The village of Falling Petals did not weep when the winter came early. It simply shivered.
Li Baizhu sat on a rotting wooden stool outside his family's hut, his hands resting limply on his knees. His fingers were thick, stained with the gray grime of the earth. He was watching a beetle struggle to climb a blade of grass. It fell. It climbed. It fell again.
"Baizhu," his mother called from inside. Her voice was like the sound of dry leaves scraping against stone—thin, tired, and devoid of hope.
He stayed still. His head tilted slightly, his lower lip hanging just a fraction too low. To a passerby, his face was a mask of emptiness. But behind those glassy eyes, Baizhu felt the weight of the cold. It was a heavy, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, like he had swallowed a leaden coin.
His cousin, a boy with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue named Shen, walked past and kicked the stool. Baizhu tumbled into the dirt. He lay there, feeling the damp soil press against his cheek.
"Look at him," Shen spat, looking down with a sneer that twisted his young features into something ugly. "The ancestors must have been sleeping when this one was poured into the mold. A waste of rice."
Baizhu blinked. A single tear tracked through the dust on his face because the beetle had finally been crushed under Shen's boot. The loss of that small, frantic life felt like a hole opening up in his chest.
He reached out a slow, trembling hand and touched the smear of the beetle's shell.
"Poor... friend," he whispered. His voice was a raspy, unused thing.
In that moment, the shadows of the nearby willow trees seemed to stretch and lean toward him. The world felt thin. The others saw a boy who couldn't count to ten, but Baizhu saw the way the shadows had teeth. He felt the hunger of the earth beneath him, waiting to swallow everything whole.
He was only sad.
The sadness was a heavy, wet blanket draped over his mind. Baizhu watched the juice of the crushed beetle stain the pad of his thumb. He kept his hand still; he liked the dampness, a reminder that something had been there, even if it was now just a smudge.
Shen laughed, a sharp, barking sound that made Baizhu's ear twitch. The cousin reached down, grabbing a handful of Baizhu's tangled hair and yanking his head back. Baizhu's neck strained, his throat exposed to the biting wind. His eyes rolled upward, white and unfocused, tracing the swaying tops of the willows.
"Are you even in there, you half-formed lump?" Shen's face drifted into Baizhu's field of vision. It was a face full of teeth and spit. "Answer me. Say 'I am a dog.'"
Baizhu's mouth hung open. A string of saliva connected his lip to his chin, swaying in the breeze. The pain in his scalp felt distant, like a report of a fire in a neighboring village. He was more concerned with the way Shen's shadow was beginning to fray at the edges. To Baizhu's clouded eyes, the shadow wasn't a flat thing on the ground. It was a pool of black oil, and it was starting to grow hair.
"Dog..." Baizhu repeated. His voice was thick, like he was talking through a mouthful of mud. "Shadow... is hungry, Shen-Shen."
Shen's sneer faltered. He looked down at his feet, then back at the vacant, trembling face of his cousin. Baizhu was looking at the air six inches behind Shen's left ear. His pupils began to dilate until the brown of his iris was a mere sliver.
"Don't call me that," Shen hissed, giving Baizhu's head a final, violent shake before shoving him back into the dirt. "You're lucky the village needs the labor, or we'd have drowned you in the creek years ago."
As Shen turned to walk away, Baizhu stayed on the ground, his cheek pressed into the freezing slush. He watched Shen's back, his expression shifting into something fluid and wrong. His eyebrows crawled upward, creating deep furrows in his brow that looked like wounds. A slow, lopsided grin pulled at the left side of his face, while the right side remained slack and dead.
He felt a tickle in the back of his throat. It wasn't a cough. It was the feeling of a thousand tiny legs.
In his mind, the world wasn't made of wood and stone. The trees were fingers reaching out of a grave. The sky was a vast, bruised eyelid. And Shen... Shen was just a loud noise that was about to be silenced.
Baizhu's fingers dug into the mud, clutching the earth as if he were trying to hold onto a spinning ball. The sadness was gone now, replaced by a cold, hollow curiosity. He wondered if Shen would make the same sound as the beetle when the weight finally came down.
"Shen-Shen," Baizhu whispered to the empty air, his tongue darting out to lick the beetle juice from his thumb.
The shadows of the willows snapped toward the path Shen had taken, gliding across the ground without a sound, like ink spilled on a silk sheet. Baizhu watched them go, his eyes wide and wet with a terrible, mindless joy.
He stayed in the dirt, a broken boy with a clouded soul, waiting for the scream that would tell him his "friend" was no longer alone
in the dark.