The Sixteenth Fallen Leaf
Wu Yu had not kept close count of the days, but there was a countdown app on her phone. When she had first made up her mind to run away from home, she had already decided that if, after one hundred days, neither her family nor the police had found her and brought her back, she would leave that damnable place, Qianzhou, forever, that gloomy, dark home of hers that was like a swamp and a prison.
Before going to bed, she opened the app and subtracted another day, only to realize that today was already the seventh day since she had met Ji Shiqiu.
A week.
A surge of overwhelming crisis rose within her. While Ji Shiqiu was fast asleep, Wu Yu opened once again the Weibo notice she had saved.
For the past two or three days, whenever Ji Shiqiu was busy downstairs, she would repeatedly refresh similar posts, keeping up with the police's latest developments.
There was not much new content in the comments section.
The internet was like this. Every round of trending searches was like a free music festival. After the brief revelry, everyone scattered like birds and beasts, leaving behind nothing but a mess.
Wu Yu felt that she was the person left behind to pick up the garbage.
She kept returning to the “original spot” and conducting a carpet search, but could no longer obtain any useful information.
Wu Yu fell into confusion.
But there was one thing she was very clear about. Since she had already decided to become Ji Shiqiu's accomplice, she had to prepare for a longer-term escape.
She concealed it well, making sure the other person noticed nothing, and did everything she could to prevent him from going outside.
She had not lied, either. In Wu Yu's eyes, Ji Shiqiu was simply Ji Shiqiu, nothing more.
Wu Yu had committed no actual crime, but in essence, she was no different from Ji Shiqiu.
She too was someone who did not consider the future, drifting along, muddling through, half-dead and half-alive, passive yet violent.
But fortunately, she had not been hunted down. She had money and free time, and could help prolong the time before his misfortune arrived.
She knew that they did not have many days left to remain in Suixiu.
She believed Ji Shiqiu knew it too, but he did not reveal the slightest hint of it. He ate when it was time to eat and slept when it was time to sleep, like any person earnestly living their life or enjoying a trip, in a secluded paradise known to few.
Wu Yu felt that he was waiting, waiting for the long night to truly descend.
But she could not simply sit and wait for death.
As for that sword of Damocles, she did not mind whether it would also come crashing down upon her own neck.
Everything came at a price.
Paying for one's choices was the law of the universe. Holding on to this thought, Wu Yu quietly began the first step of her relocation plan.
Taking advantage of trips to the convenience store to replenish her cigarettes, she would buy a suitable amount of bread, cup noodles, and drinking water, accumulating them little by little. That way, when the time came to truly run, she could avoid many troubles.
Huang Mao had noticed that she had been coming by frequently these days, and was quite surprised.
“Beautiful girl, I thought you went home.”
Wu Yu said, “I'm getting ready to leave.”
Huang Mao counted the money and teased her, “Can't bear to leave our place? Feeling down, so even your smoking addiction's gotten worse?”
Wu Yu tapped the cigarette box against the counter. She did not deny it.
“A little.”
Just as she was about to put a cigarette between her lips and walk out, Wu Yu heard some movement outside. It was the voices of two middle-aged men, muttering and discussing something.
“This spot, this spot.”
“Should we put it a little higher?”
“I think facing outward would be better. That way, we'll be able to see everyone coming and going.”
Wu Yu focused her attention and saw two men who looked like village officials. One was balding, the other wore glasses. Both were potbellied and not particularly tall. They were standing behind a utility pole not far from the shop entrance, putting up something, all the while chattering without pause.
Wu Yu lowered her head and shielded the flame as she lit her cigarette. She took two steps forward, wanting to see clearly what exactly they were messing around with.
Wu Yu did not go any farther.
Her head went blank with a buzz, as though she had fallen into an icy cellar.
Even though she could not make out the information and photographs in black characters on a white background, she could guess the contents in a single second.
After all, she could practically recite the entire thing by heart.
The first thing Wu Yu did was look toward the blonde-haired man behind the shop counter. Fortunately, he was completely absorbed in his game and had no time to gossip about what was happening here.
Wu Yu pretended to play with her phone, tapping her toes. It was only when cigarette ash fell onto the screen that she realized she had forgotten to take a drag for quite some time.
From the corner of her eye, she waited until the two men had ridden their electric scooters away in opposite directions. She looked around, checked several times to confirm that there was no one nearby and no cameras, then hurried over to the cement-gray utility pole.
It was plastered with a jumble of filthy little “dog-skin-plaster” advertisements, but the most conspicuous and newest one was Ji Shiqiu's wanted reward notice.
Without thinking, she tore it down.
The paper had only just been pasted up with paste and had not yet dried, so when it came into Wu Yu's hands, it was still completely intact.
Wu Yu folded it twice, tucked it into the pocket of her cardigan, then hurried toward the main road leading out of the village.
She kept walking, kept walking, facing the biting afternoon wind. On either side were fertile rice paddies. Where she was going, she did not know. She only knew that she had to go as far away as possible. She could not let more people in the village see this notice.
She turned onto the narrow field ridge and continued walking.
The soles of her shoes were thin, and the gravel began to hurt the bottoms of her feet. Wu Yu felt it, but she could not stop, not until she saw a large stretch of gray-green reeds surrounding a fishpond.
The ground beside the pond was wet. Wu Yu slid down the earthen slope, one foot sinking deeper than the other, and came to a timely stop at the bank, without letting the toes of her shoes disappear into the surging river water.
The countryside was empty in every direction, not a soul in sight.
Wu Yu still crouched down warily, using the wall of reeds as cover. She took out the notice. Afraid that the half-dried paste would cause it to stick together, she carefully flattened it out.
Perhaps the weather was poor, the light dim, or perhaps it was the change of background color. The boy in the photograph looked even paler and more detached. Aside from the fearlessness he had shown before, there was now something almost indifferent about his face.
Wu Yu stared at it for a while.
She took out her lighter, snapped open the lid, and set fire to the upper-right corner of the paper. The flickering scarlet spread outward, the flames leaping. Just as the fire was about to reach the edge of the boy's photograph, Wu Yu suddenly seemed to awaken from a dream and plunged it into the river water beside her feet.
She had meant to destroy it, but for some reason, she could not stand by and watch him burn to nothing. It was ominous, and too cruel.
The fire went out instantly, and black smoke drifted and curled upward.
When she took out what little remained of the paper, the image of the person on it was soaked through as well. The paper was astonishingly poor in quality. After being subjected to both water and fire, it fell apart at the slightest movement, sticking into a soggy mess. The eyes were no longer eyes, the nose no longer a nose, and the original features could no longer be made out.
Wu Yu's eyes reddened and grew wet in the wind. She drew a deep breath through her aching nose and turned her face away, as though she had solidified there, not moving a muscle.
After a long while, she viciously crumpled the wet paper into a ball. She stood up and, with all her strength, hurled it into the pond.
Silver ripples spread across the water in an instant, then quickly settled back to normal.
—
After returning to the village by the same route, Wu Yu did not hurry back to the inn. Instead, she went farther afield and walked around for a while. All the shops, all the utility poles, every wall within sight, she left nothing unchecked.
It was nearing evening. Every household had returned home to cook, leaving only the chilly slanting sunlight on the brick-paved roads, along with lingering cats and stray dogs.
Wu Yu had never felt so desperate.
The notices had been posted far more densely than she had expected. They could be seen everywhere.
She did not know how the police had managed to trace things to here, or perhaps they had followed some clue and launched a radiating, village-by-village search throughout the surrounding area.
There was simply no way to tear them all down. And if she removed too many, it would only draw attention.
Wu Yu looked back over the places she and Ji Shiqiu had visited these past few days, the people they had seen. Along the way, the sound of the wind, the sound of breathing, the noise of stir-frying, the beating of egrets' wings, all seemed magnified countless times, pressing in on her senses from every direction.
Wu Yu felt a dull ache at her temples.
In the end, before returning home, she deleted the only photograph of the notice from her phone.
It was as though the world had finally grown quiet, and clean, too.
The door to Sister Lin's inn was half-shut, and there was no smell of food.
Wu Yu immediately became uneasy. She hurried a few steps inside, only to discover that there was no one there. Upstairs and downstairs, nowhere.
An unknown panic, like a black vine, began growing wildly from the soles of her feet, wrapping her entire body in its coils. Nearly suffocating, Wu Yu ran around the front and back of the house, but saw no sign of Ji Shiqiu or Sister Lin.
She did not dare ask the neighbors, afraid of revealing something.
So she turned back toward the depths of the village and searched without overlooking a single corner. When she found no one among the residences, she widened her search and went farther out into the fields.
Countless ominous thoughts lingered in her mind, and her stomach had begun to cramp. Suddenly, she remembered Old Zheng, Sister Lin's lover.
She asked an old man sitting outside his house, drinking with salted peanuts as a snack, where the “Mr. Zheng who used to teach music” lived. Fortunately, the village was small, and everyone was constantly crossing paths with everyone else. There were only a few people of any standing, and Old Zheng was one of them. The old man quickly pointed her in the right direction.
Wu Yu ran there without hesitation.
Sure enough, in the fields behind Old Zheng's house, she saw Ji Shiqiu and Sister Lin.
The boy was helping pick sweet potatoes. The setting sun gilded half his body in golden red. He looked so bright, so vivid, and yet so fragile, as though he would be swallowed up by the night.
The fine veins at Wu Yu's temples stood out. She walked straight toward him.
Ji Shiqiu noticed her too. He slowly straightened, just about to smile and wave at her, when the woman had already grabbed the sweet potatoes piled at the edge of the field and, with all her strength, hurled them at him. As she walked, she cursed, throwing one after another.
“What are you running around for?”
“Did I tell you to run?”
“Is it going to kill you to stay put?”
“If you don't want to have an easy time, then don't make me suffer!”
……
Ji Shiqiu had initially raised his hands in confusion to dodge a couple of them, but the moment her words left her mouth, the vivid expression on his face dimmed.
Ji Shiqiu did not move again.
The last sweet potato, thrown from close range, struck him squarely on the left cheek.
The force was enough to make his head turn slightly away. The pain spread across his face, but Ji Shiqiu did not raise a hand to cover it. He did not move at all.
Sister Lin stood stupidly not far away, unable to understand what was happening, even less able to react.
Wu Yu stepped into the mud and crossed through the clusters of sweet potato leaves, walking quickly until she reached Ji Shiqiu.
She looked up at him. Her lips trembled uncontrollably, and all she could do was bite them tightly shut.
The boy's eyes were also shining sharply as they fixed on her.
They resonated with each other, at the same frequency as her trembling lips.
Wu Yu wanted to ask him, Does it hurt?
But she could not get the words out.
She only noticed that some flecks of mud had been left around his cheekbone, starkly conspicuous against his clean face.
She raised her hand and tried to wipe them away, but no matter how she rubbed, she could not clean them off. Instead, the dirty area only grew larger.
The motion of caressing turned into an urgent scrubbing.
Wu Yu's tears fell like a sudden rainstorm.
At a loss, she pulled up her sleeve, wanting to use another way to clean him.
But Ji Shiqiu, as though suddenly waking up, caught her wrist, gripped it tightly, and pulled her away from the sweet-potato field where dusk was about to descend.
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