When Mai Minghe woke, the room was dark, and what seeped beneath the curtains was still the night.
She was a light sleeper and woke several times a night, but tonight something different had woken her. A faint, harsh sound had roused her from the background hiss of air in the room.
What was making that noise?
Drowsy and muddled, she could not quite work it out.
Metal kept scraping and clinking until, with a snap, the lock cylinder sprang and the door creaked open. Long neglected, the hinges were stiff and heavy as an old person's joints, their shrill cry cutting a wound through the silent night.
Oh, someone had picked the front door's lock.
If Mom found out, who knew what kind of scolding she would get-a girl living alone, and she hadn't even thought to wedge a chair against the door at night?
Her mother had never trusted the world. She checked the gas four or five times before going out, always looked at the back seat before getting into a car, and never allowed her to return a stranger's nod or smile.
Mai Minghe had always thought her mother worried too much. She had never expected someone really would break into her home tonight.
She could not make out the sounds that followed, but dimly, she sensed someone coming in. Light flickered beneath the door: a flashlight.
Unfamiliar footsteps moved dully through the living room, with the occasional creak. Mai Minghe knew that meant the intruder had stepped on the wooden floor outside the kitchen. A pipe had burst one year, soaking and warping the boards there, and ever since, they had frequently voiced their shrill opinions.
Having a burglar was quite a novelty.
She closed her eyes again and listened intently to his movements.
First, he opened the door next to hers-a tiny, narrow room that had never seen much use. It had once been painted as a nursery, then served as a study, then been converted into a dressing room, yet none of those functions had ever truly been realized. Now it was only a dust-filled storeroom.
One glance was enough to tell that the mountains of things piled inside were all junk, not worth searching. Sure enough, the burglar's footsteps immediately retreated, and the door thumped shut.
In fact, there probably weren't more than a handful of valuable things in the entire building.
Things certainly went missing often in this low-rent apartment building. Once, Mai Minghe had failed to close her door properly, and by the time she noticed, a pair of ankle boots had vanished from the shoe rack by the entrance. Furious, she had knocked on every door to ask about them, to no avail. But things going missing were one thing; outside burglars rarely went to the trouble of picking locks and forcing doors to rob people with so little worth taking.
How funny that she remembered such insignificant things so clearly. Those boots had been calfskin, their brown leather smooth and gleaming, their style smart. She had never managed to buy another pair she liked as much.
Let him take whatever he wanted. She didn't have anything terribly special anyway.
The burglar came to the bedroom door. As soon as he opened it, his flashlight shone inside and found Mai Minghe.
The harsh white light glared against her face through her eyelids. She remained motionless, her eyes closed in feigned sleep.
An unfamiliar voice let out an involuntary "Huh?" He seemed very surprised.
Mai Minghe resisted the urge to move and made no sound.
The burglar walked into the bedroom, his footsteps tapping, made a circuit without even opening the bedside drawer, and went out again.
What could he possibly steal, being so slapdash about it? Mai Minghe was beginning to worry for him. People needed a little patience when they did things. They couldn't be afraid of tedious work.
A minute or two later, he returned and approached her bed. A pocket of warm human breath hovered above it.
"Hey," a man's voice called. A hand pushed at Mai Minghe's bony shoulder. "Hey, wake up."
There seemed little point in pretending to sleep anymore.
Why wake her up? If he wanted to steal something valuable, couldn't he look for it himself? Stealing wasn't enough; he had to shirk the work too. People these days, honestly.
Mai Minghe opened her eyes. A dark figure bent over the bedside, looming above her head.
Because the flashlight pointed down below the edge of the bed, the burglar's face lay in shadow. At the fringe of the light, all she could see was a dimly pale Adam's apple bobbing as he spoke.
"Don't be scared. I just need to ask you something. Is there someone named Mai Minghe living here?"
"...That's me. Do we know each other?"
The man drew a breath, straightened up, and looked over the body beneath the blankets.
"You-you're her?" As though he still refused to believe it, he raised the flashlight and rudely swept it over Mai Minghe's face several more times.
She had not looked in a mirror for a long time and did not know what she looked like now. It could hardly be anything pretty.
"What is it?" she asked softly.
The man's mouth hung half-open, as though he was still trying to digest something.
She could see that he did not want her to be Mai Minghe, because he immediately asked again, as though afraid she had misheard. "Mai, as in wild wheat. Mai-Ming-he."
"That's me." Mai Minghe smiled again. "There's no one else."
The man stared at her.
A few seconds later, he asked, "Ma'am, how old are you?"
How old? Mai Minghe had to think about it herself.
At some point, she had started having trouble remembering her age. Sometimes she even mistakenly thought she was still a young girl.
A year added one to your age. It did not sound like much, yet it held countless tiny moments, like snowflakes filling the sky; unnoticed, they piled up into a lifetime.
Take a handful of snow, and she could not tell when it had fallen. A stretch of her life surfaced, and she no longer remembered how long ago it had been.
The social worker said that at her age-eighty-six-Mai Minghe's mind was still fairly clear, unlike some elderly people...
"Eighty-six?" Mai Minghe asked the social worker in her memory. "You must be mistaken. I'm not that old."
Silence returned to the room, and the background hiss of air rose again.
The burglar seemed only just to hear it. Pointing at the little plastic tubes in Mai Minghe's nostrils, he asked, "Are you... on oxygen?"
"Huh?" Sometimes Mai Minghe forgot. "Oh, yes. Such a nuisance."
The burglar sighed. He set the flashlight beside the bed, its circle of light falling on the opposite wall. Light divided the room, carving out a circle of bright youth and the dim decay beyond it.
"Look at me... I forgot to ask. Would you like some tea?" Mai Minghe asked. Visitors were so rare that she had forgotten to offer him anything. "It's hard for me to get up... There's tea and biscuits in the kitchen. Help yourself."
The burglar grew awkward, as though he had not expected this.
"No, thanks." After hesitating for a few seconds, he added, "Um... would you like some? I could bring it to you."
Mai Minghe declined and thanked him. The homeowner and the burglar exchanged pleasantries for a while.
Clasping his hands, the burglar stared at the television in the corner for a long time before asking it, "Are you in poor health?"
"I'm quite well. I can get out of bed and walk on my own."
"...What do you do for meals? Do your children bring you food?"
"I don't have children." She smiled. "I don't eat much anyway. I just throw something together... The social worker brings me vegetables and eggs now and then."
"A social worker? Don't you have any relatives in Blackmoor City?"
"I'm used to it," Mai Minghe said. "I never had many relatives or friends, and they all died before me. Young man, do you watch television?"
The burglar seemed to find the question absurd. After a moment's silence, he suddenly took out his phone, glanced at it, and hurried out of the room.
"Hello?"
So he had gone to answer a call.
"Yes, I've found her... No, I haven't started yet." The burglar hesitated. "Um, did you know she's an old woman? Eighty-six. That wasn't in the information."
The reply was brief, because the burglar spoke again almost immediately.
"Yes," the burglar said without lowering his voice, perhaps because he saw no need. "But... do we have to take hers? She's not the only one with a pathway. Besides, we don't even know what hers is like... Even young people have a hard time when it's taken away, don't they? What if she can't survive it?"
The person on the phone was very displeased. Even Mai Minghe seemed to faintly hear his raised voice.
The burglar endured it in silence for a while, then finally said, like a student who had done something wrong, "No... I understand. I'm sorry. I'll make sure I get it."
Sometimes Mai Minghe was startled by her own hands.
Thick, wrinkled skin wrapped each bone in overlapping layers, bulging with veins and blood vessels, almost without warmth. They and the hands in her memory belonged to two different people.
With this hand that seemed not to belong to her, she fumbled beneath the blankets, found the pendant at her chest, and gripped it tightly.
This time, the moment the burglar entered, he said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I need to take something from you."
Mai Minghe could just make out his features. He looked bright and respectable, in his twenties or thirties, still a child. Unless someone told her, she would never have guessed he was a bad person.
"What do you want?" Mai Minghe asked. "Oh, I have no use for any of it anymore. You can have it. There's a silver brooch in the drawer..."
"No, I don't want your valuables," the burglar interrupted. "I need to take something out of your body."
"An organ?" Mai Minghe was curious. Her organs hardly seemed worth taking.
"No, that's not it. Stop asking. You wouldn't understand even if I told you."
"Then, will I die?" Mai Minghe asked. "You said something about that earlier."
Caught off guard by her question, the burglar froze for two seconds before saying, "I don't know either... It's possible."
Mai Minghe quietly studied the cracks in the ceiling for a while.
"If you want it, take it," she said softly. "Only... before you do, could you grant me one wish?"
At some point, the burglar had come to her side.
"What wish?"
"I used to work in a library. The pay was very low, but I liked the library and was happy working there... Once, when I finished work, the librarian told me there was an old book they were getting rid of. It hadn't sold at a discount, so they gave it to me to take home and read."
The burglar's hand came to rest on her pillow.
There was a dark shape by his feet, apparently a machine. Mai Minghe only noticed it now; she did not know when he had brought it in.
"I looked, and it was a poetry collection. When I got home, I leafed through it for a while," Mai Minghe murmured. "I read it, put it down, and later I didn't even know where the book had gone. But somehow... these past few years, I keep remembering one of the poems in it."
"What poem?"
"You young people all have those... clever phones, don't you?"
"Smartphones," the burglar corrected her.
If she had a grandson, perhaps he would correct her like that too.
"I hear they have everything in them?"
"...More or less."
"Could you find that poem for me?" Mai Minghe pleaded. "I'd like to hear it one more time."
The burglar looked down at her, suddenly a little awkward, then pulled a tissue from the bedside table and placed it in her hand. As Mai Minghe stared at it in bewilderment, he said, "All right. Don't cry. I'll find it for you. Do you remember the title?"
She was crying?
So even at her age, she couldn't accept death.
Perhaps at her age, she still hadn't had time to truly live.
"It... it had something about daisies in the title." Mai Minghe deliberately withheld half of it.
There was so much inside a clever phone that finding a poem was difficult, and daisies were a very common image. Sure enough, it took a long time.
After finding several poems that were all wrong, the burglar finally lost patience. "Ma'am, it's not my fault you can't remember the title. I still have to get back and turn in my assignment. You-"
"I remember now," Mai Minghe said hurriedly.
This young man who was going to take something from her was probably also the last person in her life who could let her hear that poem again.
Even if she could delay no longer and had to face death, hearing the poem once more would still be something.
"'I Will Pick More Daisies'... I think that was the title."
The young man glanced at her without speaking, his fingers tapping against the screen.
This time, he quickly found the poem that had come back to Mai Minghe again and again.
"I found a video of someone reading it," he said, setting the phone beside the bed.
In the silent room, steeped in medicine and decay, an advertisement before the video burst noisily to life, announcing special prices at Little Caesar's Pizza.
"It starts after the ad. Listen to it. I'll work while you listen."
He bent down and pulled a tube out of the dark machine.
...If I could live my life again,
I would try to make more mistakes.
I would relax,
I would be softer,
I would live more foolishly than I had on this journey.
Mai Minghe felt wetness gathering beside her ears.
Like her parents, she had spent her entire life wearing herself out with worry. When wartime prices soared, she painstakingly planned her rations every day; in peacetime, she kept the household accounts every week. Her family had run a small shop when she was a child, and however much she craved it, she had never dared sneak even a bite of the sweets on the shelves.
As she grew up, she encountered many branching paths covered in wildflowers, but never set foot on them.
People were strange. Everyone knew they had only this one life, yet they lived each day as though there were endless time to try again.
The burglar lifted the blankets and laid a cool tube against Mai Minghe's chest. Only then did she dimly realize that the thing looked a little like an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner.
"What's this?" The burglar picked up the pendant on her chest and glanced at it. Without waiting for Mai Minghe to answer, he pushed it away from the mouth of the tube. Young people generally did not recognize it or know what it was for.
Luckily, he didn't know.
As the poem played, he pressed the mouth of the tube against Mai Minghe's chest, where skin stretched over bone. He switched on the machine, and a low sound she had never heard before gradually circled through the room.
...If I could start again, I would go places, try everything, and travel light.
If I could start again, I would run barefoot through the long springs and autumns.
I would try skipping school,
I would no longer rack my brains for high marks, unless they came by accident.
I would ride merry-go-rounds to my heart's content,
I would pick more daisies.
In the final instant before the darkness of death enveloped Mai Minghe, she dimly heard her front door being smashed open, hurried footsteps and voices rushing in together.
After several years of pregnancy, I've finally given birth to an ugly child... The first chapter is quite long. I thought, since the pacing is slow, I'd give you a bit more (.
"I Will Pick More Daisies" is a real poem. The poet was eighty-five when they wrote it, one year younger than my girl. Actually, the poem wasn't the inspiration. I'd already started writing when I suddenly remembered it and thought it fit perfectly.
Oh dear, it's been so long since I last updated or rambled that I'm embarrassed. I don't know what to say anymore.
Thank you for coming back.
(End of chapter)
Before you continue