THE DREAMER'S LAMENT

2. Qī

Hou Yi twisted the squeaking shower off. The spare rivulets of water stopped tapping faintly on his skin. He snatched the towel from the sink, a worn piece of aged wool, tattered. Though it did nothing to decrease the cold permeating his flesh, he wrapped the towel around his waist and tied a knot.

When he stepped out of the bathroom, tight and hole-dotted in the bamboo walls, the house was quiet and empty. Dust clung to the corners that rattan brooms couldn’t reach. Water plinked from a cracked, taped tap, into a rust-stained sink. Plink, plink, plink. Hou Yi moved across the only room other than the bathroom, forced into a corner of the boxed house. A made bed squatted in the north-facing corner. A pantry in the south. Two cabinets in the west. They had no personal treasures save for the once dainty-painted china – teacups and saucers – and bright glass perfume bottles, tiny and pinch-sized; all layered in an inch of dust. Those treasures had always belonged to Chang’e. Small remnants of her city life before Hou Yi whisked her into the countryside. With silver-ringed hands entwined and a poor dowry they’d used to pay debts in the end.

Here, in these rooms, used to be legs tangled in sheets, heartbeats lost in the tiny swallows of each other. That had been ten years ago. Now, they were grey and old. It was only a matter of time when the universe’s axe would fall to shear their life away. To separate soul from vessel. Chang’e started to believe in things – in faith. Of God, of angels, of guardians and Heaven. “Maybe you can find peace here,” said Chang’e once upon a time, when the hairs gathering at her forehead had slightly silvered, when she was holding a book to her heart. Faith and All the Shades of Happiness, it had read. It had been tattered and fragile and greasy, as if it had been picked up from a rubbish bin. When Hou Yi had refused, Chang’e only kept her insistency on his reading the book. So many times, growing subtly over time, and slowly, without her knowing, their marriage had begun to fray over time as well, worn by her pressure. By forcing something that didn’t belong between them. In their vows, they had never mentioned any godly being nor any promise to love each other under the name of a god. And suddenly, Chang’e had pressed these faiths into his hands. Why did she do so? Hadn’t Hou Yi been sufficient with all their living costs?

But then… There was the baby.
A shrivelled, winter-pale thing. One who’d died before it could glimpse the world. After hiking on foot over slopes and across slippery frozen rivers, just to reach the closest doctor, Chang’e weeping on his back whenever her back ached and the absence of a beating heart inside her pulsed her womb with pain, it was uncovered. A diaphanous veil, lifted by a pair of clawed hands, poison seeping into the fabric. Everything was a lie as big as the expanse of the cosmos. Of course. Of course; Hou Yi should have understood a long time ago.

They could never have love.

It had driven Hou Yi’s head spinning with madness. His toes and fingers grew heavy and numb, like ice cubes, not even when the sun would have warmed them. Each day the house – their smoke-puffing chimney, their tiny lantern-lit windows, the woman at the heart of it all – felt to slip from between his stiff grasp. To slide behind a horizon of a pallid blue pockmarked with silver clouds like tears.

That was when the younger women – twenty or early thirty – walking home from the bank, curvy dress-suits cinching tighter around their figures, had never seemed more appealing than a raise of money. Reaping the month’s harvest, Hou Yi did not whistle or howl at the women like all the other farmers, though married they were, too. Hou Yi looked at them, intensity in his gaze, and pink would spread across their cheeks like rosy splayed hands.

Now, wrapped in a towel, Hou Yi approached one of the cabinets in his house. He traced a reflection of Chinese script scrawled on the porcelain teacups. Be happy. Hope for a new day. Love is beautiful. No, no, no.

Something glittered in the corner of his view.
A bar of moon- and lantern-light on a golden flask. The slender, pinkie-sized container slanted on its rounded bottom, its top screw gripping onto the battered wood of the inside of the cabinet, struggling not to slip and tumble across moth-chewed lace napkins.
Hou Yi’s heart lightened, and bore with the dark weather of this house, at the sight of the flask. He remembered the hard chink of a metal-and-wood shovel as its spade tapped into a soiled thing, gleaming at the breaking of dirt. Yesterday had changed his life. This flask would, too.

A minute of fate had come to him, beneath fertiliser and roots. A lent hand, a borrowed key, to escape and start anew. But he’d heard of the tales, the spur of gossip whirled by parched lips. There was a hidden artefact in these lands of theirs, some say buried by ancient gods. And the whole world sought it.
Carefully, Hou Yi eased the cabinet door open, reaching in. His hand clasped around the flask, ever so tenderly as though he were caressing a lover.