A closeted truck driver × a disabled newsstand owner
Set around 2008.
An ordinary person's story.
Small-town fiction.
First person.
Blurb:
I keep thinking about her.
I think about the way she rolled out through that door in her wheelchair.
I think about her sitting by the phone, turning the pages of a book day after day.
I think about the endless green mountains beyond the window behind her...
I think about her so much that I can't sleep, night after night.
I can't drive my truck properly anymore. I can't earn a living properly anymore. Whenever I close my eyes, all I see is her face, and all I hear is her voice...
She says, “This isn't living, Fu Chuan.”
She says, “You're already wet.”
She says, “I don't want a prosthetic leg. I don't need a new wheelchair, and I don't need you to take me out again.
I just want you to love me, right now.”
I don't know what love is.
So I leave at one in the morning, pass through Zhangye and cross the salt lake, driving eight hundred kilometers into Sichuan from dawn until night.
I knock on that door and climb onto her legs.
I kneel on her wheelchair, sit on her numb legs, and hold her as her hands stroke my back, then my throat...
I tilt my head up and listen to snowflakes fall outside the window, to the spring tide swelling and the migratory birds flying home.
I look down and see fish leaping from the water, and dew dampening fresh blossoms.
But she asks again, she keeps asking:
“Do you love me?”
Theme: Make the most of your time. The years wait for no one.
