Fragment: Four Hundred and Twelve Bones Rubbing Against One Another
Location: Beijing

Time：Summer 2020 

 

Beijing.

The south bank of Houhai.

 

I could not hear their words.

What I heard instead was the sound of four hundred and twelve bones rubbing together inside two human skeletons.

 

The boy was young.

His skin was pale.

Leaning against the trunk of a tree, he released small sounds from his throat, not unlike the cries of a bird.

 

The woman pressing against him wore a pale green cotton dress.

Her hair, streaked with gray and white, looked dyed.

From behind, she appeared at least forty years older than the boy.

Her hands moved across his body.

One thigh pressed firmly against him.

She swayed her waist and hips with measured rhythm, like a model pacing the length of a runway.

 

Two black N95 masks lay beside the boy's shoes.

 

People passed by.

Their faces were hidden behind masks.

Their pulses were not.

Neither were the hormones turning in their blood.

 

Unlike most people, I had spent my life listening to the body.

The shifting of joints.

The celebrations of organs.

The slow, viscous movement of glands.

The disordered pulses running through blood vessels.

 

In a previous life, I had been a crow.

It left its hearing behind.

It planted that hearing in me.

Dusk settled over the lake.

 

The woman continued her slow movements.

Little by little, she began to resemble my childhood neighbor, Granny Yang.

The tremor that escaped her lips reached across fifty years and pulled me backward.

 

A flock of crows arrived.

Each calling to the next.

Like old wanderers meeting on a distant road, they greeted the crow that still lived within my blood.

 

One of them swooped down.

It dropped a black hairpin at my feet.

Five centimeters long.

 

The sound of it striking the stone pavement was like an electrified needle.

With a single touch, it pierced a memory long sealed away.

 

A few minutes later, I found myself standing in Pocket Alley.

The hairpin remained clenched in my hand.

The courtyard was still there.

 

Fifty years had passed.

The doorway seemed lower than I remembered.

I stepped beneath it and discovered I could no longer straighten my back.

I found it difficult to imagine how Father had passed through that doorway again and again.

 

The smell of damp wood remained.

The moss carried a faint scent of water and earth.

I reached out and placed my hand on the old wooden door.

I did not push hard.

It was locked from within.

No sound came from the courtyard.

My hand stayed there.

 

For a while.

Then I withdrew it.

Turned away.

Left the alley.

 

Before I had fully settled into the back seat of the Lexus, I said to the driver:

 

"Renmin University."