The First Fallen Leaf
On the day of the Autumn Equinox, day and night were equal. Wu Yu had not slept all night. She packed her luggage bag and, according to the original plan, went downstairs. She made her way through the aisles between the shelves, tiptoeing until she stopped in front of the cash register. She took out all the paper bills inside, rolled them up, and tucked them into the inner pocket of her luggage bag.
Just as she was about to push the drawer shut, she paused. Then she pulled it open again, casually picked out a one-yuan coin, and left without looking back.
The rolling shutter door was too loud, so Wu Yu took the back way. Her home was at the entrance of the village, not quite in the center of Guhe Town. A main road lay in front, while farmland bordered the back. The dew was heavy in late autumn, and the earth was inevitably muddy and slippery. Wu Yu paid it no mind. Stepping across the vegetable fields, green and glossy like oiled paper, she breathed deeply and, beneath the night sky, swung the luggage bag up onto her right shoulder with abandon.
It was still early. Gray haze had spread everywhere, and the world remained shrouded in gloom. Cool air rushed against her face, mingled with the sweet, cloying fragrance of osmanthus blossoms.
Along the way to the station, aside from the occasional two or three elderly people heading down to the fields, some carrying shoulder poles and others carrying hoes, she saw no one else.
Wu Yu wore a mask. No one could recognize her.
She boarded the earliest bus. There were still plenty of empty seats, and with no one beside her, she placed the luggage bag there. Taking out her phone, she deftly swapped the SIM cards, then pushed open the bus window and tossed the old card into the roaring wind.
Like a white moth set free, it stumbled and scraped past the blurred window before quickly disappearing from sight.
Wu Yu did not pull her hand back.
The bus was moving fast, carrying the wind until it became something solid in her hand, as though it were a water balloon she could squeeze. But when she actually curled her fingers, all she grasped was a handful of nothingness.
She repeated the motion again and again, until the old man in the seat ahead found the wind too noisy and turned around to glare at her. Only then did Wu Yu smile, lean back against the seat, and let the bus return to silence.
When she opened her eyes again, the sky was already bright. The scenery outside the window had taken on the colors of oil paint. Green mountains stretched into the distance, while the rice fields along the way rolled like golden waves. Great white cumulus clouds, like collapsed glaciers of snow, churned and followed the bus in pursuit.
Wu Yu spent nearly the entire day rooted inside the bus, getting off only during rest stops to smoke and relieve herself.
One bus after another changed shifts, and wave after wave of passengers came and went. Finally, she got off several hundred kilometers away, in Lianzhou. The mountains and terrain here were utterly different from her hometown. A mountain was simply a mountain, covered in lush green wherever the eye fell. There were not so many traces of people making a living, no endless terraced fields like layers of ropes binding and suffocating the land. The evening sunlight poured down like reddish water, flooding the mountains and wilderness until, at last, it solidified there.
Wu Yu was frozen inside it too. After sitting on the bus all day, her legs were so stiff and numb that she could barely feel them. She did not hurry up the mountain. Instead, she first stopped to rest in the village at its foot.
The village was called Suixiu. It was small and remote. The houses were typical Huizhou-style architecture, white walls and dark gray roof tiles, but they were not new. The brick roads were pitted and uneven, neglected for years. Everywhere were signs of age, mottling, and a lack of upkeep.
Wu Yu picked a guesthouse whose name looked pleasing to her.
The sign read [Sister Lin's Guesthouse]. A curtain of peach-wood beads hung across the entrance. Once she lifted it, the first thing she saw was a fish tank, separating the front hall from the dining tables.
Perhaps the owner was simply lax about such things. The fish tank looked as though its water was rarely changed. A thin layer of damp moss had already coated the inside walls, and through the murky gray-green water, several red carp could vaguely be seen.
Seeing how empty the place was, Wu Yu called out twice. Only then did someone answer from the adjoining room. A middle-aged woman with a messy bun came out. She was presumably Sister Lin. Yawning, she asked sleepily, “What is it?”
Wu Yu gestured behind her. “I saw the sign on the door said it was a guesthouse.”
The woman paused for a moment, then understood. “Oh. Wait a second.”
As she spoke, she redid her hair, bent down, and took a key from the drawer behind the front desk.
“Second room on the left upstairs.”
Wu Yu took it. “You’re not going to check?”
The woman looked up. “Check what?”
Then she realized. “Your ID card?”
Wu Yu nodded.
The woman smiled. “We hardly get anyone staying here all year. What’s there to check? You’re just a young girl. What could there be to check? Go on upstairs.”
Wu Yu did not say how many days she would be staying, and the woman did not ask.
After paying the deposit, Wu Yu asked what time the shop next door closed.
“Around seven or eight.”
At seven or eight, there was indeed no one left outside. Even the dim streetlights seemed somewhat extravagant. Wu Yu quickly put her things away, shook the last cigarette from the pack, and finished smoking it by the window.
A scarlet point glowed within the window frame, flickering on and off. Across from her stood the mountain, its ridges rising and sinking beneath the night. The moon hung high, occasionally disappearing behind a veil of clouds, like a fragile jade jue, polished until it was translucent and thin.
Hearing the familiar sound of a rolling shutter door below, Wu Yu stretched up and leaned out to take a look. The small supermarket next door was closing for the night. She waved and called loudly, “Hey!”
The blond-haired young man pulling down the door looked up at the sound. “What?”
“I want to buy something.”
The blond-haired man waved her over, telling her to hurry.
Before going downstairs, Wu Yu pressed out her cigarette and wedged it horizontally into the track of the screen window, leaving a narrow gap for the night wind. The mountain air was heavy with dampness. Bamboo groves swayed, their rustling sounds reaching her ears like an invisible drizzle, completely covering the sound of her footsteps.
The blond-haired man had a face that suggested limited patience, thin and sharp. He could not be bothered to raise the shutter again, so Wu Yu bent down and slipped into the shop, casually picking out two cups of instant noodles and some bottled water.
“Get me a few packs of cigarettes.” She walked back toward the doorway.
The blond-haired man glanced at her and followed her into the shop. “What do you want?”
Wu Yu said, “Whatever. Anything is fine.”
“That’s way too casual.” The blond-haired man took out several moderately priced options from behind the counter and lined them up across the surface. “Which one?”
“All of them.” Wu Yu found the WeChat QR code at the side. “Ring them all up together.”
She came out carrying the plastic bag. Behind her came a loud clatter as the blond-haired man locked the door.
He quickly overtook her, while Wu Yu’s wandering gaze drifted toward his back.
Her gaze was quickly cut off.
Someone was actually sitting on the left side of the small shop’s doorstep.
She had come over in a hurry, and with the sky already dark, she had not noticed him before. Now, however, she could no longer ignore him. He was a man wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt. His shoulders were broad and level. Because his head was lowered, the shadow cast by his all-black baseball cap nearly covered his entire face, making his brows, eyes, and features impossible to see clearly. Only the sharp, straight ridge of his nose was faintly visible.
He sat with his legs bent, his upper body hunched forward, utterly motionless. He was on the thin side, too, and the outline of his spine was plainly visible beneath his clothes.
The wind had died down all around them. Everything was quiet, and his silence gave him an almost unreal quality, as though he were both real and illusory.
Wu Yu assumed he was with the blond-haired man, one of the people who worked at the shop.
Yet the blond-haired man acted as though he were invisible, striding quickly past him, mounting his electric scooter, and speeding away.
Could she have seen a ghost?
The bizarre thought welled up, and a chill crept down Wu Yu’s back. She quickened her pace and returned to the guesthouse.
That night, Wu Yu did not sleep peacefully. When she awoke from her nightmare for the third time, she rolled out of bed and went to the window.
The man was actually still sitting there. His appearance remained impossible to make out clearly, but his posture had changed somewhat. He had both hands braced behind him, his face tilted upward as he gazed at the sky. He had not moved for a long time, like a hibernating beast rooted to this place, perhaps punished, perhaps cursed, but in any case unable to leave easily.
At this hour, the clouds had parted and the mist dispersed, and the moon was dazzlingly bright.
Yet he seemed to be covered in frost and snow.
With the slightest tap, he would shatter into powder scattered across the ground.
The longer Wu Yu looked.
The more she felt the cold seep into her bones.
Wu Yu shuddered violently, lowered her folded arms, flicked the cigarette butt wedged in the window out into the night, then shut the window and drew the curtains, no longer allowing even a sliver of wind to enter.
—
Wu Yu never fell asleep again. Her thoughts drifted and swayed until dawn, her mind occupied by the strange man outside. Obviously, the mountain ghost was nothing more than a product of superstition and mischief, but he did not look like an ordinary vagrant either. After all, everything about him, from his collar to his trouser legs, was clean and presentable. When sounds gradually began to stir downstairs, Wu Yu took out the coin from her luggage and used heads or tails to make her decision. In the end, she went behind the window to confirm that the man was still in the same place, then quickly washed up, pulled on her clothes, and went downstairs.
When she visited the small supermarket again, the blond-haired man was chewing gum and playing a mobile game, completely absorbed.
She rapped twice on the glass counter with the back of her finger.
The blond-haired man remembered Wu Yu’s face. He lifted and lowered his eyelids, then grinned teasingly. “Beauty, you didn’t already finish your cigarettes, did you?”
Wu Yu did not answer. She only asked, “Who is the person outside your shop?”
“How would I know?” The blond-haired man snorted. “He’s been sitting there since yesterday afternoon. He doesn’t even respond when you talk to him.”
Wu Yu arched an eyebrow. “You’re just not going to do anything?”
The blond-haired man was completely unfazed. “If he gets hungry, he’ll leave on his own.”
At that, Wu Yu fell silent in thought for a moment before asking whether the shop had a certain item.
The blond-haired man looked up in confusion. “Huh?” He then glanced around the shop. “You want that thing this early in the morning?”
Wu Yu shifted her eyes to the side, too lazy to interpret the ill intentions on his face. “Just tell me whether you have it.”
After leaving the small supermarket, Wu Yu tucked both hands into the pockets of her hoodie and unhurriedly walked over to the “statue” that had occupied her thoughts all night.
She extended her right hand and slapped the box she was holding onto the ground.
She had controlled her strength perfectly. The silver-blue square box landed squarely against the toe of his shoe. The Durex logo showed through the plastic wrapping, strikingly conspicuous.
The man had obviously seen it. The fingers hanging beside his knee moved. It was an almost twitching movement, like an old, rusted mechanism being forcibly wrenched once. Subtle, sensitive, fleeting.
Wu Yu’s gaze shifted to his baseball cap. “Do you have nowhere to go?”
The mountain wind lifted her hair, and she casually tucked it behind her ear.
At the same time, the man in front of her raised his head.
Beneath the brim of his cap was a pair of extraordinarily bright eyes. Their owner was far younger than she had imagined, his face somewhere between that of a boy and a grown man, with prominent brow bones and a strikingly well-defined nose bridge. There was a wealth of emotion in the depths of his eyes too: undisguised disgust, tempered with some confusion, some irritation, and the fragile, exhausted red of bloodshot eyes. All of it gathered above a palette of expression far beyond anything she had expected.
A voice inside Wu Yu reminded her that she liked this face. She liked these signs of resistance.
The young man lowered his head.
He ignored her, so from her higher position, she continued talking to herself. “Did you see the thing on the ground?”
The young man remained silent.
Wu Yu waited quietly for quite some time, but did not receive even half a response. She was not annoyed. Instead, she gave an exceedingly faint smile. “I’m staying at the guesthouse next door.”
“Once you’ve thought it through, pick it up and come find me.”
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