It Seems There is Light

Windmill

Posted by arieskyei, 3 Views, Released on December 10, 2021

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The original three-day hospital stay was extended to five days because Shi An’s health was so poor.

New Year’s Day was really not a good day for visiting, so just after the first day, the neighbors of Qingjiu Alley were about to flatten the threshold of the hospital room.

There was only one young couple who accompanied the children in the adjacent bed, and they were amazed by the way they tried to break the threshold every day.

Probably in the eyes of adults,​ their child would always be a child.

Shi An looked at the Rubik’s Cube, building block, and comic book beside the bed and fell into a thought.

“…Uncle Zhao,” Shi An gently pushed away the intellectual puzzle1 that Yan Zhao had placed in front of his eyes and said in a warm voice, “This one is not necessary.”

“You’re polite with Uncle?” Yan Zhao looked at him with wide eyes and slapped the puzzle with a crackling sound, “Don’t you kids all like this kind of stuff?”

Shi An couldn’t help but look at the neighboring bed.

The kid’s eyes were glowing!

“You can play with him,” Shi An looked at the little boy in the next bed and asked him, “Do you want to play with this?”

The boy nodded repeatedly.

Yan Zhao moved a chair to the neighboring bed and set up a small table. Two people were picking up the puzzle with head to head.

Yan Zhao was handsome with two small tiger teeth when he smiled, which made him very attractive to children. When he was about to leave, the little boy was already pulling at the corner of his clothes, deflating his mouth to cry, “Uncle, will you come back later?”

Yan Zhao smiled and scolded him, “Hey, you little boy, what later? Get well soon and you won’t be here anymore!”

The young couple both laughed, and Shi An also gently curled his eyes.

Yesterday the kid took his lanterns, plus his own, and gave them to the young couple. He held a lantern with a bad shape in one hand, and said in a milky voice, “One for dad, one for mom.”

The young couple smiled happily, as if they had received something precious, and held it in their hands with great importance, praising the beauty of it.

Shi An looked at it slightly dazed.

He suddenly remembered the days and nights when he was a child, waiting alone in an empty hospital room during the dawn and the darkness.

It seemed that at that time there was not much sadness, but the heart could not stop being barren, like a quiet wilderness with no life, so empty and silent, so vast and dark.

When he was young, it was always difficult to be alone in the hospital.

In the empty, quiet, white room, he felt his presence thinning out, melting into the transparent, empty air.

At that time, he often doubted whether he was alive or dead, or whether Shi An did not exist in the world at all, and everything was his imagination and dream.

Probably because at that time, Lu Qingzhi and Shi Wang never cared about him, so whether he existed or not was not important.
Compared to his childhood, he felt very relaxed now lying in the ward and being lazy.

In the afternoon, Fang Wanqing and Yan Liang came over to see him.

“Lady misses you,” Fang Wanqing said with a smile, “It keeps sneaking into your store, probably looking for you.”

Lady was arrogant and didn’t get close to others except Shi An. It was already a bit old and not very active, so it probably really felt lonely.

“I miss it too.” Shi An leaned on the bed and smiled lightly.

“It’s so clingy, it probably thinks you’re one of its own kind,” Yan Liang teased with a smile next to him, “You two are quite similar, but you don’t know each other well.”

Shi An gave him a faint look and then averted his gaze.

Still angry?

Yan Liang thought of the video and immediately made a big alarm.

Although in Shi An’s perception, he had deleted the video, but after returning home, he retrieved it back from the ‘recently deleted’ folder. Now, because of Shi An’s glancing at him like this, Yan Liang couldn’t help but feel weak.

“Are you still angry?” Yan Liang did not dare to look at him and lied, “I deleted it, I deleted it all, you saw it.”

Only then did Shi An look at him again, and Yan Liang hurriedly smiled at him, two small fangs showing by his thin lips.

“Ah, you made Xiao An angry?” Fang Wanqing laughed and raised her hand to push Yan Liang, “Why did you upset Xiao An?”

“Aunt Fang, you are biased.” Yan Liang pouted with his peach blossom eyes.

Fang Wanqing was unmoved: “Don’t I know you yet? Would Xiao An take the initiative to provoke you?”

Yan Liang wrinkled her nose.

“Only Xiao An can stand you,” Fang Wanqing looked at Yan Liang askance, “Little windmill.”2

“!!!” Yan Liang straightened up, “Why are you mentioning this again? I’m not, I’m not!!!”

Fang Wanqing smiled, covering her mouth.

“Little Windmill” was Yan Liang’s childhood nickname, no one called it anymore, but occasionally it was used to make jokes.

The children in Qingjiu Alley ate and slept together since they were young. If the children in the family were still missing at mealtime or bedtime, they had gone to someone else’s house.

Since he was a child, Yan Liang had liked to run around; eating, drinking, and sharing a bed around. Then one summer, when the neighbors gathered in front of the store and chatted in the evening breeze, someone raised a mouth, saying that Yan Liang was dishonest in sleeping and kept spinning when he fell asleep.

Who knew that everyone would agree, saying that Yan Liang slept like a small windmill; before sleeping, his head was still towards the head of the bed, after waking up the head was at the end of the bed.

Just after saying that, Zhou Yuan fell out of bed that night because Yan Liang was sleeping in circles.

For a whole week, Zhou Yuan walked from one end to the other end of the alley with a bruise on his forehead, spouting off about Yan Liang’s bad behavior.

Hence the name of the Little Windmill.

From then on, the people of the alley unilaterally announced the end of Yan Liang’s bed-sharing privileges.

But Yan Liang still ran to Shi An’s house with perseverance. He squatted at the door of the dessert shop punctually at noon and night every day, stubbornly trying to sleep with Shi An.

In the opinion of the people, Shi An was simply too lazy to bother to kick him out, so Yan Liang successfully got into Shi An’s bed every time.

This persistent bed-sharing did not stop until the age when it was no longer appropriate to sleep in the same bed with friends.

In fact, there was a private discussion and the consensus was that Shi An must have been forced to fall quite a few times.

“Shi An and I are true love,” Yan Liang was anxious, “Look at him, he doesn’t even mind me, you all mind me. Where am I spinning? No!!!”

Shi An’s knuckles curled up unconsciously following Yan Liang’s voice.

“Hey!” Fang Wanqing raised her hand and heavily scraped Yan Liang’s nose, “Still not admitting it? Ask Xiao An, did you sleep moving around? We didn’t even discuss the result back then, so did Xiao An fall or not? Xiao An, did you fall?”

Shi An was leaning against the bed watching the two of them tussling. When he was suddenly named, he was slightly stunned.

He saw the light blue curtains in the corner rise and fall with the wind. The window pane shone with a cold metallic light, making his eyes flash.

Shi An lowered his eyes and thought seriously.

Actually, he hadn’t fallen.

Shi An didn’t know whether Yan Liang spun when he slept, because when he slept with Yan Liang, Yan Liang didn’t spin.

It was also possible that the bed was big enough for two people to sleep on each end; Yan Liang spun a circle but he did not know..

When Shi An was a child, he often had dreams. In the dream, he was always chasing after Lu Qingzhi and Shi Wang, but he couldn’t catch up with them, so he was so tired and depressed that he couldn’t breathe.

He would prefer to have a gruesome and bloody nightmare, which was much better than this depressing and endless dream.

In this seemingly soft dream world, even if you fell asleep, you would be too tired to breathe. When waking up, you would still feel tired.

It was better to wake him up directly.

At the age when he needed to sleep in his parents’ arms the most, there was always no one at his side when he woke up at midnight. Later, when he passed this age, he was not used to sleeping with others

Except for Yan Liang.

He didn’t know why Yan Liang liked to sleep in the same bed with someone so much, but with Yan Liang by his side, he would feel that the dream wasn’t so unbearable anymore.

When Yan Liang was with him, he would sleep very deeply.

He was worried at first that he might lose his mind in his sleep, but Yan Liang’s reaction seemed to show that he did not.

“Xiao An is too lazy to care about you.” When Shi An didn’t answer, Fang Wanqing turned back to snicker at Yan Liang, “How old you were then, you still had to run to sleep with someone.”

Yan Liang’s mouth was flat and he didn’t speak.

He was very young and handsome. This kind of expression on his face was actually very pleasing to the eye.

“Okay, I won’t tease you anymore,” Fang Wanqing reached out and flicked his forehead, then turned to Shi An, saying, “Xiao An take a good rest. Aunt Fang won’t bother you anymore.”

Shi An answered yes.

The days of hospitalization, flipping through books and getting infusions, passed quickly.

These days he could only eat liquid food as his stomach would be uncomfortable after eating gruel.

Shi An didn’t feel like eating, but when more people came to visit him, almost everyone had to say something like, “It’s so terrible you can’t eat on the New Year,” which made him crave for it.

On the day he was discharged from the hospital, Shi An was very eager to eat as if it was the first time in his life.

When he returned to Qingjiu Alley, Shi An saw Lady squatting at the entrance of the alley at first sight.

If it hadn’t been for Fang Wanqing’s comment on how much Lady missed him, he wouldn’t have been able to tell.

The lady still looked calm and cool as it squatted there. Its tail curved beautifully, licking its front paws slowly and carefully.

When Lady was young, it had beautiful eyes, like the clear blue sky in winter, light and clear, and extremely clean.

There was a flow of people coming and going in the alley. An old-fashioned bicycle with a crooked handle was leaning at the door of the flower shop, and the old shoe shiner squinted his eyes and dozed off.

Lady paced slowly towards Shi An with its head tilted slightly between movement and silence.

Shi An bent down and hugged it.

The proud cat finally stopped being reserved and fell into Shi An’s arms, purring happily in its throat.

Two days after the New Year’s holiday, Shi An stayed home until the third morning and went to school.

Near the end of the semester, the air in the classroom was a little more tense than usual.

Cheng Yuan could write Chinese calligraphy. When other head teachers were watching their students’ final review, he turned a deaf ear to anything outside the window and nestled in the office with a brush to write a couplet.

After writing it, he had to bring it to the classroom and put it up, one in the classroom and one outside the corridor.

These days, as long as you stood in a position where you could see the teaching building, you could see Class 3 at a glance.

Thanks to the blessing of the couplets, Class 3 was extraordinarily red inside and outside, which stood out in the white teaching building.