The Monkey Spirit

Granny Qiqiao's house sits at the very end of Misty Ridge Village. Its walls are yellow clay, its window a wooden lattice, and just beyond the sill there is a low stone ledge. Since A-Dou was taken, she has lived there alone. A-Dou was her grandson; one summer when he was seven, the mountain flood swelled the stream, and the boy, playing on the shoal, was gone with a single wave. That year Qiqiao was in her forties; now her hair is all white.

For twenty years she has kept a habit: each dusk, after the gruel is cooked, she fills a bowl, sets it on the windowsill with a pair of chopsticks, neatly, evenly. When neighbors ask whom she keeps it for, she says, "In case A-Dou comes home hungry."

Early that spring, an uninvited guest appeared on the sill.

It was around Qingming. The light was fading; she was setting the bowl when, at the edge of her eye, she saw a small grey shape crouched beyond the lattice. She looked closer: a monkey, no more than half a foot tall, one ear torn, its fur plastered into wet strands by the rain. It did not fuss. It only crouched and watched her, eyes bright, as if holding back words.

Qiqiao was not afraid. She smiled. "Well, have you come for a meal too?"

She broke off half a boiled sweet potato and set it on the ledge. The monkey watched her a moment, then crept over, took the potato, swallowed it in a few bites, and settled back, its eyes following her.

After that it came often — sometimes at dawn, sometimes at dusk, slipping down from the forest on the back hill, along the old locust tree, to the sill. Qiqiao never found a name for it, and came to call it simply "the little guest." The little guest was like a child: greedy for peanuts, fond of squatting by her feet to watch her stitch soles; when she coughed, it would clap a furry hand to its own chest in mimicry. Once, telling a neighbor about A-Dou as a boy, she wept; the little guest went still, then reached out a furred hand and wiped the tear from her sleeve.

Something in her trembled, and she did not dare think further.

A few days before the Dragon Boat Festival the rains came and would not leave. Those nights the little guest did not come. Qiqiao slept poorly, her ear turned always to the window. On the third night the rain was frightful. She could not sit by the lamp any longer; she threw on a rain cape, took up the lantern, and trudged through the mud toward the back hill. Neighbors said she had lost her wits — an old woman, deep night, going into the woods to look for a monkey. She paid them no mind.

In the woods the water reached her ankles, and the lantern light was shredded by the rain. She called, "Little guest — little guest —" and the sound was swallowed. Around a bend she saw a broken branch lying across the foot of the old locust; beneath it showed a patch of grey fur. She dropped the lantern and flung herself over, heaved the branch away: the little guest lay curled beneath, a gash on its hind leg, blood mixed with mud.

She tucked the monkey into her bosom, wrapped it tight in the cape, and carried it home step by step. The oil was nearly spent; all the way she shielded the warm weight in her arms.

The little guest stayed by the stove seven or eight days. When it could walk it was back on the sill. Qiqiao thought, it belongs to the mountain after all, and cannot be kept. Sure enough, after autumn it came rarely, sometimes not for ten days or half a month.

The day A-Dou was taken was the third of the seventh month. Each year she lit no fire, only set the bowl of gruel on the sill and sat until dark.

That year, on the third of the seventh month, the rain had stopped and mist rose from the hills. At dusk the little guest came, cleaner than usual, its fur fluffy. It wanted no food. It crouched on the ledge, and from somewhere against its belly — she never knew how it carried it — it drew out a thing, set it gently on the sill, nudged it toward her hand, and slipped into the mist.

Qiqiao looked down. It was a wild orchid, petals pale violet and white, its roots still damp with earth, as if freshly plucked from a cliff crevice. She knew that flower: as a child A-Dou had loved to tuck it behind his ear, saying its scent could hold a person near.

She said nothing. She pinned the flower to the lattice, then filled another bowl of gruel and set it beside the first.

The people of Misty Ridge still speak of it: on Granny Qiqiao's windowsill stand two bowls all year. One for A-Dou, one for the little guest. The guest comes more seldom now, yet whenever mist falls on the third of the seventh month, it is sure to appear at dusk, leave something behind — a flower, or a smooth river stone — and vanish into the mountain mist without turning back.

Qiqiao says the hills are not empty. Some things go far away, but there is always someone to remember them for you.