Preface: First String
The pine smoke and ink fragrance in the library suddenly took shape. It was the wind caused by the "Complete Book of Music" that slipped from Su Fanyin's fingertips. The yellowed pages were like frightened birds flying. She staggered and fell into the clear air, and the sound of cracking jade made ice patterns bloom in her ears. When he looked up, the crack in the lens cut the mole at the end of the boy's eye, like the veins of a ginkgo leaf crossing the thin frost in early winter. Classmate, he picked up the golden leaves in her hair and brushed the thin calluses of his fingertips against her ears. Your bookmark was crying. The wind passed by the century-old window lattice and peeked at the still-dry ink on "The Collected Poems of Yeats" in his hand.
At the auction hall 70 kilometers away, the banana leaf Qin failed to be auctioned for the seventh time. As the gavel was about to fall, the man in a silver-gray suit raised his sign: "Three million." Amid the uproar, he stroked the scorch marks on the belly of the piano: "In the winter of the 26th year of the Republic of China, someone extinguished the sparks here with blood. The spotlight pierced the dusk and illuminated the old scar on his ring finger, like a phoenix. He bowed his head. On the velvet of the display cabinet, half of the dried lotus cake oozed sugar frost, and he suddenly saw a snowy night in 1943: a sixteen-year-old girl huddled in the cellar of the piano workshop, the dead wood was covered with ashes from the bombardment, and the moonlight filtered through the cracks in the tiles and entered the newly engraved poem on the bottom of the piano: Keep the flowers illuminated at night.
The wheelchair on the Wutong Road ran over broken gold on the ground, and a cicada was caught in the cracks in the hosta between the old woman's frosty hair. When the person pushing the chair leaned over, the rustling sound of electricity came from the hearing aid, which was imagined to be the sound of the pages of a book overturning when he was young, or the heartbeat of two young skeletons nestled in the candlelight of the cellar. Her fingertips lightly touched the brown spots on the back of his hand: Look, the cicada string she picked up suddenly trembled, emitting clear overtones.
Three strings vibrate, three annual rings. All the fragile time will eventually condense into a golden river that will never break in the leaf veins
