The last negative in the tin box was of a hospital window. A snowflake landed on the windowsill, its hexagonal shape identical to those in 1998 and 2024. In the reflection of the windowpane, a man in a hospital gown could be vaguely seen, clutching half a carrot, his posture exactly like the child in the negative. Ayu suddenly remembered that before Zhonghua's father passed away, he kept talking about going back to the old alley to see the snowman, saying that the snowman's nose was pointing towards the direction of the rising sun.
When we visited Zhonghua's mother's house over the weekend, the old lady pulled a wooden box from the bottom of a trunk. Inside were photos of Zhonghua on his 100th day. In the background, on the screen wall of a courtyard house, an unfinished snowman was drawn in chalk—the carrot nose was empty, and next to it was half a real carrot, the same shape as the one in the negative. "When your father was little," the old lady said, stroking the photos, "he always said that the snowmen in the alley would change their noses by themselves. One morning, he woke up to find icicles still hanging from the tip of the carrot, just like the rime ice he had seen in magazines on Changbai Mountain."
Zhong Hua compared the negative with the photograph and discovered that the direction of the brick seams on the screen wall matched the annual rings of a birch tree in Changbai Mountain. Even more astonishingly, the wear and tear on the floor tiles where his father was squatting in the photograph formed a snowflake pattern, and the snowflakes on the negative from 1998 extended in the exact same direction as the direction his father's finger was pointing in the photograph. Ayu suddenly remembered that when they were skiing in Changbai Mountain, Zhong Hua had drawn a map of their old neighborhood in the snow, saying that the location of each snowdrift overlapped with his childhood memories.
The camera in the attic was polished to a shine, the number "1998" engraved on the inside of the lens cap gleaming silver in the sunlight. Ayu loaded a new roll of film, and as Zhong Hua pressed the shutter, he heard a familiar "click"—a sound that resonated perfectly with the sound of snowflakes sliding down Changbai Mountain, the sound of snow sweeping in the alleyways of 1998, and the sound of a pen scratching across his father's medical record. In the viewfinder, Ayu saw her reflection, and behind her, the outline of an unfinished residential building gradually emerged, and on the snow-covered rooftops, a snowflake just like the one from Changbai Mountain was falling.
While reviewing negatives late at night, Zhong Hua discovered that the snowman's face in the 1998 film matched the texture of a rock in Changbai Mountain. They had leaned against that rock before; it had naturally formed indentations that Ayu had said looked like the smiling eyes of a snowman. Even more miraculously, in the shadows of snowflakes on the negatives, one could vaguely see the face of Zhong Hua's father when he was young, smiling at the camera. Behind him, deep in the alley, the demolition team's bulldozers had not yet entered; only a child wearing a Lei Feng hat was sticking half a carrot into a snowdrift.
The camera sat on the living room bookshelf, and among the diamond-shaped lattice of its leather case, a real snowflake had landed sometime earlier. Ayu examined it under a microscope and found that its structure was identical to the one on the film. The water stains left by the melting snowflake, smudged on the photographic paper, formed the exact shape of the floor plan of Zhong Hua's old family courtyard house. Zhong Hua suddenly remembered that during his last lucid moment before his death, his father had pointed to the snow outside the window and said, "Look, that snowman has a new nose."
That winter was particularly cold. Zhong Hua and A Yu returned to Changbai Mountain. Lost in the birch forest, they saw a tree bent under the weight of snow, with half a carrot hanging from its branches, frozen red. Zhong Hua reached out to pick it up and found a faded candy wrapper underneath, printed with a torn Mickey Mouse—exactly the same one that had fallen out of the camera. Suddenly, the snow fell heavily. A Yu looked up, and a snowflake landed on her eyelashes. In the instant before it melted, she saw its hexagonal structure, each corner adorned with tiny ice crystals, much like the ice droplet hanging from the tip of a carrot warmed by a child's body heat during the snow blindness era of 1998.
The old man at the photo lab later sent a letter saying he'd found another negative in the darkroom drawer. It didn't show a snow scene, but rather a hospital electrocardiogram; the lines matched Zhong Hua's father's medical records, except for a snowflake-shaped interference pattern at the peak of the waveform. The letter ended with: "The child who built the snowman in 1998 later became a doctor, always saying the snowman's heartbeat resonated with his own." Along the edge of the letter, the outline of Changbai Mountain was faintly drawn in pencil, and at the summit, a snowflake identical to those from 1998 and 2024 had fallen.
Now, the Seagull camera hangs in the study, its lens pointed at the sycamore tree outside the window. When the leaves fall in autumn, one gets stuck in the gap of the lens cap, its shape strikingly similar to a birch leaf from Changbai Mountain. Zhong Hua loads the film into the camera, and occasionally he hears a soft "click" sound, as if something is turning in the darkroom, rewinding twenty years of time into a spiral of snow. And every winter when it snows, A Yu breathes on the lens, the mist condensing into hexagonal frost flowers on the glass, each corner pointing towards the alleyway before Zhong Hua's old home was demolished, and the snowflake they saw earlier this year in Changbai Mountain, landing next to the snowman's carrot nose.
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