The Empty Room in the Urban Village

Xiao Wu is twenty-two, in his second year working in this city, and he moved into the urban village.

The place was a room a hometown acquaintance told him of. The village buildings are packed like matchboxes, the passageways dark, wires strung in tangles — but cheap. Xiao Wu's room was on the second floor, six hundred a month, with a little balcony for drying clothes. He laughed with delight; at that price anywhere else you could not rent a toilet.

The day he signed, the landlord did not come; an agent handed over the keys. He did not catch the landlord's name on the contract, only that the surname was Chen. Rent went by a messaging app; he never met the man in person.

The first few days were fine. The oddness came slowly.

Late at night he kept hearing movement next door. Not a commotion — faint, broken sounds: like a chair leg dragged slowly across the floor, one drag at a time; and like a tap opened a crack, drip, drip. Xiao Wu pressed his ear to the wall; it was a solid wall, no neighbor. He thought it must be upstairs. But noise from above would not hug this wall.

He asked an old resident on the same floor, Granny Zhang, who was always picking vegetables in the stairwell. She looked up at him, her eyes strange. Which room did you take? Oh, that one. She lowered her voice. That one has stood empty for years. Ten years back an old man lived alone there, died inside, was not found till half a month later, the TV still on. After that it stayed empty; nobody dared rent it.

A chill ran down Xiao Wu's back, but the rent was paid and the deposit down, non-refundable. He lay awake all night, staring at the ceiling, and truly heard it — a very faint TV sound, crackling, like an old picture tube.

Next day, steeling himself, he knocked on the next-door wall; no answer. He asked the landlord to end the lease; the phone replied after a long pause: the contract is signed, no refund.

Xiao Wu accepted it. But as he lived there, the TV sound and the chair-dragging slowly stopped frightening him. The sounds were lonely, not scary — more like someone wanting to say a word to another but not knowing how to begin. He remembered his own first days in this city, just as lonely, waking at night to the traffic outside the window, feeling the whole city had nothing to do with him.

One day it turned cold; he cooked a pot of congee, ladled out a bowl, and set it at the foot of that wall. He did not think much of it — just a bowl for an old neighbor.

Next morning the bowl was empty, washed clean, upturned by the wall.

Xiao Wu said nothing. After that he would set a hot bowl by the wall every few days, sometimes congee, sometimes noodles. The bowl always came back washed.

He told Granny Zhang. She was startled, then sighed: that old man, in life he loved a hot meal. His daughter married far away, came back once a year. The day he died, there was still warm congee in the pot.

When Xiao Wu later moved out, at the end of the lease, he set a bowl of congee by the wall, fuller than usual.

Midnight Record note: What a city never lacks is lonely people; what it also never lacks is empty rooms. That old man's TV and chair-dragging scare no one — they are the habits of a man who lived alone all his life and, even in death, could not break them: wanting someone for company, wanting a hot meal. The steam off Xiao Wu's bowl of congee was the only thing in the whole cold rented building that still felt human. We always say a near neighbor beats a distant relative, yet in the city we do not even know when the person next door has died. A bowl of congee for a washed-clean bowl — too small for any news story, yet utterly real: to have someone mind you a hot meal is to have not lived in this world in vain.