Sect Year 2 · ninth month · day 15 · the Qingliu road, the first inn below Silent Terrace
Lin woke on a pallet by the stove with the room smelling of wet wool and lamp oil. Grey light came under the shutters. Somewhere in the kitchen a pot was already ticking on the hob, and a woman’s voice was scolding a child for dropping a spoon. He lay still and let the place come to him, one piece at a time, the way a cart comes into focus on a road.
The valley came first, and it came whole. He could feel the bellows in his shoulders and the weight of the lever under his hand. He could see the teacher’s long fingers on the rag and the frame shining along its grain, and the step worn pale in the middle, and the gate with its bars.
He could hear the stream under the forge in the spring, and the iron triangle, and the note of it going out over the terraces. He had lived sixty-five years in that valley in a single night. None of it had gone thin at the edges. He had expected it to, and it hadn’t.
