Iron Ladder

The surface of the earth was swallowed up by rusty dust and mist, and humans retreated to the tens of thousands of towers made of stacked containers. The bottom of the tower is melting, and the top of the tower is growing wildly. The rich live at the top of the tower, with mirrored blocks held up by hydraulic jacks at their feet, swallowing up a batch of newly cast iron boxes every time they are lifted up; the people at the bottom live on the edge of the rising poisonous fog, and are forced to move upward every year until their legs and feet can no longer climb. Tie Zhuang is the youngest ladder climber at the bottom. He earns a bite of food by delivering goods to the elderly who cannot run. His regular customer Grandma had spent half her life saving up her credit, and begged him to send a wordless letter to the mirror area more than two thousand floors above - to her daughter, whom she had not seen for fifteen years and had been swallowed up by the top of the tower. A letter, two thousand three hundred layers, the last pension of a seventy-three-year-old mother. Climbing up the iron pile, I discovered that under each layer of iron sheets in the tower, there was a message that had not been delivered, a pair of insoles that had not been worn, and a person that I had never seen again. And the pair of insoles he brought became the only thing walking sideways in this vertical cage. This is a story about legs, iron, and the phrase "you can still keep your old place at home."