I found the ledger of inherited debt on a quiet afternoon, while the house was still deciding whether it knew my footsteps. Dust hung in the sunlight like it had nowhere else to go. I had just set my grandmother’s incense burner back on the altar when one floorboard shifted under my heel and made a soft, tired sound.
At first, I told myself it was rot.
The shophouse was old—older than the new towers pressing in from both sides. Repairs had been done cheaply over the years. Still, the creak felt wrong. Too hollow.
Outside, the neighbors were burning incense again. They had done it every morning since my grandmother died. They had done it long before that—ever since my great-grandfather was the only man on this street who survived the famine. People called our family fortunate.
No one ever said why.
Across the lane, an auntie watched me through her window. When our eyes met, she lowered her head. Not greeting. Not respect.
She knew.
I knelt and lifted the loose board.
Beneath it lay a thin book bound in red thread, its cover darkened by smoke and time. It felt heavier than paper should. Fine grit clung to my fingers, like ash that would not brush away.
The first page bore my family name in careful brushstrokes.
Below it:
For years owed and years received.
My chest tightened.
The Ledger of Inherited Debt
The pages were not about money. Each line held a name, a birth date, and two narrow columns: Years Given and Years Kept.
Some entries were stamped in faded cinnabar: 已清—settled.
Others were not.
Halfway down one page, I found my cousin Ming.
Eight years under “Kept.”
Forty-six under “Given.”
The room tilted. I had carried his coffin with my uncle. I remembered how light it was.
The ink did not smear beneath my thumb.
I turned the page.
My grandmother’s name appeared again and again across decades. Every entry balanced. Years given. Years kept. Each line stamped clean.
She had laughed loudly, coughed softly into her sleeve, and scolded me for wasting rice. She had lived to ninety-three.
I pressed my fingers against her name.
“What did you do?” I whispered, and hated myself for asking.
Mine appeared near the bottom, written recently. My current age sat under “Kept.” The space beneath “Years Given” was blank.
The incense smoke bent toward the lifted board that night, sliding downward instead of rising. The ash trembled.
When I was small, I once tried to nap beside the altar.
“The smoke falls faster when you lie too close,” my grandmother had told me, pulling me away.
I slid the ledger under the bed.
By morning, my hands trembled pouring tea.
What Inherited Debt Demands
The weakness did not stay steady. Some hours I felt almost normal. Then it came hard and sudden—my knees folding on the stairs, breath tearing thin in my chest.
The old man from three houses down stood by my gate that afternoon. He did not step inside.
“You opened it,” he said.
I did not deny it.
“The first to touch it after a death keeps the books,” he said. “Your grandmother kept them long.”
His eyes moved to the altar.
“It keeps you breathing,” he added quietly. “Until another hand agrees.”
The neighbors burned incense because they had seen this before. They had watched our house outlast illness, outlast accidents. They had also watched small coffins leave it.
Their paint peeled the way paint should.
On the third night, I opened the ledger again.
When I traced my name, the page felt warm. The blank space beneath it seemed wider than before.
The earliest balanced entry bore my great-grandfather’s name—the year of the famine.
The columns were not where I remembered them.
I shut the book and stood up too quickly. The room swayed. For a moment, I thought of taking the ledger and walking out of the house, leaving it on the old man’s doorstep, leaving it in the drain, leaving it anywhere that was not here.
My legs would not carry me far.
I sat on the floor instead.
For a moment, I thought of my younger sister. I imagined taking her wrist, pressing her thumb to the page. The image came too easily—her confusion, the way she would trust me.
My stomach turned.
I wiped my hands on my shirt as if I had touched something foul.
The space beneath my name waited.
Outside, incense burned thin and careful.
I slid the ledger back beneath the floorboard and lowered the wood into place. The house pressed back into silence.
At the altar, I lit incense.
For a long moment, I almost blew it out.
When I did, the smoke did not rise.