The train roared, crushing the morning mist. Zhao Chengshu clung to the window bars and shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the steam.
Chen Chunhua watched him carve words into the car with a wrench, sparks flying across the back of his chapped hand. When the last vertical stroke of the character "等" (wait) pierced through the rusty paint, her mother's slap also cracked the corner of her mouth.
"A poor fellow carving a tombstone?" Father Chen spat out a mouthful of thick phlegm, and the trembling rails shook the phlegm into a string of beads.
Chen Chunhua clutched the bloody tinfoil star and watched the train turn into a black mole on the horizon.
————————————————————
The green mailbox at the town post office resembled a festered appendix. Chen Chunhua counted the cracks in the fifty-third brick through the fence. It was seven months and three days since Zhao Chengshu left. The dandelion fluff that emerged from the cracks swayed like a broken second hand in the parched September wind.
The security guard, Lao Zhang, knocked his enamel pot against the windowsill, and wolfberries floated in the tea: "A letter from Jianghuai." He pushed a damp envelope over. The word "Jianghuai" on the postmark was soaked by rain, and the edge was stained with suspicious blue stains.
Chen Chunhua scraped it with her fingernails, and red clay fragments fell into the lines of her palm - these were the fragments that got embedded in her fingers when she was pouring bricks yesterday, mixed with the fishy smell of ink from the letter paper, and fermented into a sour taste in her nasal cavity.
The letter paper was folded into a thousand paper cranes, their wings soaked with motor oil. Zhao Chengshu's handwriting seeped through the creases:
"Chunhua, it's raining on the windows of Shennan Avenue. The foreman said that every time we install ten air conditioners, we can earn one star. When we earn a thousand stars, we can see the sea..."
The ellipsis was elongated by water stains, like the gap in the brick kiln roof where rain leaked during last year's rainstorm night.
Chen Chunhua remembered that night, Zhao Chengshu wrapped his copy of the Electrician's Handbook in plastic. Water droplets slid along his protruding wrist bones and into the pages, blurring the three-phase circuit diagram into an abstract painting. Now, thousands of kilometers away, the Jianghuai rain was soaking his scribbled promises.
Chen Chunhua folded the letter along its original crease and stuffed it into her coat pocket. Twelve letters were already stored in the secret compartment at the bottom of the pickle jar, each wrapped in oiled paper and topped with a pickled cucumber from her mother's collection.
I learned this trick from the novel "Lin Hai Xue Yuan" (Lin Hai Xue Yuan). Enemy spies love to overturn rice jars. The salt frost on the edge of the jar gets on to the letter paper and crystallizes into tiny galaxies.
Passing the railroad tracks on the way home, Chen Chunhua squatted down and touched the "wait" character Zhao Chengshu had carved. Rust had seeped into the cracks between her fingernails, mixing with the red mud to form a dark brown scab.
Three months ago, when he was carving words on the train window, sparks flew into his pupils, and now they were burning on her retina: "When I finish installing a thousand air conditioners..."
As dusk fell over the threshing ground, Chen Chunhua dug out a half-broken pencil from the ashes in the stove. It had been secretly slipped in by her night school teacher, and the pen still bore a cigarette burn. She leaned over a beam in the granary, writing a letter, moonlight filtering in through the cracks in the tiles:
"Chengshu, today we took down the old door panel in the east wing and found the three screws you hid. Mom said she'd save them for Yaozu to repair his bicycle..."
She heard her father coughing from under the beam, and hurriedly stuffed the letter into the crack in the wall. Lime fell, forming a light snow in the moonlight.
Those unsent letters molded in the interlayer, growing fuzzy mycelium, like the cotton wool worn out at the knees of Zhao Chengshu's overalls.
Zhao Chengshu curled up on the air conditioner outdoor unit on the 38th floor of Ping An Building, and the friction between the safety rope and the steel frame made a faint groan.
The December wind was like a poisoned blade, cutting open the patch on his collar, revealing the crooked word "Spring" below his collarbone - it was pierced with a sewing needle dipped in printer ink, and the scab became inflamed and ulcerated, becoming a wound that would never heal.
He bit the flashlight and wrote on the cigarette pack, his teeth making dents in the plastic:
"Chunhua, I saved a window washer today. His safety buckle suddenly snapped, and when I rushed over, the toolbox hit my lumbar spine. A photo frame slipped out of his pocket. It was a girl in a floral dress, with the same red hairband as yours pinned to her braid..."
The steel frame suddenly trembled, and half a cold steamed bun tumbled out of his pocket. Zhao Chengshu watched it disintegrate 122 meters above the ground, the debris swept toward the glass curtain wall by the air currents, reflecting a miniature avalanche in the astonished eyes of a white-collar worker. He thought of the snow at the brick kiln in his hometown, which fell on Chen Chunhua's eyelashes like a layer of salt.
The musty smell of the shed fermented in the dead of night. Zhao Chengshu pulled a yellowed envelope from under his pillow. Ninety-seven unsent letters from home were stacked up in a tower by date. The one at the bottom was stained with blood:
"Chunhua, the foreman said we'll be fined for carving words on the steel frame. But the word 'Chun' can't be erased. It's the only painkiller 122 meters above the ground..."
Little did they know that this was Zhao Chengshu’s last letter. Yes, the letters stopped.
She waited for a long winter, but he never came.
(One day)
She pressed the yellowed pieces of letter paper tightly against her chest, as if this could suppress the bitterness surging in her heart.
His fingers unconsciously stroked the already blurred postmark on the envelope. His fingertips were covered with dust, but he stubbornly traced the name of the city over and over again - that was where he wrote his last letter.
Dusk deepened outside the window, and the streetlights lit up one by one, casting tiny specks of light in her eyes. Chen Chunhua suddenly stood up, so hastily that she knocked over the teacup on the table. The water stain spread across the letter paper, like a belated tear.
But Chen Chunhua didn't care about all this. She just stuffed the letter into her bag. Her fingertips trembled slightly, but she fastened the lock of the broken suitcase with extraordinary determination.
The mirror image still had red eyes, but her lips were pressed into a stubborn line. Chen Chunhua raised her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and when her fingertips touched her earlobe, she paused—it felt empty, missing the pair of pearl earrings he had given her that year.
It doesn’t matter, she said to herself, this time she would ask him face to face why he was so stingy that he couldn’t even say goodbye in a complete sentence.
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