The Sealed Stove

On the coldest nights of the twelfth lunar month, the old apartment block where my mother lived had lost its heating. After work I rushed over, carrying a honeycomb-coal stove.

Mother had been bedridden for two years. She spoke little and often woke at night. I sealed the stove, clamped the lid tight, left a thin seam of air. The flame dimmed inside the chamber to a faint orange glow. She watched that small fire and said, "When you were small, you were terrified the fire would go out."

I dozed in the chair. Sometime later a draft of cold woke me. The room was dark; only a thread of light leaked from the stove mouth. I heard something light and fine on the floor, like bare feet stepping through coal ash.

I switched on the lamp. There, on the ash, was a line of tiny footprints—toes pointing outward, winding from the stove mouth, curving to Mother's bedside, then turning back and vanishing under the threshold. The size of a palm, five toes clear: a child's foot.

I crouched to look. The ash was cold, yet the prints seemed pressed down just now with a wet fingertip, their edges still faintly damp.

"Ma, whose child is this?" I asked, turning.

Mother squinted a long while, then shook her head. "No child has set foot in this room for years."

Then I remembered the old frame in the corner—a photo from my childhood. I stood barefoot by the coal stove, three years old, mouth open laughing, toes black with soot. Mother had kept it, calling it "the first time you learned fire bites."

The footprints stopped, at the bedside step, exactly beneath that frame.

I reached into the chamber. The fire was long dead, utterly cold. Yet the ring of prints remained until I cleared them at dawn—the ash dried, the lines distinct, as if someone had paced back and forth while I slept, checking whether the stove was sealed well.

Mother lasted three more winters after that. Every night I sealed the stove, she would say, "When you were small, you always got up to check three times."

I do not remember doing so. But those footprints—I never told her, afraid she would laugh, and afraid that, suddenly, she might believe it.