71 posts tagged with "Fiction"

The old library in the east end of the city had seen some years. Its dusty grey brick walls and tall windows exuded a quietness, but also a stubborn sense of being out of step with the times. Most people who came here were familiar faces: retired old gentlemen and ladies seeking a quiet spot to read the newspaper; students preparing for exams, hunkered down all day; and idlers like me, with nowhere else to go, who came here pretending to still be seeking knowledge, but really just killing time, staring blankly at the old locust tree outside the window.

At seventeen minutes past two in the morning, I was still awake. The rain outside wasn't heavy, but persistent enough, like a rambling old woman, endlessly repeating some long-forgotten complaint. On the radio, Billie Holiday was singing a song about loss, her voice like frosted glass, rough, yet radiating a peculiar light. I was on the sofa, holding a glass of whiskey on the rocks that had long gone cold. The ice had completely melted, leaving only a thin, amber liquid that tasted like a metaphor for some kind of failed life.

Wang Cuifen's legs had always been straight.

Six seventeen in the morning. The alarm hadn't gone off yet, but I was awake. Outside the window, the sky was a thin, washed-out blue-gray, like something laundered too many times, carrying a hint of hungover fatigue. This city is always like that, waking up reluctantly. It seemed my body housed its own alarm clock, more precise and more stubborn than the mechanical thing on the bedside table.

He, let us call him K, or more precisely, Archivist G/T 718, couldn't recall when he began working in the archives of the General Administration of Customs, a place as vast as the Library of Babel. The days were like impressions made repeatedly with the same stamp, blurred and identical. His duty was to receive, classify, and file the announcements concerning tariff adjustments that arrived like snowflakes from every corner of the world. These announcements, initially scattered whispers, gradually gathered into a clamorous torrent, eventually crescendoing into a continuous, deafening roar.

That afternoon, like any other afternoon, was unremarkable, perhaps even a bit tedious. Faint motes of dust floated in the air, along with the hesitant warmth of impending early summer. I had just finished a rather uninteresting translation job and was walking home, headphones on, listening to Bill Evans's "Waltz for Debby." As I passed the Mixue Bingcheng on the corner, a sense of wrongness, like a small pebble dropped precisely into the calm surface of my consciousness, made itself felt.

K first noticed the fridge magnet on the partition of his colleague Wang's office cubicle. It was a brightly colored, slightly clumsy-looking cartoon character, grinning an overly brilliant smile, with a nonsensical motivational phrase printed beside it, something like "Keep it up today, duck!" or similar. K only glanced at it at the time, feeling rather indifferent, even thinking such things were childish. The office cubicle was already cramped; sticking something like this on it made it seem even more crowded, almost... desperate. A kind of futile desperation, trying to combat monotonous reality with cheap colors and slogans.

When Wang Jianguo received the water bill, he initially thought it was a misprinted joke. On the off-white paper, in neat standard font, a string of numbers was clearly printed: 39,390 yuan. The payment deadline was next Wednesday. He read it three times, then checked his phone calendar again. Yes, it had only been eighteen days since they moved into this new home, into which they had poured half a lifetime's savings.

Lixiang, much like the nearly withered jasmine on her windowsill, was an inconspicuous speck of green in this concrete jungle. She worked as a clerk in a medium-sized trading company, her days filled with typing, photocopying, and making tea that was never quite hot enough for the boss. Life felt like a rusty conveyor belt, carrying her from sunrise to sunset. Her only hope, her only thing to look forward to, was Liang Yu.

Old Zhou felt he was living like a potted plant. Not the meticulously pruned, zen-like kind, but one simply stuck in soil, placed on a windowsill, given a bit of water regularly, and nothing more. The "soil" was the Sunshine Nursing Home, the "water" was the three daily meals of mush, pills, and the occasional smile from a caregiver. Outside the windowsill was, theoretically, the world. But separated by a layer of smudged glass and a gleaming stainless steel railing, that world became like a landscape painting on TV – distant and unreal.

The railings were installed uniformly last year, supposedly for safety. The director spent an hour spitting saliva at the all-residents meeting, the main theme being: this thing will prevent you from falling. Old Zhou, dozing off below, thought, falling? From this third-floor height, not too high, not too low, falling would most likely just mean breaking a few bones, then lying in bed, becoming an even more standard potted plant. What really irked him was that the gleaming railing, like prison bars, constantly reminded him: you are penned in.