She was an old woman.
She looked very old, thin, and small, with bones protruding under her loose skin.
She was a woman who would fall over if the wind blew.
Her gray hair was unkempt, and scruffy.
She wore slippers on her bare feet, with long nails embedded in the thumbs of her feet, gray—black and hard nails that groaned and flexed and snaked—I’d never seen nails like that before.
She always stood alone downstairs in my house—that garage was her residence. Whenever my mother passed by, she always said, “gaolaoshi[1],” and how she knew that is something we didn’t know.
She spoke a foreign dialect, but it didn’t alienate us.
When I passed by, she would always smile at me and say, “What a pretty little girl.” So I followed my mother’s example and said, “Thank you!” Smiling and responding politely.
She rarely spoke.
She was just silent as if the hustle and bustle of the world had nothing to do with her.
No one wanted to know who she was, or where she came from, only that she just stood there in front of the garage, looking through the green and red neon light and the noises made by those enjoying their life in the city, into someplace nobody ever knew.
I never met her old companion; she just stood alone, standing like a stake in a long, calm river, the surface of which was slowly rotting under the water, but stubbornly fighting against the slow-moving river.
One day, she disappeared in the doorway without a word, unnoticed.
Another day, a group of people suddenly gathered under my house. They appeared as if from all directions in an instant. They were arguing, yelling, talking, laughing—so she had so many relatives.
She was gone.
I heard that she had been bedridden on her deathbed, perhaps unable to move, perhaps with bedsores, perhaps in excruciating pain. But who cared? only occasionally her son came to take care of her.
I can only imagine her lying in bed, facing the ceiling. The sunlight drilled through the gap between the door and the wall and hit the floor. She felt the imprint of the sun’s rays brighten, darken and fade, and then brighten again. I don’t know how long she lay there, how many such day and night cycles she endured in agony.
The sun rose, set, and rose again. We moved into a new home, the birds in the trees changed from one group to another, the dust on the furniture was wiped over and over again, and we were like ships that passed in the night with our neighbors. The years flowed as they always are, and the world may have changed a bit, or perhaps, nothing at all.