Chapter 10
The shed appeared around him in the familiar silence and his legs gave out.
He sat down hard on the dirt floor, not meaning to, his body making the decision before his mind caught up with it. The sacks sat beside him in the dark. He didn't look at them. He looked at nothing in particular — just stared into the dim space ahead of him while his thoughts drifted in directions he didn't have control over.
Uncle Wei's face kept surfacing. The way he'd smiled this morning when Guowei had shown up early. The clap on the shoulder. The dumplings. The easy way he'd called him nephew like it was already decided, like it was a fact that didn't need discussion.
A kind old man. That's what he was. Just a kind old man who had fed a stranger and given him work and asked for nothing but honesty in return.
And Guowei had repaid that by climbing through his window in the dark.
He pressed his palms against his eyes.
From somewhere beyond the shed walls he heard a voice. Small and bright and moving fast.
Lihua.
She was calling something he couldn't make out clearly, her words tangled up with laughter and the sound of her feet on the packed earth outside. Running somewhere. Doing something. Being eight years old in whatever uncomplicated way eight year olds are when the world isn't pressing down on them.
The sound of it steadied him.
He didn't know why. It shouldn't have. But it did.
He let his hands fall and sat there breathing slowly until the shaking in his chest quieted and his thoughts stopped moving quite so fast.
Then he stood up.
He was halfway to the door when he stopped.
Wait.
He'd told his family he was going fishing. That's what he'd said this morning — the river, near the mountain bend, he'd be back before dark. And judging by the quality of the darkness outside the shed it was well past dark now. They would have noticed. They would be worried.
And if he walked out now carrying bags from the modern world, carrying things they had no context for, carrying food that didn't come from any river—
He couldn't.
He turned back into the shed and stood there thinking.
The village had no electricity. The shed had no light. He was working in near total darkness, his hands the only tool available to him, and what he needed to do required more precision than that allowed.
He felt his way carefully along the back wall until his fingers found the stack of baskets he'd organized days ago. He pulled several down, set them on the floor near where he remembered the sacks to be, and crouched.
He opened the first sack by feel.
Rice.
He could tell by the texture — the small hard grains shifting against each other under his palm, slightly rough, the particular weight and sound of it. He tilted the sack and poured carefully into the first basket, going slowly to avoid spilling in the dark. The rice was faintly yellowed, he thought, though he couldn't see well enough to be certain. Old stock. A year, maybe two. Perfectly normal for the era. Perfectly usable.
He didn't feel happy about it.
He felt ashamed.
And underneath the shame — quieter, harder to look at directly — he felt relief.
With this much food his family could make it through winter. Not comfortably, maybe. But they could make it. No one would go to bed with an empty stomach. No one would wake up wondering if today was the day the rice ran out.
He stopped himself from thinking further and kept working.
The second sack held corn kernels, dry and hard. The third was oatmeal, fine and dusty under his fingers. The fourth was potatoes — he could feel their shape through the cloth, irregular and solid, and he poured them into a basket with care.
The fifth sack was the largest and when he opened it he knew immediately what it was. Flour. Too fine to pour into a basket without losing half of it to the dark. He felt around the shed until he found it — an old sack in the corner, stained and slightly stiff with dirt from a previous potato harvest, but intact. He turned it inside out, shook it once, and carefully transferred the flour. A little dirt never hurt anyone.
He was tying off the flour sack when he heard the voices.
His mother. Xiaomei. And Lihua, farther away, calling his name.
He moved to the door and peered through the narrow gap between the wood and the frame. The main house was dark. The door stood open. The voices were coming from outside — past the yard, into the village proper, getting farther away.
They were out looking for him.
He moved fast.
He gathered the baskets and the flour sack and carried them into the house in two trips, setting them quietly in the kitchen and covering them with a cloth his mother used for drying vegetables. Then he went back for the bag he'd brought from the two yuan store — the one with the dumplings, the chicken, the fabric, the hair pins, the things he'd actually paid for. He slung it over his shoulder, checked that the shed looked undisturbed, and stepped out into the yard.
He was three steps from the shed when he heard the footsteps.
Small ones. Fast.
Lihua came tearing around the corner of the house at full speed, saw him, and stopped so abruptly she almost fell over.
Her eyes went wide.
Then she spun on her heel and ran back the way she'd come, her voice rising into the night.
"Mom! Mom! I found him! He's here!"