Nine Centimetres a Year

The hillside cemetery in Saint-Aubry slides downhill about nine centimetres a year, coffins and all. The night groundskeeper's job is to keep the headstones moving with the bodies. Each night he scans the ground with radar, finds where a coffin has drifted, and quietly digs its stone up and resets it above it, so that by morning every widow is still crying over the right person.

1. The old radar logs show the stones were wrong long before he started. His predecessor gave up in 1983, so half the town has spent forty years crying over strangers. He starts correcting them one stone a night, and regular visitors begin telling each other that their graves 'feel different lately.'
2. He can only move stones in the dark so nobody makes a scene, and he can't move more than one a night. At that pace the hill slides faster than he can fix it. He starts sleeping in the tool shed and losing weight, a man trying to run the wrong way up a slow avalanche.
3. The bottom row of graves has pushed under the fence into the Ardoin vineyard. The old vines there now grow among split coffins, and the wine has become famous: critics call it 'mineral, almost mournful.' Old Ardoin starts slipping him envelopes of cash to stop resetting stones and let the hill keep coming.
4. The town council schedules a vote to sink concrete piles and stop the slope for good. That would save the cemetery and kill the vineyard. Everyone assumes the groundskeeper will vote to save his life's work.

💡 A strange, exact job (resetting gravestones to follow a slow landslide) keeps raising the stakes on its own until the man doing it finds that his own grief was misplaced, and the title's pun turns literal: he trades one graveyard shift for another.