FictionPress.com - let the words flow| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
HONG-FENG
Chapter One
(Tsubasa)
The sputtering hum of a stalled engine reverberated through a narrow street as a set of muddy tires rolled to a halt on the wet gravel. Having finished her task of parking the truck, ChunLi pressed her face against the cool surface of her window before braving an exit, scowling at the foul weather.
It was raining, despite the weatherman’s claim that it would be sunny and clear-skied that day. Pulling at her bottom lip, she recounted that she had been watching the forecast at her aunt’s house, which was in a different province, and therefore likelier to be cloudless.
Mumbling to herself as she kicked open the door, she pulled out the pitifully small suitcase from the passenger seat and used it as an umbrella. Stuffed inside was everything she had managed to snag from her ‘room’ at the aforementioned aunt’s property two nights ago on her way out; perhaps if she hadn’t run out on such short notice, there would have been more than a few clothes and a box of mementos.
“Stupid weather… it better not ruin my stuff!” As quickly as humanly possible, she sprinted through countless puddles to her childhood home and jammed her key into its socket. It took her several minutes to realize that her parents must have changed the lock in her absence.
By this time, the rain had penetrated her suitcase, and she was soaked. “Damnit…” In desperation, she shouted and beat her fist on the door, praying someone would answer.
After having successfully bruised her knuckles and drained her voice, ChunLi turned back to her ‘get-away’ pick up truck and made a mental note that it wasn’t even hers. It wasn’t exactly a stolen vehicle… she just borrowed it without the intention of bringing it back any time soon.
Dragging her muddy sneakers back along the pathway to the battered vehicle, she lamented aloud about how disappointing it was to drive all that way and get stuck in the rain for nothing. With her dark eyes on the ground, she saw that the yard had been neglected over the years; weeds had sprouted and grown irregularly, the earth had been badly torn in several places, and the patch of daisies her grandmother worked so hard to keep alive had all but withered into dust.
Where was everyone, anyway?
When at length she had climbed back into the truck, ChunLi wiped the rain from her face and gazed back to the house she had grown up in. With the rush of getting in from the rain, she hadn’t noticed just how much damage time had inflicted upon the modest house; now, unhindered by the storm, she could see that a remark of how it fared worse than the yard would be an understatement.
The tin roof had been beaten in by hail and had since caved in from the center; something had eaten multiple craters into the walls, leaving them to break off from the frame completely; even more weeds had invaded cracks peeking around all the visible corners, and the one window at the front had been broken several times and finally given up on.
Completely, it seemed as though the house had been abandoned years ago, maybe not even that long after she had left.
Even today, curled up in the driver’s side of that musty pick-up truck, with her soaking luggage in the broken seat next to her and the rain pelting down from every angle, she could still remember everysecond of that hot summer day seven years ago.
Sneaking out of the tiny room on her tiptoes, the ten-year-old ChunLi stumbled around in the darkness, wandering into the main room. With the help of a small, wooden stool, she performed her daily ritual and pulled herself up to gaze out of the house’s only window.
Outside, she could see nothing but a pitch-black world, but somehow, the heat still found a way to snake through the atmosphere even without the sun’s help. After peering into the sunless world, she slipped her tiny feet off the stool and scampered aimlessly through the little house in a pace that took her an hour to complete.
It was then, when the dreaded sphere began to rise, that her father should stumble out of their room in his favored green robe and tiredly make his way into the kitchen. Her mother had since gotten up and had begun to prepare a pot of tea, as she had every morning, and was waiting in the kitchen for her husband.
It was then that the morning began to evolve into a day that would change everything.
ChunLi had heard her parents in the mornings before; as they sat in the kitchen, drinking their tea, her father would start a rather pointless conversation about the weather or fixing their altar (which he never seemed to get around to). Her mother would listen silently for a while, patiently absorbing his words like some kind of sponge until he asked her a question and she would reply with much less a repetition of what he had been talking about.
Today, though, her father seemed to skip all the casualties and jumped right into a speech he appeared to have left off of from the night before. Because ChunLi had known her father to do this sort of thing before, she wasn’t as astonished as she was when she caught onto the object of his rambling.
When her mother replied with something other than his own words, she scrambled to lean closer into the thin walls for a better ear to the conversation.
They were talking about her.
Her father waited until his wife was nearly done protesting to his plan, and then told her, “It doesn’t matter now; our brother-in-law is already on his way to pick her up. Go and get her things together because he will be here soon.”
With this, he left the room, leaving his cup on the table half-empty.
ChunLi’s head felt as if someone had pricked it with a needle and all her thoughts had flown out, leaving her feeling quite flat, like a balloon. She sat outside the kitchen for a while, staring blankly into the wall opposite her.
She sat there until her uncle came into their house, greeting her parents while her grandmother ignored them all and made for her garden. When her uncle stepped over to her and told her to get up, she hadn’t meant to continue sitting there like a stone; her body felt so weighed down that she couldn’t have budged if she wanted to.
Finally, her father sighed and plucked her off the floor, carting her through the door and to her uncle’s truck.
When he knocked on the side of the truck, she was abruptly startled out of her memories and, accidentally, slammed her open palm against the horn. The sound was so unbearable to the young man that he staggered backwards and wound up tripping over a pothole.
Gulping down a sense of guilty fear, ChunLi got out of the vehicle once again to see what had become of him. “H-hey. Uh… Are you okay, buddy?”
With his thumb, he plugged one of his ears, then released it, but it didn’t do anything to stop the blistering ringing going on in both of them. “I… can’t hear you. Speak up?”
“Oh god, I’ve deafened you, haven’t I?” Biting her nails, ChunLi stepped back a little while the boy got to his feet.
He repeatedly suctioned his ears until he was moderately satisfied. “What?”
Horrified, the girl put both her hands in the air, “Look, guy, I’m so sorry about that. Uh… Uh…”
To her surprise, he replied this time with a sign that he had actually heard her. “No, no. ‘S’fine. All better now, right?”
“You… You’re sure? No hard feelings?”
He grinned, awkwardly, “Yeah, and right. I probably shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that, anyway.”
She turned to the side, “Yeah, you shouldn’t have.”
“Hey, now.”
ChunLi scrutinized her situation, realizing that she was even more soaked now than she had been several minutes ago. “Um… Would you uh…”
The boy seemed to catch on, “Come in?”
Relieved, the girl nodded graciously and secured the truck before following him into his house. As they stepped through his doorway, she felt as though she had somehow been inside this house before.
