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Lin Xia's Roof

Lin Xia's Roof

Short Fiction

Summer Eaves

42K0

When life becomes a wind-up toy, some people choose to regain the rhythm of breathing in the salty sea breeze. Zhou Yuan worked as a project manager in an advertising company for seven years, working with PPT and late-night phone calls from Party A day after day. One day while working overtime until three in the morning, he found that his right hand began to twitch involuntarily - just like the paper jammed printer that had been used for five years. So he stuffed the faded briefcase into the locker, took a box of unopened stomach medicine, and fled to Heqi Town on the edge of the map. This fishing port town does not even have a chain supermarket, but there are kelp dried on the stone road with an emerald luster, and the radio in the old tailor shop is always on the opera channel. The attic window where he rented had half a piece of chalk stuck in it, which was said to have been left by the previous tenant - an art teacher who couldn't draw sunrises - one drunken morning. The landlord, Lin Xia, runs a pharmacy in a small town that is always mistaken for an antique shop. She uses dried perilla leaves to wrap tangerine peel plums and uses pickle jars as canvases for graffiti. She taught Zhou Yuan many useless but gentle things: how to judge the time of high tide from the sound of waves, how to rescue mugwort in the sun drying area before a heavy rain, and how to leave a gap when simmering porridge in an earthen pot to let the steam hum. When Zhou Yuan watched the sunrise over the sea for the first time, when he replaced the instant noodles with the dangshen chicken soup brought by Lin Xiasai, the anxiety and insomnia domesticated by the city were finally pickled by the salty sea breeze and turned into faded notes. And the glowing glass beads in the cracks of the attic floor, the half oil painting left by the art teacher, the egret that always lingers at the pier late at night... Are quietly tapping the title page of another story.

A Light in the World of Mortals

Summer Eaves

87K0

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