He takes a step forward. The sea trembles; the sky trembles; everything in the sky and in the sea trembles. If someday a bird dives toward the surface of the sea, then he will feel the excitement and joy of that dive through the seawater as well.
“You like this?”
“Yes.”
“It’s even more expensive than you think.”
“I know.”
“What I mean is that I don’t have any way for you to bring it with you.”
The man is silent. Far to the north, a part of the sea roils with dark, surging currents. He can no longer think it over. “Then I won’t leave.”
Xiaoyi bites her lips. After a long silence, she opens her mouth and lets out a word soundlessly.
A school of orange lyretails swims between them, obscuring their faces from each other.
When they can see each other again, both are smiling.
Six P.M. Rush hour. A tidal wave of humanity emerges from the subway stations, fills the shops, the roads, the overpasses.
Xiaoyi gets out of the Charade. This is the world of the present. Dusk burns brightly and gently. Pedestrians part around her.
Behind her is her shadow, stretched very long. Together they walk slowly, with great effort.
Xiaoyi lifts her hand to find the dog whistle hanging around her neck, touches it.
They exist. They’ve always existed.
She’s not alone at all.
She does not cry.
CHENG JINGBO
Cheng Jingbo’s fiction has won many accolades, among them the Galaxy (Yinhe) Award and Nebula (Xingyun) Award as well as being selected for various Year’s Best anthologies in Chinese. Unusual among genre writers, she has been published in People’s Literature, perhaps the most prestigious mainstream literary market in China. She lives in Chengdu, China, and works as a children’s book editor.
Cheng’s stories are difficult to classify. They feature multilayered, dreamlike images connected by the logic of metaphor, dense syntax, and evocative, allusive expressions. Leaping from thought to thought, they invite the reader to navigate like a water strider stepping across ripples in a pond. The stories pose a challenge to the reader and the translator alike, but the effort is worth it.
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES
February 16: Through the Door Into Summer
The Snow-No-More birds appeared in the sky, adding to the chaos that enveloped the world.
The fluttering wings that were supposed to signal clear weather scraped across the orange sky like the return of snow-laden billows. Ash white feathers filled the air, drifting down until they fell into the black orbs of my eyes, turning them into snowy globes.
On the sixteenth of February, I was born on the road to light, a refugee. My ebony eyes were luminous and vivid, but no one came to kiss my forehead. All around, people sighed heavily. I lifted my head and saw the ash white flock heading southward, their cries as dense as their light-stealing wings.
To the south was the Door Into Summer, built from floating asteroids like a road to heaven.
The giant star that lit the way for the refugees gradually dimmed, the shadow crawling up everyone’s face. After the briefest experience of daylight, I saw the first twilight of my life: my mother’s image bloomed in the dim glow like a secret flower.
Mankind streamed across the river of time, aiming straight for the Door Into Summer. In that moment, our tiny planet was falling like a single drop of dew in a boundless universe, tumbling toward that plane made up of the broken remains of a planet.
New cries arose from the Snow-No-More birds. Gliding through the gravity-torn clouds, the soft, gentle creatures were suddenly seized by some unknown force. Alarmed, the flock wound through the sky like a giant electric eel, each individual bird a scale. They hovered near one another, their wingtips brushing from time to time with delicate snaps. The snaps quickly grew louder and denser—the birds drew closer together to resist the unknown force that threatened to divert them, and electric sparks generated by the friction of the wings hopped from wingtip to wingtip. A great, invisible hand wrapped its fingers around the throat of the flock, and the ash white electric eel in the sky began to tremble, its entire body enshrouded by a blue flame.
And in a moment, the invisible force that had been pulling them higher into the sky dissipated. The eel writhed in its death throes among the clouds, the feathers shed by struggling birds falling like volcanic ash. Soon the feathery snow descended over us. It slid in through gaps around the oxhide flaps, fell mothlike against the greasy glass of the gas lamps, floated in clumps over the dirty water in copper basins, caught in my eyebrows and the corners of my eyes.
The oxcart rolled forward slowly. My mother began to sing in the midst of this snowstorm of ash and sorrow. Gradually, I fell asleep, listening to her lovely voice. But her eyes were filled with the sights from outside the cart: in the suffocating, fiery air, tens of thousands of oxcarts headed in the same direction. The remnants of humanity flooded across the hills and plains. The farther she looked, the more oxcarts she saw—each like the one we were in.
An old man rushed before our cart and knelt down. “The star is about to go out.”
Even before he had spoken, my mother already knew about the star. Even before he had opened his lips, her eyes had already sunk into gloom. Since the oxen’s eyes were covered by black cloth, the animals showed no signs of panic. But as the darkness fell, they felt the strange chill.
Rising clouds of dust drowned out the old man’s words, just like the endless night drowned out my mother’s beautiful, bottomless eyes.
He had failed to notice the spiked wheels of the oxcart. Blood soaked into earth, a dark stain melting into the night. In my sleep, I felt the oxcart lurch momentarily, as though something had caught against its wheels. And then it rolled on as though nothing had happened.
My mother continued to sing. In her song, the white-bearded High Priest died on the way to see the Queen—because the news he was bringing was ill.
After that day, I never saw a Snow-No-More bird again.
Legend has it that on the day I was born, my small planet passed through the Door Into Summer. All the Snow-No-More birds died outside the door. Though they were birds of spring, when they died, it snowed: every flake was an ash white feather; every flake was limned in pale blue fire.
On the day the Snow-No-More birds disappeared in the southern sky, we penetrated a wall made of 1,301 asteroids and exited the Garden of Death through the Door Into Summer.
February 19: Curtain Call for the Crimson Universe
People called me Rosamund because they said I’m the rose of the world.
I thought the world was a fading rose. The cooling universe was filled with ancient stars like our sun—they collapsed, lost heat, aged, contracted into infinitesimal versions of themselves and stopped giving us light. Now, with shrunken bodies and failing sight, they could only offer us a useless prayer as they watched us flee at the edge of night.
A thousand years ago, nine priests secretly debated among themselves around a circular table and probed the will of the gods for the answer to one question: why had the stars suddenly decided to grow old and die?
In the end, because the priests could not answer the question satisfactorily, the king punished them by taking their heads.
But one of them, the most powerful priest of them all, managed to survive. He lived because he had two faces, the second one hidden by his long, thick hair, and no one ever knew of its existence. If one gathered enough courage to pull aside the curtain of snakelike hair, one would see tightly pursed lips and wide-open eyes. When the king demanded that the priests yield up their heads, this priest split apart his own head with a double-edged sword and gave up the front half. Thereafter he became a wanderer far from home, and lived only with the secret half of his head.