction, there were no apartment buildings, no shops. Just an old wall.
One day I followed someone. They walked to the end of the alley and vanished. The alley was a dead end. A brick wall covered in ivy. No door. No window. Not even a manhole cover on the ground.
The person was just gone. The ivy leaves swayed gently in the breeze. Like nothing had happened.
That was around the time I realized this pharmacy wasn't what I understood a pharmacy to be. Sure, it sold medicine. To people. But it also dispensed medicine to other things. Among those human-shaped, talking customers coming and going in broad daylight—some of them didn't pay with money.
I saw an old woman buy a bottle of the cheapest licorice tablets. She placed a rusted copper coin on the counter. The characters on the coin—I didn't recognize a single one. Not Kangxi Tongbao or any common ancient coin. The strokes were crooked. Something older.
Uncle Zhou took it without blinking. Gave her a few yuan in change. When the old woman turned to leave, I noticed her heels stirred up no dust on the ground.
I also saw a young man come in late at night for sleeping pills. Uncle Zhou brought out a box. The man reached under the counter—Uncle Zhou's blind spot—and opened his palm. A tooth lay there. A real tooth. The root still smeared with dried blood.
Uncle Zhou glanced down and said, "Not enough." The man reached into his mouth again. Crack. He placed another tooth on the counter. Uncle Zhou slid the box over.
He handled these things as casually as scanning a QR code. When I stood nearby, he acted like nothing was happening. Talked about the weather. About rising prices. About how the breakfast shop next door had raised the price of steamed buns. Not wanting to make things awkward for him, I pretended I didn't see anything either.
But I knew. The moment that pharmacy door swung open, what walked in wasn't always human.
Back to the dissolution pool.
My last week before leaving, I finally pried the full answer out of Uncle Zhou. That afternoon he was sorting the storage room. I offered to help. I separated the expired meds into piles—Chinese on one side, Western on the other.
He glanced at me. Maybe because he figured I'd been reliable for three months. Maybe he was just old and wanted someone to talk to.
He started dumping pills into the sink. Turned on the faucet.
"The dissolution pool," he said, hands still working, "dissolves illness."
I stood beside him, handing him boxes. Water rushed. Pills tumbled, dissolved, disappeared.
"People take medicine. The medicine carries the illness away. The illness is cured. The medicine is absorbed. But the pills that never get taken—expired, discarded, replaced—they took on the illness for someone and were never accepted by anyone's body."
He poured the last bottle into the sink. Stirred the powder in the water with an old toothbrush.
"They're wronged."
The sound of running water filled the silence of the storage room. I watched his old hands. Knuckles thick. Skin cracked all over.
"So this pool," he said, "is for sending medicine to the other side. The patients... over there."
"Who are the patients over there?"
Uncle Zhou turned off the faucet. Stood by the sink for a long time. Long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"The same way you came into this world—that's how they left it."
I didn't understand. But every hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
My last day was a Friday in mid-December. I finished the paperwork. Thanked Uncle Zhou for taking care of me. He waved his hand and said go home, focus on your thesis. He even smiled—a rare thing. The wrinkles at the corners of his mouth bunched together, like a piece of paper crumpled up then smoothed back out.
He walked me to the door. The afternoon sun was good. The alley was quiet. I stood at the pharmacy entrance—the glass door, the metal shutter, the familiar mix of medicine smells—and felt like I was saying goodbye to a place that wasn't quite of this world.
"One more thing," Uncle Zhou said from behind me.
I turned around.
He stood in the doorway, the white coat still hanging off him like a robe. The fluorescent light from inside the shop outlined his silhouette.
"Next time your finger hurts in the middle of the night for no reason," he said, "just soak it in warm salt water. Don't come looking for me."
I laughed. Thought he was joking. Then I saw his face. He wasn't joking.
I walked to the mouth of the alley. The bus stop was just ahead. I looked back.
The pharmacy was still there. Glass door. Metal shutter. The "Dissolution Pool" sign on the wall, the four characters small as ever.
And then I noticed something I'd never seen before—or maybe I'd seen it a hundred times and never registered it. The pharmacy's address plate, the one next to the door, had a line of smaller text beneath it.
It read: "Also serving: the departed."
My vision went blurry for a second. I blinked, and the smaller text was gone. Just the address plate. Just the pharmacy.
Normal. Everything normal.
I got on the bus. Sat by the window. The pharmacy shrank in the distance. And I remembered what Uncle Zhou had said that first week, the half-sentence he never finished. I finally understood what the other half was.
A bottle of soda expires, worst case you get the runs.
A bottle of medicine expires—
Someone on the other side goes hungry.
The bus pulled away. I leaned my head against the window, felt the vibration of the engine through the glass. My index finger ached for no reason. Right at the second knuckle.
A dull, cold ache. Like someone with tiny, neat teeth was biting down. Gently. Patiently. Waiting for me to reach back into the water.