The Tenth Fallen Leaf
Until it was over, they never kissed. Sometimes emotions surged too quickly, making the foreplay seem superfluous. The bedsheet looked as though a sudden, chaotic summer rain had fallen upon it, water marks scattered everywhere.
It was raining in the bathroom too. It was Ji Shiqiu taking a shower. When he came out, the young man had wet hair plastered over his head. He did not return to the bed, but opened the window and let the natural breeze dry his hair.
Wu Yu propped herself up and looked at him. “How does it feel?”
Ji Shiqiu shot her a sidelong glance. “How does what feel?”
Wu Yu asked, “Don’t you want to hear my evaluation?”
His bangs rustled softly in the mountain wind. “You already gave it.”
Just now on the bed, Wu Yu had not said a word. Nothing more than some sounds escaping her that were difficult to listen to. But since Ji Shiqiu was making fun of her like this, of course she had to bite back.
“What did I evaluate?”
Ji Shiqiu was a man of few words, and even less inclined to dwell on this sort of thing, so he said nothing. He rubbed his hair, which was no longer dripping, and pulled on his clothes.
“Let’s go downstairs to eat.”
There was an unfamiliar man at Sister Lin’s dinner table. By way of introduction, he was a widower from the village. He had previously been a music teacher at a middle school in the county seat, but later injured his leg in a car accident and was left with a chronic condition that made traveling inconvenient. He retired and stayed home before he was even forty-five, entering ahead of schedule into the leisurely life of farming and retirement.
Sister Lin affectionately called him “Old Zheng.”
Wu Yu accepted the dinner Sister Lin had served her, then made faces at him with exaggerated winks and expressions until even the old man’s face and ears turned red.
Sister Lin raised the rice scoop as though she meant to hit her. “What kind of behavior is that? Are you the only one allowed to have a man?”
Wu Yu was still smiling. She asked Old Zheng, “You teach music. What can you play?”
“Piano, harmonica, all of it.” Old Zheng pulled a silver harmonica from his trouser pocket and looked up at Sister Lin. “I happened to bring it today. She said she wanted to hear some songs.”
Sister Lin immediately lowered her face.
Wu Yu rested her chin on her hand. “Can we listen together after we eat?”
“Of course.”
Sister Lin went over to the boiler, took out a plate of freshly baked black-sesame-filled pastries, and brought it over.
“Mid-Autumn Festival is almost here. I made some mooncakes. Take some if you want.”
Then she called to Ji Shiqiu, “Xiao Qiu, eat more. You’ve been climbing the mountain for so long, and you still had to carry someone. You need to replenish your strength.”
Wu Yu gave him a sidelong look, her attitude casual. “His stamina is excellent. It never runs out, never gets used up.”
Sister Lin and Old Zheng both froze, then fell silent at the exact same moment.
And Ji Shiqiu, who had been eating with his head down the entire time without joining the conversation, finally raised his eyes. This glance was rather rare. It could actually be described as a glare, and it also brought a little more vitality to the gloomy face he had habitually worn ever since she had met him.
“Eat, eat,” Sister Lin said amiably as she took her seat.
After dinner, Old Zheng deliberately rinsed his mouth before sitting down on the steps at the entrance and formally beginning his harmonica performance. Sister Lin specifically requested The Moon Represents My Heart, and he had practiced it at home for two days in advance. The familiar, fluid melody emerged from between the man’s lips and teeth, drifting through the quiet little courtyard.
The bright moon hung high overhead, turning the rippling grass into a snowy field.
Sister Lin leaned against him and softly sang along:
“You ask me how deeply I love you”
“How much I love you”
“My feelings are true, my love is true”
“The moon represents my heart”
Wu Yu sat one step lower than the two of them. After listening attentively for a while, she took out her phone on a whim, wanting to record the two of them as a keepsake. Sister Lin was embarrassed and repeatedly waved her off, saying no, but Wu Yu refused to give in, and the two middle-aged people eventually allowed it. Later, when the song reached its most heartfelt part, Wu Yu began humming along too.
Two female voices, different in thickness, rising and falling at different pitches, wove together into an unexpectedly beautiful harmony.
When the song ended, Wu Yu applauded enthusiastically and egged Old Zheng on to play another.
The middle-aged man could not stop smiling. He took an interest in Ji Shiqiu, who had remained silent the entire time, and said to Wu Yu, “What does your boyfriend want to hear?”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
So they were not a young couple who had come into the mountains together to travel and clear their heads. Old Zheng was intrigued.
“Huh? Then what is he?”
Wu Yu raised an eyebrow at the full moon and replied softly, “Who knows?”
She turned to ask Ji Shiqiu, “What are you?”
Ji Shiqiu glanced toward her. In the moonlight, the woman’s eyes were clear and bright as she stared straight at him. In a voice only the two of them could hear, she repeated, “I don’t know either. Do you know? What am I to you?”
Ji Shiqiu’s heartbeat unconsciously quickened.
The gaze directed at him was a kind of pitch-black acid. Under her prolonged stare, there was a faint, corrosive ache in his chest.
He raised his hand, seized her chin, and, as though fiddling with a jointed doll, forcibly turned her face to the other side.
Wu Yu gave a low laugh.
For no reason, the wind of the autumn night felt hot and restless. Ji Shiqiu touched the tip of his nose and discovered that it was already damp with sweat.
Before going to sleep, Wu Yu sat propped against the headboard, playing with her phone and savoring those old songs from years ago.
Ji Shiqiu finished hanging up their washed clothes and trousers to dry, then returned to sit by the table. For a long while, he did not move.
Wu Yu lifted her eyes and noticed that he was looking at that group photograph again.
“Why didn’t you bring your phone when you came out?” she struck up a conversation with him. “Aren’t you bored?”
Ji Shiqiu’s hand, which had been caressing the photograph, stopped. He put it back into the drawer.
Wu Yu asked again, “Why don’t you look at the painting I gave you? Or is it that you’re embarrassed to look at it in front of me?”
Something stirred in Ji Shiqiu’s chest. “There’s nothing worth looking at.”
“There’s nothing worth looking at, yet I didn’t see you throw it away on the road. Anyway, it didn’t cost you a single cent.”
Ji Shiqiu pulled open the drawer again, intending to take it out immediately and throw it out the window, let the wind carry it wherever it pleased. But after a few seconds of inner struggle, he slowly pushed the drawer shut again.
“I’m going to rest.”
He walked back to the bed, intending to reach for the bedside light switch.
Wu Yu stopped his arm. “No.”
Ji Shiqiu pretended not to hear and switched it off anyway. The room instantly became pitch-black. To prevent trouble before it started, Ji Shiqiu even lay down at the other end of the bed, avoiding giving her the opportunity to pester him and make trouble.
In the darkness, the woman fell silent.
Only the phone screen emitted a luminous white glow. After a while, that light too completely disappeared.
A faint sound came from the other end of the bed. Ji Shiqiu listened intently when something with the cool, silken touch of ice suddenly fell onto his elbow, then slid down in front of him. He picked it up and saw that it was a woman’s underwear.
Wu Yu hooked her leg around his.
Blood rushed to Ji Shiqiu’s head. Irritated, he got up, caught her behind the knee, and dragged her back in front of him.
“What are you pretending for?” In the dark, the surroundings were wild and indistinct, their shadows overlapping. Wu Yu clung to his shoulders, her fingernails like sharp teeth as she viciously bit down on the taut muscle of his upper arm. “What are you pretending for?”
Ji Shiqiu did not even know what he was pretending for.
He had never encountered a woman like this, someone who made him want to flee from her, the farther away the better, so that it would be safer for both of them; yet at the same time, he crazily wanted to draw close to her, to destroy her, to possess her.
He could only restrain himself, refusing to kiss her, making everything look as though it were merely the release of lust, as though he had poured into it none of his submission or affection.
Wu Yu noticed it too, and deliberately spoke viciously:
“That’s all you’re capable of.”
She even said:
“Good thing your mother is locked away in the drawer. Otherwise, if she saw her pure and spotless good son doing something like this, I wonder how she’d feel?”
Ji Shiqiu sealed her mouth shut with his hand.
She did not struggle. His palm, however, was as though a kitten had licked it.
Ji Shiqiu withdrew his hand and clenched it into a fist, unable to help leaning down to stop her with his lips. The karmic offense was hers, yet the karmic retribution seemed to fall upon his own head. His entire body burned. Amid the hidden ebb and flow of sin and pleasure, he slowly dismembered himself, and remade himself.
……
The two lay side by side. It was a long while before their clamorous heartbeats finally settled.
The moon rose higher, shining in through the window and laying a clean white tile of light across Ji Shiqiu’s left chest.
Wu Yu traced the edges of that patch of light with her hand, and began humming the melody that had been interrupted not long before.
Her nasal hum was so soft and low that Ji Shiqiu had to hold his breath to make out that it was the first song Old Zheng had played on the harmonica today.
Wu Yu found Ji Shiqiu’s eyes. “Do you know why the moon can represent the heart?”
Without waiting for him to answer, her voice soft and loose, she spoke unhurriedly:
“It’s fundamentally not because of how true and how deep the song says it is, but because it disappears, and it belongs to no one. It isn’t even so perfectly round every day. To give your heart away is to agree to experience an adventure of waxing and waning, of clear skies and cloudy days.”
Ji Shiqiu stared at her.
The woman seemed to be reciting an incantation, a spell that made a person feel light and yet tense.
She gently stroked his cheek and asked:
“Xiao Qiu, do you want to take a risk?”
No comments:
Post a Comment