The Dewdrop Spirit
Old Zhou, a shoemaker on the old lane, finds a tiny water-spirit living inside a dewdrop on his windowsill plant. He tends the drop each night with a little dish of water; when an autumn wind carries it away, he keeps the vigil, and on the eve of winter the dew returns, shining, as if she never truly left.
Old Zhou mends shoes at the mouth of the old lane, and has done so for more than forty years. He is a quiet man with clever hands; a sole he resews will hold for two more winters. People call him stubborn. He only shrugs.
He rents the top floor of an old building. On the windowsill sits a pot of evergreen left by a former tenant. He has watered it for ten years and cannot bring himself to throw it out. That summer he noticed something odd: each night before dawn a single dewdrop would gather at the tip of a leaf, larger and brighter than any other, and vanish with the sun, leaving no mark on the sill.
For days he thought nothing of it. On the seventh morning, up early for work, he saw it plainly in the lamplight: inside the drop stood a tiny figure no taller than a thumb, all of water and pale blue, on tiptoe peering into the room.
Zhou said nothing. From then on, when he came home he would fill a bottle at the lane's tap, wipe the sill spotless, and set out a little porcelain dish of water beside the pot. The small one grew bold, now perched on the dish's rim, now stretched along a leaf, as if keeping him company over his congee. He never spoke; she only listened to the clack of his stitching machine.
When three burning days baked the soil white and curled the leaves, Zhou panicked. At midnight he wrapped the pot in a damp cloth and carried it into the room's cool corner. By dawn the spirit had shrunk to a grain of rice yet still shone. He let out a breath and smiled for the first time in years.
After White Dew a cold wind rose and found the gap in the window. The next morning the soil was bone dry and the drop was gone. Zhou fumbled out an old flannel, carried the pot indoors, and sprinkled it every day, waiting. A week passed; the leaves revived, but the spirit did not return. Still he wiped the sill and set the dish, like a man expecting a late guest.
The day before Winter Solstice he repaired an old child's cart at the lane's end; the owner pressed two oranges into his hand as thanks. He climbed the stairs with them, and there on the sill, at the tip of the evergreen's leaf, a dewdrop was shining again, and within it the faint shape of pale-blue clothes. In the little dish, too, another drop had appeared, round, as if someone had left a word.
He set the oranges by the dish and did not wipe the dew. The wind had dropped; the sky was about to lighten. He thought: next summer, she would probably come again.