The Tofu He Left in the Rain
Shen Mao, a stubborn tofu maker on Locust Lane, finds a square gone from his slab every rainy night, only to float back in the slop bucket bearing a child's handprint. Keeping watch, he sees a small blue-white hand press into the curd and recalls the mute boy drowned in the sealed well that still feeds his yard. Now he leaves one extra square each wet night, dims the lamp, and says nothing.
Shen Mao has kept his tofu workshop at the mouth of Locust Lane for the better part of his life. His craft is particular: he curdles the soy milk with aged brine, drawing out slabs that are tender yet hold their bone—they cut clean and lift whole on a chopstick. The lane knows his shoulder-pole. He is a hard man, set in his ways, who never extends credit, yet when a poor neighbor comes he quietly slices an extra finger's width and says nothing. After the autumn rains began, something strange came with them. On wet nights he would rise before dawn to soak the beans, grind, boil, and curdle; by the time the milk had set into one pale slab in the vat, he would doze in the back room until first light. Yet lately, when he lifted the cloth, a square was always missing from the slab—cut clean, as if someone had pressed it away in the dark. Stranger still was the slop bucket beneath the board: there floated a neat square of fresh tofu, smelling of the sweet well, its face dimpled with five shallow pits—plainly a child's handprint, as though something in the water had carried the piece back. Shen first blamed stray cats, but no beast leaves such fingers. He said nothing and kept watch by the stove with his oil lamp. Past midnight the rain fell and the lamp wick snapped. He saw the set curd in the vat sink a little, as if something pushed from below. A small hand rose to the surface, blue-white, fingers spread, pressing slowly into the slab, leaving a shallow mark that the new curd closed over. Shen's throat tightened, but he did not move. He remembered the mute boy pulled from the old sweet-well at the lane's end two winters back, limbs gone green, said to have come to wash his broken bowl. The well was long sealed, but the sweet water for his tofu came from a shallow well he had sunk in his own yard—and the old folk said the veins ran together underground. Since then, on every rainy night, Shen leaves one extra square in the vat: uncut, unsold. When he hears a faint sound by the stove, he dims the lamp and lets the child come for his square of tender tofu. The lane thinks him merely stingy with oil after dark. He has never spoken of it. He only sets that one square down more gently each time, as if afraid of startling something.