Buried Bones

“The first thing I felt was the weight of those five packets of soil. They were buried in the heart I would have one day: one from Qingyuan Mountain, one from the bottom of the Jinjiang River, one mixed with sand from across the strait, one soaked in rain from the South Seas, and one taken by the feng shui master from his own ancestral grave. He said it meant that I was in you and you were in me, and that the house would come alive. It was the twenty-fourth year of the Guangxu reign, the year 1898, before I opened my eyes.” “Now I am just a piece of wood lying in an air-conditioned room. They call me ‘installation art.’ On a certain day every spring, beads of water seep from me, and they say it’s condensation. Only I know they come from dreaming, again and again, of the years when I was still whole: the years when cooking smoke rose, incense curled through the air, and cries and laughter mingled with the winds of mountain and sea, filling my body. I am waiting for the last piece of wood to rot. Only then will this dream, which has lasted a hundred and twenty-five years, be over.”