The Third Incense Stick was never meant to burn at night.
In my family, rules were never written down. They were whispered, passed carefully from one generation to the next, as if speaking them too loudly might weaken them.
Two incense sticks showed respect.
Four honored the dead.
Three—especially after dark—was forbidden.
Three was not an offering.
Three was an invitation.
When I was young, I once reached for a third stick during Qing Ming. My grandmother caught my wrist before I could light it. Her fingers were warm. Her grip was not.
“Some doors do not close the way they open,” she said.
I thought she meant spirits.
I did not realize she meant memory.
The Apartment Above the Shuttered Shop
My grandmother’s apartment sat above an old herbal shop in Bukit Merah. The shutters below had been rusted shut for as long as I could remember. The painted characters on the signboard had faded into pale outlines.
After she passed, my parents argued about the place. Sell it. Rent it. Seal it.
I volunteered to stay for a week.
I said it was responsibility. The truth was quieter. I had been avoiding family gatherings for months. Avoiding questions about work, about marriage, about whether I still remembered the old rules properly.
Upstairs, the wooden windows were nailed shut. Dust drifted in the still air. Camphor and dried herbs clung to the walls.
The ancestral altar waited in the living room.
The Ancestral Altar and the Third Incense Stick
The altar was small, darkened by years of smoke. A porcelain bowl sat at its center, ash packed tight as stone.
Above it hung a single photograph.
A man in a traditional tunic. His posture rigid. His eyes sharp enough that I felt them follow me when I moved.
“Your great-grandfather,” my grandmother once said.
She never told me his name. I never asked.
That first night, the air felt thin. Each breath came shorter than the last.
In the drawer beneath the altar lay a bundle of red incense sticks tied with yellow thread. My hand hovered. I could almost hear my grandmother correcting the spacing, adjusting each stick until it stood perfectly straight.
Two. Or four.
I pulled three.
The match flared brighter than it should have. When the incense caught, the smoke did not rise.
It sank.
It slid down the sticks, curled over the rim of the altar, and spilled toward the floor as if it had weight.
The scent shifted.
Not incense.
Soil. Damp wood. Earth newly turned.
My hand trembled as I pressed the third incense stick into the ash.
Footsteps answered from the corridor.
Footsteps and the Third Incense Stick
Slow. Measured.
They moved along the corridor and stopped directly outside my door.
I felt the space behind me change, as if someone had stepped close enough to share my shadow. Cloth shoes brushed lightly against tile.
I did not turn.
The footsteps lingered, then receded.
The smoke thickened.
When I looked back at the altar, the photograph no longer reflected light. The man’s eyes seemed deeper, as if the image had gained depth where there should have been none.
That night, I dreamed.
The Corridor of Names
I knelt in a long corridor lit by oil lamps. Their flames bent without wind.
Doors lined both sides. Each bore a name painted in black brush strokes. Some bold. Some nearly erased.
Cold air breathed from beneath the doors.
They began to open.
Hands reached from the darkness inside. Whispers brushed my ears. The sound was not angry. It was searching.
At the end of the corridor stood a final door.
Blank.
It opened last.
I woke before dawn, throat tight.
The incense had burned to ash. The bowl overflowed, gray dust spilling over the rim.
For a moment, I could not remember my middle name.
I said it aloud. It sounded wrong. I said it again before it settled back into place.
Behind me, a voice spoke.
“You lit three.”
The Shopkeeper’s Warning
The herbal shop below was open the next morning.
I stopped at the foot of the staircase. The shutters that had been rusted shut for years were raised. I did not remember hearing them move.
An old man stood behind the counter, grinding herbs. The air smelled fresh, as if the place had never closed.
“You burned the third incense stick,” he said.
I nodded.
He glanced at the gray dust clinging to my sleeve.
“Three calls those who were not properly counted,” he said. “Those whose names slipped.”
My stomach tightened.
“What do they want?”
He considered me for a long moment.
“To be remembered,” he said. “And sometimes to remain.”
When I stepped back onto the street, the shutters were down again. Rusted. Sealed.
My phone buzzed.
A message from my mother.
She had addressed me by my great-grandfather’s name.
I stared at it for a long time before replying.
A Final Act of Respect
That night, I returned to the altar.
I lit one incense stick.
The smoke rose straight and thin.
I bowed until my forehead touched the floor. Fear lingered, but something heavier sat beneath it.
“I don’t know your name,” I said. “But you were family.”
Beneath the altar lay an old ledger. Its pages were brittle, ink faded to gray.
I hesitated before writing.
Then I wrote the name my grandmother once whispered in her sleep.
The handwriting looked unfamiliar. I forced myself to continue.
“You are not forgotten,” I said softly. “But you are not me.”
The room remained still.
A crack split the photograph down the center. The man’s gaze felt less hollow—but not gone.
When I stood, gray dust still marked my sleeve.
The Doors That Remain
I moved out the next day.
The photograph stayed cracked.
Sometimes, in quiet rooms, I catch the scent of incense where none burns.
Once, my father paused mid-sentence, searching for my name before finishing it.
At night, I dream of corridors lined with doors.
I wake before the blank one opens.