The scream was a beautiful, wet snap.
I stayed in the dirt, my chin resting on a cold stone, listening as the sound echoed off the valley walls. It was a short scream. It had a beginning, a middle, and a very sudden, gurgling end. Like a flute being filled with heavy syrup. My heart slowed down, each throb a deliberate, heavy pulse that felt like a thick finger tapping on the inside of my ribs.
I stood up. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else—long, spindly things that moved with a jerky, spider-like grace. I brushed the slush from my tunic, my fingers lingering on the frayed threads.
"Ahhh, mother," I whispered. My voice felt light. It was airy. It felt like a bubble of cold water rising through my throat. "What have I become?"
I felt amazing. My head, usually filled with a grey, suffocating fog, was suddenly empty. Weightless. Someone had reached into my skull and scooped out all the heavy, rotting thoughts, leaving behind nothing but a cool, whistling breeze. I could see the individual veins in the willow leaves. I could hear the worms turning in the soil three feet beneath me.
I began to walk toward the path where Shen had vanished. My movements were slow, my feet dragging slightly, creating twin furrows in the mud. I found myself smiling. My lips pulled back so far they hurt, exposing my gums to the freezing air. My eyes were wide, unblinking, fixed on the red smear that now decorated the trunk of a white birch tree.
Shen was there. Or, what used to be Shen.
He was folded. That was the only word for it. The shadows had taken him; they had tucked him away. His silk vest was twisted into a tight rope around his chest, and his limbs were bent at angles that suggested he was trying to fit into a very small box. The earth had drunk all the blood before it could even cool.
I leaned over him, my hands clasped behind my back like a scholar inspecting a fine calligraphy scroll. I peered into his face. His eyes were still open, but the sharp, cruel light in them was a dull, flat confusion. His mouth was stuffed with dead leaves.
I reached out a finger and touched the tip of his nose. It was cold.
A giggle bubbled up in my chest—a high, frantic sound that felt like a bird trapped in a cage. I clapped a hand over my mouth, my fingers digging into my cheeks until I broke the skin. The pain was delicious. It was a sharp, clear needle stitching me to the present moment.
"Poor Shen-Shen," I crooned, my voice vibrating against my palm. "The shadow wasn't just hungry. It was lonely."
I looked at my reflection in the glassy surface of a nearby puddle. My face looked different. The vacant stare was gone, replaced by a feverish, wet intensity. I looked like a man who had just realized the sun was actually a giant, unblinking eye.
I felt a sudden, violent urge to dance.
I began to twirl in the muddy clearing, my arms limp at my sides, my head lolling onto my shoulder. The grey sky above looked like a shroud, waiting to be pulled over the world. I spun until the trees became a blurred wall of brown and white, until the smell of the damp earth filled my senses like a thick, sweet perfume.
I was a vessel.
The silence of the forest pressed against my eardrums, a heavy, suffocating weight that felt like being underwater. I stopped spinning and fell to my knees beside Shen's folded body. I leaned in close, my nose almost touching his cold, waxen ear.
"Can you hear them, cousin?" I whispered, my eyes darting toward the deep, shifting blacks beneath the trees. "The ancestors aren't sleeping. They're just waiting for us to stop making so much noise."
I felt a warmth spreading from my stomach, a slow, crawling heat that moved like insects under my skin. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt truly full. I picked up a small, smooth stone from the mud and tucked it into my cheek, savoring the way it felt against my teeth.
The mist in my head was gone, but the world outside was starting to blur. The shadows were coming back, and this time, they were part of me.
I turned my gaze back toward the village, toward the flickering lights of the huts. They looked like tiny, fragile sparks in a vast, encroaching ocean of ink. I stood up, my face settling back into its slack, empty look, hiding the screaming joy that was currently carving its name into my soul.
Time to go home. Mother would be wondering why the woo
d hadn't been chopped.
The stone in my mouth tasted of ancient rain and dead things. I rolled it over my tongue, savoring the grit, clicking it against my molars. It was the only thing keeping me from floating away into the grey expanse of the afternoon.
The walk back to the village was longer than I remembered. My feet felt heavy, as if the mud were trying to reclaim its own. Every few steps, my knees would buckle slightly, a twitch of muscle that made me stumble. I liked the way the world swayed. I liked the way my shadow seemed to drag behind me like a tattered, ink-soaked cloak, snagging on the roots and stones of the path.
I reached our hut just as the last of the pale light was being swallowed by the horizon. Mother was standing by the door, a bundle of dry sticks clutched to her chest. Her face was a map of exhaustion—deep lines carved by years of worrying about a son who couldn't remember his own name half the time.
"Baizhu?" she called out, her voice trembling. "Where is your cousin? He went looking for you."
I stopped. I tilted my head so far to the right that my neck made a sound like a dry twig snapping. I watched her. I watched the way her pulse jumped in the hollow of her throat. She looked so small. So fragile. Like a bird made of parchment.
"Shen-Shen is resting, Mother," I said. My voice was smooth, a calm river flowing over rocks. I felt a surge of affection for her, a warmth that made my chest ache. I wanted to reach out and touch her face, to show her the beautiful thing I had found in the woods.
I took a step toward her. My right hand rose, my fingers twitching in a rhythmic, undulating motion, like the legs of a centipede. I could feel the darkness coiling around my wrist, a cold, oily weight that wanted to be shared.
"He found a very quiet place," I continued, my smile widening until my cheeks felt like they were going to tear. "He's very still now. He doesn't have any more mean words left."
Mother's eyes widened. The sticks in her arms began to slip, one by one, clattering onto the hard-packed dirt. She backed away, her heels catching on the threshold of the hut. She wasn't looking at my face. She was looking at my shadow.
It was a hole. A deep, pulsing rift in the world that was slowly beginning to climb up the walls of our home.
"Baizhu... your eyes," she whispered, her voice breaking into a sob. "What happened to your eyes?"
I blinked. I hadn't realized I was crying until I felt the wetness on my cheeks. The tears weren't clear. They were thick and black, like the ink the scholars used to write their histories. They tasted of salt and old secrets.
"I can see now, Mother," I said, and the joy in my heart was so intense it felt like a physical blow. "I can see the threads. Everything is tied together by such thin, beautiful strings. And all it takes is a little tug..."
I reached out and mimicked the motion of pulling a thread from a loom. My fingers closed on the air, and for a second, the entire village seemed to dim. The wind stopped. The sound of the distant river vanished. There was only the sound of my own wet, ragged breathing.
I felt a sudden, sharp hunger. Not for food—the thought of eating felt repulsive—but for the silence. I wanted to wrap the whole world in the same velvet quiet that had taken Shen.
Mother sank to her knees, her hands covering her mouth to stifle a scream. I knelt down in front of her, my movements slow and deliberate. I reached out and tucked a stray lock of grey hair behind her ear. My touch was as light as a moth's wing.
"Don't be afraid," I whispered, leaning in until our foreheads touched. I could smell the woodsmoke on her skin, the scent of a life lived in fear of the dark. "The fog is gone. We don't have to be fools anymore."
I pressed the smooth stone from my mouth into her palm. It was warm now, vibrating with a low, sub-audible hum.
"Keep this," I said, my voice dripping with a terrifying, mindless tenderness. "It's a piece of the silence. It'll help you sleep."
I stood up and walked past her into the hut, my shadow swallowing the hearth, the table, and the small, wooden bowls. I didn't need a lantern. The darkness was bright enough for me.
Behind me, in the doorway, Mother began to hum a lullaby. It was the same one she used to sing when I was a child and the night was too loud. But her voice was flat. Empty.
I sat in the corner of the room and watched the shadows dance on the ceiling. I felt like a king sitting
on a throne of dust.
The wind doesn't just blow anymore; it whispers secrets about the gaps between things.
I stood outside the threshold of our hut, my toes curling into the damp, cold earth. A thousand tiny mouths sucked at my skin, welcoming me home. I've always been a boy of cursed birth. The elders whispered it over their rice wine, their eyes darting away whenever I stumbled through the village square. They said I was born with demons stitched into my marrow. My mother, poor thing, isn't well in the head either—she spends her days talking to the steam rising from the kettle. Maybe that's why she stayed quiet when the shadows started to eat the corners of the room.
I closed my eyes and let the breeze wash over me. It was delicious. It felt like thin, invisible silk ribbons wrapping around my throat, pulling me toward the horizon. My head felt light, a hollow gourd bobbing in a dark stream.
I leaned my head back, my mouth falling open to catch the chill. A slow, rhythmic twitch in my left eyelid pulsed, a frantic little heartbeat that belonged to someone else. I reached up, my fingers moving in a slow, hypnotic circle, tracing the bone of my socket. I wanted to reach in and see if the eye was still there, or if it had turned into a marble of pure, frozen ink.
"So quiet," I whispered. The sound of my own voice made my skin crawl with pleasure.
I looked down at my hands. They were trembling, but from an internal vibration, a frequency that made the air around my knuckles look blurred and soft. I curled my fingers into a tight fist, then released them slowly, watching the way the skin stretched over the joints. My nails were tipped with a faint, oily stain that refused to be wiped away.
I turned my head toward the village well. A group of men stood there, their lanterns flickering like dying fireflies. They were looking for Shen. I could hear the grit of their boots, the frantic thrumming of their hearts. They sounded like a cage full of frightened birds.
A sudden, wet chuckle escaped my lips. I watched them from the darkness of the doorway, my face frozen in an expression of wide-eyed, vacant wonder. To them, I was still the fool, the boy who couldn't tie a knot. They missed the way the shadows behind me were standing up on their hind legs, stretching toward the light.
My mother's humming from inside the hut grew louder, a flat, monotonous drone that harmonized with the vibration in my bones. She sounded like she was singing to a child that had already been buried.
I felt a surge of pity for them—for the men with their lanterns, for the village with its fences, for the world that thought it was safe because the sun came up every morning. They were all just sketches on a piece of paper, and I had found the eraser.
I stepped off the porch, my movements fluid and silent. My shadow led the way, a long, hungry tongue of blackness that licked the path clean before my feet touched it. I wasn't going to help them find Shen. I was going to help them find the silence.
I reached up and touched my ear, pulling on the lobe until it burned. I could hear the shadows calling my name. It was a pressure. A heavy, welcoming weight that promised to take the world and fold it into something small enough to fit inside my pocket.
I began to walk toward the lanterns, my gait steady, my eyes fixed on the brightest light. I felt like a groom walking toward his bride. The cold was gone. The hunger was gone. There was only the beautiful, hollow ache of becoming.
"I'm coming, friends," I breathed, my tongue clicking against the stone still tucked inside my cheek. "Don't be afraid of the dark. It's the only thing that never
lies to you."