Funeral Director

· 한국어 번역 대기 중

The Last Hands

A funeral director is the last gentle touch every body feels. When he takes money to make one corpse vanish, he learns he can sell the dead their dignity. Then a body arrives that he cannot bear to erase.

A runs the only funeral home in a fading town.

He buries the unclaimed at his own cost.

He tells himself he feels nothing for the dead; he only gives them order.

Pride is his center.

He must be the last hands on every body, the one who grants them peace.

One night a body comes from the river.

No paperwork, no instructions.

B, a man with money and reasons, pays A to cremate it before the coroner asks.

A takes the cash.

It keeps the free burials going.

He calls it mercy.

He does it again.

Soon he edits death for the living too, softening a suicide into an accident, hiding a needle from a grieving mother, each for a fee.

The more he lies, the more the town trusts him.

His reputation rises as his soul shrinks.

Then a body arrives without papers, and it is C, his estranged brother.

B's man tells A to make this one disappear like the others.

A understands at last that the corpses he hid were B's victims, that B has owned him from the first night, and that his brother is the bill come due.

To stay safe and keep his empire of small mercies, he must burn the one death that means something and feel nothing, becoming fully the thing he sold.

To bury C honestly is to unspool every crime and lose the home, the free graves, himself.

The keeper of dignity must decide whether dignity was ever real or only his price.