She Heard the Gentleness

After a high fever, Lin Wantang's world changed. The cat she'd raised for three years told her that her hair smelled like fried eggs. The neighbor's missing orange cat said it hadn't run off, but was hiding from a secret. The parrot belonging to an elderly man who lived alone repeated the same sentence every day: a farewell that had never been spoken.

She could hear the thoughts of every animal: the fear of stray dogs, the loneliness of pet birds, the cries of laboratory animals. Everyone who came to her thought the problem lay with their pets. But what she heard were secrets about the human heart, hidden beneath fur and feathers.

Who is the cat that refuses to eat or drink waiting to come back? What exactly did the dog barking at the wall see? Why has the influencer's parrot suddenly stopped saying, "I love you"?

Animals aren't hard to understand. The human heart is what has always been hard to understand.

Open this book and listen to what those voiceless lives are hiding.