When Lin Xue moved into the old apartment covered with old locust trees, she thought it was just a change of residence. It wasn't until the first night, when the hand stretched out from the closet grasped her ankle, and the reflection in the mirror tilted its head and smiled at her, that she realized that what was locked behind this security door was not a home, but countless overlapping nightmares.
Ink-colored fluid oozes from the cracks in the floor, and fragments of pages written with the word "Ember" are floating in the fluid; the hands of the desk clock are always stuck at 3:17, and the swinging sound of the pendulum is mixed with the sound of nails scraping wood; the books on the third floor of the bookshelf turn pages by themselves, and the blank spaces are crawling with translucent insects. , The orange particles in the belly of the worm reflected the alleys she had never been to - the mirrors there would shatter into bone china, and the broken porcelain pieces spelled out the face she had forgotten; the bells there could swallow the light, and where the light was swallowed stood a girl in red shoes, humming a nursery rhyme that only she could understand.
She saw her own bones in the black and white poems in the apartment, and felt her own shadow in the river of blood in the apartment. When the key in the hidden compartment of the wardrobe was inserted into the keyhole, and when the cocoon on the old locust tree began to tremble, she finally discovered that the hands that came out of the cracks, the split shadows in the mirror, and the souls hidden in the clock were never outsiders.
They are the old photos she deleted, the secrets she buried, and the part of herself she dared not look back on. And this apartment is just a cocoon formed in her bones, waiting for one day to use her flesh and blood to write the last line of poetry.
