Chicken Feathers Everywhere, Sci-Fi Edition

I

When Xiao Lin hung up the phone, his palms were slick with sweat.

Outside was the peculiar muggy heat of a Hucheng June. No wind. Cicadas on the old banyan screamed like an electric drill chewing through a wall. The air conditioner was off. The electric fan turned weakly, pushing out nothing but hot air.

On the table sat a bowl of dry noodles, half-eaten. The noodles had clumped together; soy sauce and sesame paste had congealed on the surface, giving off a cold, greasy sheen.

Xiao Lin stared at the chipped Nokia with its blue screen, a steelyard weight swinging in his head.

Five minutes earlier, the phone had rung. A man’s voice came through—rough, exhausted, with the rasp peculiar to a longtime smoker, interspersed with a few dry coughs from chronic pharyngitis. The voice said: “I’m Lin Xicai. Lin Xicai twenty years from now. You’re twenty-eight, right? On the eighth of next month, you’re going to marry Xiao Chen.”

Xiao Lin had laughed at once, figuring it was some college classmate pulling a prank—probably Yunan or Xinkai, those guys, waiting to hear him make a fool of himself. Xiao Lin said: “Bro, voice changer from Pinduoduo? Cut it out. I’ve got to go look at furniture with Xiao Chen in a bit.”

A cold laugh came from the other end, extremely grating, steeped in the indifference of a man who had lived the days all the way through.

“At a quarter past two this afternoon, Xiao Chen will call you twice. The first call is to tell you that the leather sofa at Baili Home Furnishings is thirty percent off, but it’s only the floor sample, and she’ll ask if you want it. The second call comes two minutes later: she’ll say there’s a cigarette burn on the sample, forget it, better go look at Red Star Macalline. Also, the eight hundred yuan of private money you hid in those old sneakers under the bed today—your mom will sweep it out this afternoon when she comes to clean. Over that, your dad and mom will have a fight. Because your mom will think the money is your dad’s stash.”

The phone clicked off.

Xiao Lin sat there, looking at the clumped noodles, cursing inwardly: playing gods and ghosts.

But at a quarter past two, the phone really rang. Xiao Chen’s voice came through the receiver, a little excited, a little consultative: “Xiao Lin, they’re doing an internal sale at Baili. That leather set, the light gray one we liked last time—the sample’s thirty percent off! It’s just…”

Every hair on Xiao Lin’s body stood on end. He cut her off: “There’s only the sample left, right?”

Xiao Chen paused: “How did you know? Are you nearby too?”

Xiao Lin didn’t answer. His heart pounded like a drum. Two minutes later, Xiao Chen’s second call arrived on schedule, her tone turned frustrated: “Forget it, forget it, we’re not buying. I looked carefully—there’s a cigarette burn on the back of the seat. It’s not obvious, but buying something damaged for a new marriage is bad luck. Let’s just go check out Red Star Macalline.”

He put down the phone and didn’t even bother to pull his shoes on properly, shuffling in slippers toward the next-door unit where his parents lived. He’d barely reached the door when his mother’s booming voice was already lifting the roof:

“Lin Jianguo! Look at you, getting clever! Eight hundred yuan! Where’d you scrape that from? Planning to save it up to drink with your chess buddies again? If I hadn’t swept under the bed today, who knows whose hands it would’ve ended up in!”

His father muttered inside, the voice indistinct through the door, sounding aggrieved and pathetic.

Xiao Lin stood in the corridor under the blazing sun and felt cold all over, so cold that sour water seemed to seep from the cracks in his bones.

The phone call was real. His self from twenty years later was staring at him, hard, across two hundred months of running-account days.

II

For the next month, Xiao Lin lived like a thief.

Every three days, at eleven o’clock sharp at night, the spacetime phone would ring. That old, exhausted voice was like a precise ledger, expensing in advance every fen and every jiao of Xiao Lin’s life.

“Tomorrow Xiao Li from the office is getting married. Give two hundred as a gift. Don’t give three hundred—the director will think you’re showing off. Don’t give one hundred—you’ll look cheap. Two hundred is just right. Though that money going out is like skipping stones on water. Anyway, you’ll quit in two years.”

“The day after tomorrow there’s a downpour. Remember to take that blue long-handled umbrella, not the folding one. The folding umbrella’s frame will snap in the wind tunnel on Zhongshan Road. You’ll duck under cover to save five yuan, and you’ll be late picking Xiao Chen up from work. She’ll have period cramps that day, wait for you in the rain for twenty minutes, and when she sees you she won’t have a kind look on her face. That’s the spark of your first big fight after marriage.”

Xiao Lin started living by the phone’s instructions. He gave two hundred yuan; Xiao Li accepted it with the usual courtesy, and the director even nodded at him in approval. He took the long-handled umbrella, held it fast in the gale on Zhongshan Road, and picked Xiao Chen up on time. Her face was indeed pale that day. When she burrowed into his arms, she carried a faint, pleasant scent of jasmine.

Holding Xiao Chen, Xiao Lin thought: Future me doesn’t know shit. See? I corrected the days, didn’t I? Xiao Chen and I are fine.

Then, on the night a week before the wedding, the other end of the line was silent for a long time. Only the click-click of a lighter, and a long sigh that smelled of nicotine.

“Lin Xicai,” the voice said, “don’t marry Chen Xiaoyun.”

Xiao Lin’s knuckles went white around the receiver: “Why? We’re so good right now. You don’t know how thoughtful she is. Yesterday I worked overtime till ten, and she still stewed American ginseng black-chicken soup for me, put it in a thermos, and brought it downstairs at the office.”

“I know. The soup was a bit salty, because her hand shook when she added the salt. And you drank every last drop, didn’t you?” The voice on the other end didn’t waver, cold as ice. “But listen to me. Call off the wedding. Call it off now, you lose some face at most, forfeit a deposit. If you go through with it, five years later you’ll wish you’d never met her. You’ll divorce, and it’ll be ugly. Fighting over that fifty-square-meter old apartment and child support, you’ll read each other’s ugliest secrets out loud in court. However much you love her now, that’s how much you’ll be disgusted by her then.”

“You’re talking nonsense!” Xiao Lin growled under his breath, afraid his parents next door would hear. “We couldn’t become like that! Are you just unhappy with your life, gone psychologically twisted?”

“Believe it or don’t.” The other end paused, a sense of a lost cause in the voice. “Lin Xicai of twenty years ago, you think you’re some hero who dares to challenge fate for love? Don’t make me laugh. You’re just a kid who hasn’t seen the world. What defeats you isn’t some class enemy, isn’t some third party. It’s the days. It’s who gets up in the morning to buy youtiao, it’s a few hundred yuan deducted from the medical insurance card, it’s all those chicken-feather-and-garlic-skin trifles two families can never add up when they sit together. Go call off the wedding. Be good.”

The phone hung up.

Xiao Lin didn’t sleep that night. He watched the shadows the fan threw on the ceiling, circling and circling, like a giant meat grinder.

The next afternoon, Xiao Lin went to Xiao Chen’s house for dinner.

Xiao Chen’s home was in a narrow alley, first floor, no sunlight year-round. The rooms always had a faint smell of mildew and soy sauce. Xiao Chen’s mother sat on a peeling straight-backed chair, picking vegetables, eyeing Xiao Lin from the corner of her eye.

“Xiao Lin, I hear your work unit’s housing subsidy is getting cut again this year?” His future mother-in-law flung a celery stalk with rotten leaves hard into a plastic basin, a sharp slap. “These days even civil servants aren’t a sure thing. Look at Xiaoyun’s cousin’s husband, at the cigarette factory—that’s what you call a harvest guaranteed, rain or drought. Last month the fancy tea sets they handed out were worth several thousand alone. That marital apartment of yours—when exactly are you going to add Xiaoyun’s name to the property deed?”

Xiao Lin forced a smile, the muscles of his face stiff as plaster: “Auntie, my parents paid for that apartment in full. The notary office said…”

“Notary this, notary that. The family’s not even married yet and you’re already guarding against her like she’s a thief.” His future mother-in-law rolled her eyes, words spitting out like a machine gun. “Xiaoyun went with you for that dead salary of yours? She wanted security. And what? You won’t even add a name.”

Xiao Chen came out of the kitchen, wearing an apron printed with “XX Feed,” carrying a plate of scrambled eggs. She glanced at Xiao Lin, her eyes a little wronged, a little ingratiating, but more than anything a weariness of being squeezed in the middle of life. She tugged her mother’s sleeve: “Ma, you’re cooking. Say a little less.”

In that moment, Xiao Lin suddenly remembered the voice on the phone—“all those chicken-feather-and-garlic-skin trifles two families can never add up when they sit together.”

He looked at Xiao Chen’s forehead, a little greasy from the cooking smoke, and his heart gave a sudden twitch. This was the girl he loved to death. She was twenty-six now, still light in her eyes. But twenty years later? Would she become the mother-in-law in front of him, running her mouth, haggling over every last coin?

After dinner, Xiao Chen walked Xiao Lin to the mouth of the alley.

The night wind was a little cool. The streetlamp was broken; everything around was pitch dark. Xiao Chen suddenly hugged Xiao Lin’s waist from behind, pressing her face to his back. He could feel her body trembling slightly.

“Xiao Lin, don’t blame my mom.” Xiao Chen’s voice was muffled. “My cousin’s husband shows off in front of them every day. It’s her face she can’t get over. Adding the name to the deed or not, either way is fine. As long as you’re good to me, we live our days well, the money and the house don’t matter. I believe you’ll accomplish great things someday.”

Xiao Lin turned around and looked at the girl’s glittering eyes in the dark. They were full of trust, full of reckless solitary courage.

Fuck twenty years from now.

Xiao Lin seized Xiao Chen in his arms, holding her extremely tight, as if to knead her into his own flesh and bone. He clenched his teeth, as if declaring war on some invisible presence in the dark: “Xiaoyun, on the eighth next week, we get married on time. Nobody can stop us.”

III

The wedding was lively, and also vulgar.

The cigarettes and liquor were second-grade goods Xiao Lin had gotten through connections. The grouper on the banquet tables had actually been swapped for cheaper red fish. Only Xiao Lin himself knew these details. To save those few thousand yuan of difference, he’d haggled with the hotel manager for three whole afternoons, worn his lips raw.

During the toasts, Xiao Lin drank a good deal of fake Moutai, his head swimming. He looked at Xiao Chen in a bright red qipao, smiling until her cheeks ached, and his heart was full of tragic, heroic feeling.

The first three months of marriage, the days were sweet as melted white sugar.

Xiao Lin locked the Nokia in the deepest part of a drawer. He no longer took those late-night calls. He felt he’d won. Fate was like the slick old director at the office: as long as you were more ruthless than him, he’d walk around you.

Every day after work, Xiao Lin went to the wet market for a jin of shrimp and half a jin of pork belly. Xiao Chen chopped vegetables in the kitchen, clink-clank, a popular TV drama playing. After dinner they squeezed onto the light gray sofa (they’d ended up buying the one from Red Star Macalline, eight hundred yuan more expensive; Xiao Lin smoked a month less for it), gnawing watermelon, discussing what to name a child someday.

“If it’s a boy, Lin Yu—sounds grand. If it’s a girl, Lin Xi, like your name.” Xiao Chen spat out a watermelon seed and casually wiped it on the scrap newspaper on the coffee table.

Xiao Lin looked at that watermelon seed, his brow faintly furrowed. He had a mild case of cleanliness. When they were dating, Xiao Chen always put down a tissue when she ate, elegant as a princess. Now that they were married, she’d gotten used to tossing trash right on the newspaper, and sometimes even throwing two-day-old socks on the head of the bed.

“Xiaoyun, the newspaper’s dirty. Bring a trash can over,” Xiao Lin said.

“Come on, it’s just a newspaper. I’ll toss it in a bit. You’re so fussy.” Xiao Chen didn’t move, eyes locked on the hero and heroine wailing on the TV screen.

Xiao Lin said nothing more. He got up and collected the trash himself.

This was the first grain of sand, dropped into the soles of both their shoes.

The change started in the second year. The work unit’s housing subsidy really was cut, by a third. After housing fund and pension insurance, Xiao Lin’s take-home pay was a full eight hundred yuan less each month. At the same time, Xiao Chen got pregnant.

She threw up until heaven and earth went dark.

The pleasant jasmine scent in the house disappeared, replaced by the sour smell of pregnancy vomit in a place long unventilated, and the bitter smell of various traditional medicines for protecting the fetus. Because of hormonal imbalance, Xiao Chen’s temper became like a blasting cap that could go off at any moment.

“Lin Xicai! Can you use hot water when you wash dishes? Greasy. Next time I put soup in this bowl it’ll taste like dish soap!”

“Lin Xicai! That box of apples your mom brought today—the bottom layer’s all rotten! Did she save the good ones for your sister’s family? Palming this rotten stuff off on me?”

Xiao Lin stood in the kitchen, a rag full of dish-soap foam in his hand, Xiao Chen’s shrieks filling his ears. He suddenly found this scene extremely familiar.

He flung down the rag, rushed into the bedroom, and dug the dusty Nokia out of the deepest part of the drawer. He charged it and waited until eleven at night.

The phone didn’t ring.

With trembling hands, he dialed back the number from the old caller ID.

A cold mechanical voice came through the receiver: “Sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service.”

Xiao Lin collapsed onto the floor, looking at the pitch-black night outside the window. He suddenly realized that “himself twenty years later” hadn’t disappeared. He was waking up, bit by bit, inside his body. He was walking, step by step, without the slightest deviation, down the road of becoming that exhausted man.

IV

After the child was born, the days shattered completely into chicken feathers everywhere.

It was a girl. In the end she wasn’t named Lin Xi, because the mother-in-law had a fortune-teller look, who said she lacked water in the five elements and had to be named Lin Miaomiao. Xiao Lin found the name unbearably vulgar, like a boiled-water shop, but to avoid a fight with his mother-in-law, he swallowed it.

With a baby in the house, space was infinitely compressed. The living room was piled with diapers, formula cans, a bathing basin. Even walking you had to turn sideways.

Xiao Lin started to dread going home.

Every day after work, he loitered under the office building until six-thirty. He sat in the five-year-old secondhand Jetta, killed the engine, lit a cigarette. The car was very quiet, only the dashboard giving off a faint green glow. Those thirty minutes were the only time in the day that belonged to him.

Once he went up and pushed open the door, it was another battlefield.

“Lin Xicai, Miaomiao had a fever of 38.5 today. I called you five times. Why didn’t you pick up?” Xiao Chen held the child, face red from crying, her hair a bird’s nest, eye sockets sunken, eyes full of bloodshot veins.

“I was in a meeting. Phone was on silent.” Xiao Lin changed his shoes wearily, not a ripple in his voice.

“Meetings, meetings, you have endless meetings every day! Four thousand a month in dead wages, what corporate-tycoon meetings are you holding? Her cousin’s husband already switched to an Audi this year, and you have to open your mouth to your mom even for formula money!”

Xiao Chen’s words were like a dull knife, dragging back and forth across Xiao Lin’s most sensitive pride.

Xiao Lin looked up at the woman in front of him. Her pajamas had been washed out of shape. There was a dried milk stain on her chest. Her face was patched with chloasma left by childbirth. Where had the Xiao Chen of those years gone? Where was the girl who waited for him twenty minutes in the rain, who smelled of jasmine when she smiled?

“Chen Xiaoyun,” Xiao Lin said calmly, so calmly it frightened even himself, “if you thought I had no ability, you didn’t have to marry me back then. Saying this now—what’s the point?”

“Lin Xicai, you bastard!” Xiao Chen dumped the child on the bed and lunged at him, tearing at his clothes. “If it weren’t for Miaomiao, I’d have stopped living with you long ago! I was truly blind back then, so many people I didn’t pick, and I picked a good-for-nothing like you!”

The child wailed on the bed. The adults’ shouting and tearing tangled together, reverberating in the cramped living room.

Xiao Lin didn’t hit back. He only shielded his face tightly. In the chaos, his gaze fell on the coffee table—there sat the groceries Xiao Chen had bought yesterday, a jin of spoiled tofu, giving off a faint sour smell.

He suddenly remembered that line from Liu Zhenyun’s book: Life is just chicken feathers everywhere.

He hadn’t understood it before, thought it was a literati’s moaning without illness. Now he understood. These chicken feathers everywhere stuck in you, drew no blood, but hurt so much you couldn’t sleep night after night.

The couple began frequent cold wars.

Often a whole week without a word. At meals, Xiao Lin ate Xiao Lin’s food, Xiao Chen fed the child. When the seasoning bottle ran empty, neither of them went to buy more; they just ate it bland. The air in the house was viscous enough to solidify. Even breathing felt like work.

One late night, Xiao Lin got up to use the toilet. Passing the living room, he found Xiao Chen sitting on the sofa, no lights on, only a pinpoint of glow from the phone in her hand in the dark.

Xiao Lin thought she was chatting with someone, a malicious suspicion rising in him. He gave a cold laugh, turned back to the bedroom, and shut the door hard.

What he didn’t know was that Xiao Chen on the sofa was at that moment holding an old Nokia of the same model, tears silently smashing onto the screen.

V

It was the autumn of the seventh year of marriage.

Xiao Lin was the one who first proposed divorce. The reason was very simple, and also absurd.

Because of a crate of oranges.

Xiao Lin’s work unit handed out a crate of Gannan navel oranges. He carried it home and set it down in the entryway. Xiao Chen happened to get off work late that day. Coming in, she tripped on the crate; her ankle swelled up like a steamed bun.

Xiao Chen sat on the floor, looking at that crate of oranges, and suddenly burst into loud sobbing. She wasn’t crying because her foot hurt. She was crying over these seven years of days.

“Lin Xicai, you’ve left this crate of oranges for three days. I told you three times to move it to the balcony, and you just wouldn’t. In your eyes, not a blade of grass or a tree in this house has anything to do with you. You live like a tenant. You don’t love me at all, and you don’t love this home.”

Xiao Lin sat to the side smoking, watching the blue smoke change shape under the light. He didn’t even have the energy to argue. Moving a crate, how big a deal was that? Did it have to be elevated to the height of love or not, home or not?

“Fine. Let’s divorce.” Xiao Lin blew a smoke ring, said it lightly.

Xiao Chen’s crying paused. She looked up at him, a despair of complete giving-up in her eyes: “Fine. Divorce. The apartment goes to Miaomiao. You walk out with nothing.”

“On what grounds?” Xiao Lin stood up at once, his voice jumping an octave. “That apartment my parents paid for in full! It’s in my name! Why should it go to you?”

“On the grounds I raised a child for seven years! On the grounds I asked for nothing when I married you! Lin Xicai, are you even a man?”

They fought in the living room the entire night. All those tender memories of before, in this moment, all became the sharpest weapons. Xiao Lin enumerated Xiao Chen’s free spending, her lack of filial piety toward his parents. Xiao Chen cursed Xiao Lin as selfish, a man who’d never amount to anything in his life.

In the end they reached an agreement: the apartment split fifty-fifty, the child to Xiao Chen, Xiao Lin to pay fifteen hundred a month in child support.

The day they went to the civil affairs bureau, the weather was fine. Hucheng’s autumn finally had a bit of coolness. The sky was washed blue.

They walked side by side on the road, half a meter between them, like two strangers sharing a ride.

Sign, stamp, collect the certificates.

The whole process took less than ten minutes. The red booklet that had represented seven years of marriage was exchanged for two purple divorce certificates.

Walking out the civil affairs bureau doors, Xiao Lin felt a wave of lightness through his body, as if a thousand-jin burden had been lifted. But right after, a huge emptiness came crashing down, like a drowning man suddenly hauled ashore who instead no longer knew how to breathe.

“Old Lin,” Xiao Chen called him from the bottom of the steps.

Xiao Lin stopped, didn’t turn around: “Something else? Child support I’ll transfer on the first of next month, on time.”

Xiao Chen walked up to him. She’d put on light makeup today, wearing a white trench coat bought before they married. In that instant, Xiao Lin seemed to see again the twenty-six-year-old Chen Xiaoyun of those years.

Xiao Chen looked at him, the corners of her eyes glittering—tears or sweat, he couldn’t tell. From her bag she took out a blue Nokia, paint already chipped, and held it out to Xiao Lin.

A boom in Xiao Lin’s head. All the blood in his body froze instantly.

“This. Giving it back to you.” Xiao Chen’s voice was very light, with the exhaustion of someone who’d been released. “Twenty years ago, a woman called me. She said she was Chen Xiaoyun twenty years later. She told me not to marry you, said we’d live in a complete mess, said we’d tear each other’s faces off in court over the property deed and child support.”

Xiao Lin stared hard at that phone, a handful of sand stuffed in his throat, unable to get out a single word.

“I didn’t believe it then.” Xiao Chen gave a bitter smile, tears finally falling. “I thought we loved each other so much, how could we become like that. So every time we fought after marriage, every time I felt I couldn’t endure the days, I told myself I had to endure, I had to be a little better to you, because I couldn’t let that prophecy come true. I thought I was saving our marriage.”

She shook her head in self-mockery: “But later I found that precisely because I knew that ‘terrible ending,’ I became more and more sensitive. You spoke one sentence less to me, I thought you were inflicting cold violence on me. You forgot to buy groceries once, I thought I wasn’t in your heart. I lived our days with you carrying guardedness and scrutiny, and in the end… I lived the days into exactly the shape she said.”

“Old Lin, actually we were both cheating. But we both scored zero.”

Xiao Chen stuffed the phone into Xiao Lin’s hand. The phone was heavy, pressing his body straight downward.

She turned around and soon disappeared into the surging crowd on Zhongshan Road. Her back was very resolute. She never looked back again.

VI

Xiao Lin moved back to his parents’ house.

He lived again in that single room from when he was twenty-eight. The electric fan still turned with a creak. On the wall still hung the decorative painting Xiao Chen had given him back then, only the colors had faded to white.

The days became quiet again. No child’s crying, no fights over dish-soap foam, no mother-in-law’s eye-rolls pointing at the mulberry to curse the locust.

But Xiao Lin found that he had grown old.

Not only had white hairs begun to appear. More important, that fire in his heart was gone. He started to become like his father: every day after work buying a few near-expiry promotional snacks, a few bottles of beer, nesting on the bed, scrolling AI short videos with no punchlines, scrolling a whole evening.

He no longer resisted fate, because he knew fate had already won.

In a blink, another thirteen years passed.

Xiao Lin became Old Lin. He was forty-eight this year, a belly had pushed out, his blood pressure was high, blood-pressure pills always in his pocket. Miaomiao was already in university, sending him a text on time every month: “Dad, living expenses.” He’d transfer two thousand on time, not one extra word of nonsense.

He and Xiao Chen had only met three times in these years. Once when Miaomiao got into high school, once at Miaomiao’s eighteenth coming-of-age ceremony, and once in a hospital corridor, when Xiao Chen’s mother died and Old Lin went to deliver a wreath.

When they sat together, they could already chat peacefully like old friends. Chat about high blood lipids, Hucheng housing prices, gossip about the young people at the office. Those chicken-feather-and-garlic-skin trifles that had once torn their hearts and made them want to strangle each other, washed by time, had all become conversation to drink with.

Once Old Lin even joked: “If we’d listened to the person on the phone back then, not gotten married, who knows, we might each be rich now.”

Xiao Chen smiled, wrinkles filling the corners of her eyes: “Come off it. Not marrying you, marrying someone else, the days would still be the same. A jin of spoiled tofu, stir-fry it in a different pan, it’s still sour.”

Old Lin was stunned for a long time, then burst out laughing, laughed until tears came.

One afternoon in June of that year.

Hucheng was still muggy as a steamer. Old Lin carried a bag of water spinach just bought from the wet market and two crucian carp, shuffling home in slippers.

When he reached the stairwell entrance, the phone in his pocket suddenly rang.

It wasn’t his current smartphone, but that blue Nokia hidden under the drawer, uncharged for thirteen years. Somehow it was in Old Lin’s pocket, giving off a piercing, retro monophonic ringtone.

Old Lin stood in the dim stairwell, the choking smell of a neighbor stir-frying chili peppers filling the air.

He took out the phone, looking at the caller ID with no number.

He didn’t hesitate. He pressed answer.

“Hello,” Old Lin put the phone to his ear. His voice was rough, exhausted, with the rasp peculiar to longtime smoking, interspersed with a few dry coughs from chronic pharyngitis.

From the other end came a young man’s voice, with a bit of the vitality of a young person from Hucheng city center, and a thread of impatience and wariness: “Bro, voice changer from Pinduoduo? Cut it out. I’ve got to go look at furniture with Xiao Chen in a bit.”

Old Lin leaned against the mottled wall, looking at an ant at his feet carrying a breadcrumb. He laughed, that laugh extremely grating, steeped in the indifference of a man who had lived the days all the way through.

“At a quarter past two this afternoon, Xiao Chen will call you twice.” Old Lin said to the other end, his tone as calm as reading a lunch menu. “The first call is to tell you that the leather sofa at Baili Home Furnishings is thirty percent off… Lin Xicai, listen to me. On the eighth of next month, don’t get married. Let her go. Let yourself go too.”

The other end was silent for a few seconds, then exploded with a young man’s raw, angry roar:

“Bullshit! I will never abandon her! We couldn’t become like that!”

Click.

The other end hung up.

Old Lin looked at the darkened screen, shook his head, tucked the phone back in his pocket. He hefted the two crucian carp that had begun to give off a fishy smell, and step by step, treading the uneven stairs, walked toward that room full of soy sauce and mildew.

He knew that young man wouldn’t listen.

Because twenty years ago, he hadn’t listened either.

This is life. You know perfectly well what’s ahead is chicken feathers everywhere, know perfectly well it’s a fortress besieged, but as long as that girl stands in the doorway and smiles at you, you’ll still, like a fool, plunge straight in.