Echoes From an Empty Well

The village breathes in the way of old radios left humming in empty rooms—static, half-formed. The banyan tree’s roots buckle the path, and the well’s rim is always damp, even when the sun hangs like a cleaver. The cat arrived when the heat did. Dun-colored, one ear nicked—a jagged moon crescent. I named it 缺儿（耳） (Ch’üeh-erh)—meaning both “the lacking ear” and “the lacking one.” A fragment, incomplete like stories my grandma left unfinished, suspended like dust motes in afternoon light. It drank from puddles, throat bobbing as if swallowing secrets. Mother says the well-water tastes of iron, but I think it tastes of the bicycle bells that rust in Old Chen’s shed, their tongues green and silent.

Father’s transistor spits numbers—stock prices, rainfall, things that mean nothing here. His shirt sticks to his chair, plastic-coated floral print peeling. At dinner, congee quivers in my bowl. Mother’s voice clicks like a fan rotating: Don’t dawdle by the well. Don’t track mud. Don’t. The cat won’t be forbidden. It isn’t anything.

That day, the road softened like wax. The banyan’s leaves curled into fists. I squatted, peeling bluish lichen from the roots, when the sound began—a low whine, like a mosquito trapped in glass. Ch’üeh-erh sat in the dust, licking its paw. The car came sleek and unmarked, glinting like wet ink. We have trucks here, coughing black phlegm. We have bicycles. Yet it rolled on, in a hurry, wheels turning as if the road itself spooled them forward.

The cat didn’t flinch.

A dull crunch, like a melon split open. The car slid past. Where Ch’üeh-erh had been, only the road remained—blurred, wavering. No blood, no body. Just a heat-shimmer where the dust settled.

At dinner, the congee trembled. I asked about the cat.

Father’s chopsticks paused. “What cat?”

Mother scraped her bowl. “There was a stray. Got hit by the tofu cart, maybe. Years ago.”

The well’s water, when I peered in, showed only my face—pale, floating. Ripples warped it into something shapeless. That night, the air smelled of burnt wires. The cicadas stopped. Through my window, the banyan shuddered, though there was no wind.

Days now fold into one another. The cat’s absence is a hole in the heat. I watch the road. Trucks pass, carts clatter, but the sleek car never returns. The well’s dampness creeps into my shoes. Father’s radio mutters numbers. Mother snaps radishes, their flesh white as bone.

Sometimes, I catch a flicker—a dun shadow, a twitch of tail—but when I turn, it’s only a leaf skittering, or Old Chen’s rag-dog nosing for scraps. The road stays empty. The lichen grows back, bluer each time.

At night, I count the cracks in the ceiling. They branch like roots. If I stare long enough, they pulse. The village breathes. The well exhales.

In the morning, my congee cools, skin forming on its surface. A thousand eyes, staring up.

I stir them under.

This piece first took shape in 2017, a flicker in the digital dust. Unearthed recently from a forgotten fold in the hard drive, it felt like discovering an old photograph, familiar yet distant. Returning to it wasn’t merely revision; much was stripped away, altered, rearranged, until what remains bears only the faintest echo of its first form. It breathes now as something new.

Perhaps the intervening years allowed other influences to seep in. Kafka’s shadow has lingered, and a sense of the absurd, of things slightly askew, inevitably permeated the writing. But the story’s most authentic roots burrow into childhood memory. I grew up beside a river in Jiangnan, its water a constant presence just beyond our door. Stray cats arrived, one by one, settling into the periphery of our lives like quiet thoughts. Then, just as quietly, they vanished. The truth, learned later, was simple: my family had taken them across the river, to a place from which return seemed impossible. To my child’s mind, that narrow water and the small bridge spanning it were an absolute threshold, the edge of the known world. Our side was everything. I remember crossing over a few times, searching for them amongst unfamiliar paths, a small, futile pilgrimage. Even then, some of me understood the pointlessness – finding them wouldn’t bridge the distance.

This story, then, is perhaps a vessel for what settled from that time: the quiet weight of loss, the shape of confusion, the stark lines of boundaries, both seen and unseen, that marked the landscape of childhood. It is that feeling, distilled and reimagined.