(1)
Today wasn’t a special day. There weren’t many cars on the national highway—only one would occasionally roar past.
Sometimes you could barely make out the color, let alone the model.
The bustling Dapeng Shopping Street was slowly left behind. Ahead, the buildings on both sides of the road gradually thinned out, replaced by endless fields.
The small city really wasn’t big. A few steps would take you out of the city center.
But precisely because the city was small, the boundary between noise and stillness was especially clear.
Zhu Ying walked with her hands behind her back, humming a cheerful tune she must have heard somewhere. An Jing couldn’t identify the song, but she could sense its leisurely mood.
whoosh Another van shot past like a cannonball. By the time they turned their heads, the silver body was already a blur.
“The car’s going so fast… That’s dangerous.” Zhu Ying muttered, moving closer to the edge of the road. If not for the fields beside her, she might have taken another step inward.
“It’s not the city, so of course they drive faster.” An Jing stretched out her arms for balance, playing the “line-walking” game on the edge of the highway. “But you get used to it.”
“So Xiao Jing walks home like this every day after school?”
“Yeah…”
“Walking home alone must be lonely sometimes, right?” Zhu Ying chuckled and quickly caught up, taking An Jing’s arm. “This highway is pretty long, and there’s nothing along the way.”
“You can still enjoy the scenery. Look at those fields—every family plants something different. Some are empty, untouched. Farther off, there are mountains and a little river, stuff like that.”
“But what if it gets dark early? Then you can’t see clearly, right?”
“If it gets dark early, you can look at the stars. But when walking at night, you usually don’t pay much attention to the scenery because you have to watch out for traffic. Who knows if someone’s driving too fast and crashes into the fields…”
“Has Xiao Jing ever seen a car crash into the fields?”
“Yeah. Once in eighth grade, I was walking back and saw a pickup truck tilted into the field ahead. School let out early that day, so I stayed to watch for a while. They sent a tow truck, but that little tow truck also fell into the field…”
“Pfft. What happened then?”
“They sent a bigger one.” An Jing shrugged. “It was pretty fun watching them get pulled out one by one. But by the time it was over, it was completely dark. I hadn’t said I’d be late, so when I got home, Sister Huihui scolded me for ages.”
“Wouldn’t Sister Feifei be the angriest at a time like that?”
“Sister Fei? Well… She asked why I was so late, and then she didn’t say anything else.”
“I thought Sister Feifei was the strict one in your family.”
“Huh? It’s not like that. Sister Fei’s just that kind of person—she doesn’t like dwelling on small things. But Sister Huihui will lecture you for ages about little things that could affect your safety, and she won’t let it go until she’s sure you won’t do it again.”
“Sister Huihui is like a mom to Xiao Jing.”
“Sometimes she is!” An Jing’s left foot accidentally stepped into empty air, and her body tilted to the left—toward a wide stretch of yellowing rice fields, almost ready for harvest.
“Hup—!” Zhu Ying yanked her back. “Xiao Jing, do you usually fall off when you walk alone?”
“Th-this was an accident, okay!” An Jing’s face flushed slightly. “You crowded me to the side, that’s why I stepped wrong!”
“Tch, blaming me. If I hadn’t grabbed you, you’d have fallen in!”
“And that part of the road had collapsed—the edge was all crumbly!”
“Better be careful. Don’t walk on the line.” Zhu Ying pulled An Jing a little closer. “Even though it’s easy to wash up in summer, if you get your clothes dirty, Sister Huihui will scold you, right?”
“She doesn’t scold for dirty clothes. At most she’ll say something about not watching where I’m going…” An Jing cleared her throat and looked ahead. “Ah, we’re almost there. The little square is up ahead.”
Zhu Ying looked back. “I can’t see Dapeng Shopping Street anymore.”
“If the road were straight, you could.”
“It didn’t feel very winding while we were walking.”
“If you were in a car, you’d notice it more. Hey, that car’s driving really—“
bang!
Before An Jing could finish, a small car coming from afar collided with a tractor. The front of the car crumpled like tofu.
“Whoa—they crashed!”
“Too fast. Even for a small city, that was too fast.” An Jing couldn’t help looking back twice. “Sure enough, it’s a local license plate…”
“It was really fast just now. Whizzed right past before I could see anything.” Zhu Ying shook her head helplessly. “And this isn’t an airport runway.”
“They’re used to speeding. People like that get tickets or get into fender benders as soon as they reach the provincial capital. A lot of my relatives drive there and say they can’t get used to it—too many rules or whatever.”
“If there weren’t enough rules, there’d be more accidents.”
“Well, at least the door opened. Looks like no one’s hurt… They probably braked afterward, right?”
“What if they hadn’t braked?”
“Then they’d be flattened… That tractor’s pretty big…”
(2)
The little square was deserted. Only an old woman sat on a bench feeding pigeons. Two clean-looking stray cats dozed at her feet, lazily soaking up the sun.
The bold pigeons not only dared to eat the corn kernels lying beside the stray cats, but even pecked a few tufts of fur from the cats’ bodies. Their beady eyes and bobbing heads gave off an air of not being all that smart.
The two stray cats were surprisingly good-tempered. Even when their fur was pecked, they didn’t get angry. They only stretched out their plump paws in a token shooing gesture when they got annoyed.
“I always feel like pigeons are pretty bold,” said Zhu Ying.
“Probably because a lot of them are raised by people. They get used to humans and become bold. Look, we’re this close and they still haven’t flown away.”
“One of them is really fat. It’s almost like a chicken. Can it even fly?”
“Which one? Oh, that one… Wow, it really is fat.”
“Let me see if I can touch it—” Zhu Ying curiously reached out her slightly chubby hand, but the fat pigeon seemed determined to prove itself. Flapping its wings, it labored into the air and landed on a thick tree branch not far away, tilting its head and observing Zhu Ying with a hint of defiance.
“It can actually fly!”
“Even an old hen can flap its wings and get a few feet off the ground.”
“It must feel great to touch, but I couldn’t. Such a shame!”
“If you like touching birds… My grandfather has a big parrot at his house. It doesn’t fly away even if the cage is open, and it’s happy to let people pet it. If you get a chance, I can let you try.”
“Nice! What does it say? ‘Gong xi fa cai’ or ‘ni hao’ or something?”
“Um… Probably not anything very friendly…” An Jing recalled something and couldn’t help twitching the corner of her mouth.
But Zhu Ying’s attention had already shifted. “Xiao Jing, Xiao Jing, look! There’s a shaved ice stand over there!”
At the edge of the square was a small stall made from a three-wheeled cart. Inside the cart sat a stainless steel bucket with two big characters taped to it: “Chuang Bing”. And as if worried people might be too shy to ask the price, a sign on the cart read: “Fifty Cents a Cup”.
“So it shows up every summer… And it’s still fifty cents a cup.”
“Is it good?”
“The taste? Eh, it’s okay. Just a bunch of syrup and food coloring.” An Jing pointed to an ice shaver on the cart. “He puts ice cubes in the shaver, cranks it to shave them, then adds colored syrup based on your order. They say there are different flavors, but they all taste the same to me. Mmm… pretty cloying.”
“So it’s just ordinary shaved ice. Can you add coconut jelly or anything?”
“No…”
“I want to try it!”
“Trust me, it’s not good.”
“Just try it, just try it! If you can’t finish, leave it for Xiao Jing to handle!”
“Hey, I’m not a trash can!”
(3)
A big bowl of shaved ice—not exactly refined, but for fifty cents, you couldn’t really complain.
The cheap, colored syrup wasn’t too sweet if you asked the boss to go easy on it. Still, if you tasted carefully, there was a strange, almost plastic-like aftertaste.
“Ahh—cold and icy. Xiao Jing, want a bite?”
“I don’t want the part with syrup.”
“Then you’re just chewing on plain ice.”
“That’s actually better. I just want the cool feeling.”
“Fine. Open wide—”
“Om.” An Jing closed her mouth around the plastic spoon Zhu Ying held to her lips, then crunch crunch chewed. “Doesn’t eating shaved ice hurt your teeth?”
“Yes! It’s already hurting! So I can’t chew—I just have to hold it in my mouth and let it melt slowly.”
“Shaved ice is only good if you chew it. Otherwise, it’s no different from drinking ice water.”
“Then I’ll leave the rest for Xiao Jing to handle.”
“So you really are treating me like a trash can!”
“But it would be a waste to throw it away!”
“I can’t eat that much either… Oh, right, when we get downstairs, we’ll see if that dog is around.”
“Dog?”
“Yeah. Don’t know who it belongs to or if it’s a stray, but its fur is pretty clean. It’s just your average big yellow dog—eats anything you give it. No idea if it would eat shaved ice.”
“Is that it?” Zhu Ying’s eyes lit up as she pointed to the big yellow dog lying by the staircase not far away.
“Ah, yeah, that’s the one. It’s always hanging around the stairwells of these apartments. Some people who are afraid of dogs go around it, but even if you accidentally step on its tail, it won’t bite.”
“Xiao Jing speaks from experience? Stepped on it?”
“Cough… I wasn’t paying attention that time…”