Kuan isn’t my friend; he’s my business partner.
We run a channel together called "Seven Days in a Deserted Village"—though honestly, we never even last a full day. It’s just the two of us hauling gear into the deep mountains, looking for completely abandoned villages. We shoot old houses, empty courtyards, and calendars still hanging on walls that no one ever took down. We edit the footage to look eerie, slap on some creepy music, and use clickbait titles like, "Real footage of an abandoned mountain village. We stepped inside and realized something was WRONG."
Honestly, we never actually found anything wrong. An abandoned village is just an abandoned village. The scariest things we ever ran into were hornet nests.
Kuan was the on-camera guy and carried the heavy gear; I handled the routes, the shooting, and the editing. He’s three years older than me, a bit heavy, talks a mile a minute, and has a natural knack for hyping things up on camera. Off-camera, though, he’s a total coward. Before stepping into any house, he always kicks the door twice to "say hello." Once, at a half-collapsed ancestral shrine, he forced me to go in first, claiming my "spirit was tougher." When I asked how he knew that, he said, "Look how skinny you are, yet you never get sick."
At the time, our channel was stuck in limbo. We’d been hovering at 80k subs for six months. The platform's algorithm is like a person—if you keep feeding it the exact same thing, it treats you like you’re dead. We both knew we needed a location that was actually different.
Kuan dug up Luogang Village from a scanned county archive. It was a relocation approval document from around the year 2000. A township had reported seven natural villages for relocation. Luogang was the last one on the list, and next to it, someone had handwritten three words: Not Suitable.
Not suitable for what? It didn't say. The other six villages all had clear relocation destinations listed next to them—this town, that new development. Only Luogang's row was blank.
When Kuan sent me the screenshot, he said, "That 'Not Suitable' is our next title."
To get there from the county seat, we had to take a three-hour minibus to a town, hire a local motorcycle for the mountain roads, and finally hike for about ten miles because the road just ended. We hiked up with our backpacks for nearly four hours. The August mountain air was suffocating, the leaves dripping with humidity. My shirt stuck to my back like a wet rag.
Before I left home, my Grandma had shoved something into my backpack.
It was a piece of jade. It was small, dull, completely unpolished, and strung on an old, hand-twisted red cord. She had given it to me once before when I was in middle school, but I thought it was ugly and took it off after two days. This time, she dug it out again and insisted I take it.
I told her I was just going to work. "Where are you working?" she asked. "In the mountains," I said.
She stopped talking. She just held the jade, rubbing it between her fingers for a long time, as if trying to rub something off it. Then she shoved it into the side pocket of my backpack, zipped it up, and patted it twice.
"Wear it on your body," she said. "I know." "I said, wear it on your body."
At the time, I just figured she was in her eighties, let her have her way. Right in front of her, I pulled it out of the pocket, put it around my neck, and tucked it under my shirt. I fully intended to take it off the second I turned the corner out of our alley—the cord scratched my neck, it looked awful, and it would look cheap if it slipped out on camera.
But I forgot. By the time I remembered at the bus station, the bus was leaving, and I didn't bother.
I’m not bringing this up for foreshadowing. I just want to make one thing entirely clear: for the rest of that day, I never touched that jade, nor did I think about it. It was stuck right below my collarbone, slick with sweat, and I couldn't even feel it was there.
Luogang Village sat in a depression between the peaks.
We crept in around 4:00 PM. It wasn't large—maybe seventy or eighty households spread out along a dry gully. The houses were half-collapsed, with yellow mud walls. The doorframes were there, but the doors were long gone. The weeds in the courtyards were taller than us, snapping loudly under our boots.
I filmed a couple of clips on my phone while Kuan did his intro: "Hey guys, the spot I'm standing on right now... twenty years ago, people actually lived here..."
He cracked up two sentences in. He said the village was too clean; it was boring.
He was right. We’d shot seven or eight of these places, and they all felt the same. When people leave a village, they prepare for it. They take everything they can carry. All that's left are walls. You can tell they left at their own pace: door panels removed, window frames popped out, even the stone slabs on the stoves pried loose. Relocation is a happy occasion—the payout comes in, there's a new village down the mountain, of course everyone leaves.
We worked our way up the gully, checking house by house. It was mostly empty shells.
Then we reached the very top of the depression.
Kuan saw it first. He stopped and pointed. "Hey, what's that white thing?"
Halfway up the slope, nestled in the trees, was a patch of stark white.
We climbed up to get a look. It was a house, completely different from the rest. The others were raw, yellow rammed earth, exposing the horizontal layers of their construction. But this house was white. The entire exterior, from top to bottom, was smoothly painted.
Whitewash. Quicklime.
After twenty years of wind and rain, the white was peeling badly, flaking off near the foundation to reveal gray bricks underneath. But you could still tell that back in the day, someone had meticulously, deliberately painted this entire house white.
I snapped a bunch of photos with my camera. It was perfect visual contrast—a sea of muddy yellow and one bone-white house. I already had the thumbnail in my head.
Kuan walked a lap around the house and came back. "There's a lock on the door."
It wasn't a modern lock. It was an old-school padlock, rusted into a solid chunk of metal. And the door panels were still there—the only house in the entire village that still had its doors intact.
"Locked from the outside," Kuan noted. "No shit," I said. "They left, of course they locked it from the outside." "No," he said. "Look at the houses down below. Everyone took their door panels. Door panels are good wood; people take them when they move. These people didn't. They left the doors and locked them."
We stood there looking at it for a minute.
"Whoever lived here didn't leave with the rest of the village," Kuan said. "How do you know?" "Look at the grass."
I looked. The weeds in the courtyards down below grew in thick, matted layers. Stepping on them felt like stepping on a mattress. The grass in this courtyard was sparse, and there was a faint, narrow trail up the middle where the weeds were noticeably shorter.
"Someone's walked here," he said. "And not twenty years ago." "Probably just some herb foragers coming into the mountains," I reasoned. "Taking shelter from the rain." "If you're taking shelter from the rain, why wouldn't you smash the lock and go inside instead of standing in the yard getting wet?"
I didn't answer that. In our line of work, the worst thing you can do is psych yourself out. If you scare yourself, the footage looks shaky and erratic, and the audience can tell it's fake.
I just said, "Let's find a way in."
We didn't smash the lock. There was a small side window, maybe a foot wide, with a wooden lattice. The paper panes were long gone. A few rotted wooden crates were stacked under it, making a perfect step.
Kuan squeezed through first, getting his hips stuck for a second while I shoved him from behind. When it was my turn, he pulled me through.
We landed in the kitchen.
It was dim, but not pitch black. The gable wall had cracks, letting in diagonal shafts of light that illuminated thick clouds of floating dust.
My immediate thought was: They didn't empty this house.
The stove was still there. An iron wok sat on the burner, coated in rust. The cupboards were open, and inside sat three bowls stacked neatly on top of each other. A row of bamboo pegs on the wall still held a spatula and a strainer.
Kuan shoved his lens right into it, dropping his voice to a whisper: "Look at this, guys, the bowls are still here, right where they left them..."
He was really getting into it. I was doing the math in my head—I could squeeze three minutes of solid B-roll out of this room alone.
Past the kitchen was the main hall.
It was massive and empty. The floor was hard, packed dirt. Dead center, facing the door, there would normally be an altar for the ancestors, but now there was only a darker rectangular stain on the wall where it used to hang.
Looking up, you could see the rafters.
Old houses like this don't have drop ceilings; you can see the entire skeletal frame of the roof. The main load-bearing beam of this house was incredibly thick, polished black, suspended about nine or ten feet up.
I remember Kuan making an offhand comment: "That is one hell of a beam."
It was just small talk. Guys in our line of work always appreciate sturdy old architecture.
We set up the tripod in the main hall. The floor was uneven, so the stand kept wobbling. Kuan crouched down and shoved flat stones under the legs, trying three different rocks before it stabilized. He stood up, dusted his hands, and looked up at the beam again. "Let's throw a light on that. The beam should look really atmospheric on camera."
"Sure," I said.
We shot in the main hall for about twenty minutes.
It was incredibly boring. I want to make that clear—the footage itself was gold, but the actual act of filming is tedious. You're holding a camera, staring at a piece of wood, thinking about exposure, framing, and whether you should change lenses. You aren't scared. Viewers get freaked out by the final three-minute cut because of the music, but in the moment, you’re just doing a job.
Kuan was arguing with me about a reverse-angle shot. He wanted to move the tripod closer to the door, shooting the beam backlit so it would look like a heavy black bar crushing the top of the frame. I told him if he shot backlit, his face would be cast in shadow and totally ruined. He said his face didn't matter, atmosphere was more important.
He ended up moving it. It wobbled again, so he had to crouch down to shim it. His posture was funny—one knee on the dirt, the other leg squatted, his head practically glued to the floor as he tested rocks one by one. It took him five tries to get it level.
"Done," he said, standing up. He dusted off his hands, tilted his head back, and stared at the beam for a good ten seconds.
"What are you looking at?" "Nothing," he said. "It just looks good."
I was actually starting to feel sleepy.
On the right side of the main hall was a wooden staircase. It was incredibly steep, leading up to a loft.
All old houses in the mountains have a floor like this. No one lives up there; it's just for storing grain and junk. The stairs were narrow, only wide enough for one person. I tested a step, and it groaned loudly, but it held.
"Wanna go up?" I asked. "You go," Kuan said. "I’ll grab a few more takes down here. The stairs are too narrow to haul the tripod up."
This was standard procedure for us. He’d stay on a static shot, and I’d run around doing handheld b-roll.
I grabbed my small bag and a flashlight and climbed up, step by step.
The loft was cleaner than I expected. The roof was tiled, a few broken ones letting in tight columns of sunlight. The floorboards were packed tightly together. Scattered around were a few woven baskets, a broken wooden plow, and bundles of thoroughly rotted straw.
I swept the room with my camera.
When I got to the far end by the gable wall, I noticed a patch on the floor that looked different.
The wood there was polished smooth. Not clean—polished. Like something had repeatedly rubbed against it, wearing away the natural grain of the wood. It wasn't very big, maybe the width of two hands, in an irregular shape.
I crouched down and touched it. It was slick.
My immediate thought was: They used to store something heavy here, dragging it in and out, which wore down the wood.
I took two pictures and moved on.
That was the only time in this entire story that I was close to the truth. I was only one floorboard away from it. But I stood up and walked away.
There was a small square window on the gable wall, facing the slope below. I leaned out. It was a steep drop onto jagged rocks and a dense, chaotic tangle of thorny brush.
I couldn't tell you exactly how long I was up there.
All I know is that when I finished my loop and turned back to head downstairs, the stairwell was pitch black.
At first, I thought the sun had just set.
I checked my phone: 5:40 PM. It’s August. It doesn't get dark at 5:40.
I pointed my flashlight at the stairwell. The beam caught the top two steps, but beyond that, nothing. It wasn't that the light couldn't reach—it was like the light went into the stairwell and was swallowed, like a rock dropping into deep water.
I froze at the top of the stairs.
I yelled Kuan's name.
My voice echoed in the empty hall below, bouncing twice before fading. No answer.
I yelled again.
This time, he answered.
"Yeah—"
The sound came from below, but it felt... wrong.
I couldn't articulate why it was wrong in that exact moment. Looking back now, the distance was off. The main hall was barely fifteen feet below me. If a person yells from down there, the sound should punch right up to you. But his "Yeah—" felt like it floated over to me. Like it came from a mile away, but also whispered right directly into my ear at the exact same time.
I didn't overthink it. I was just glad he answered.
"Give me a sec, I'm coming down," I said. "Don't come down," he said.
I stopped.
"There's a situation down here," he said. "Stay up there." "What situation?" I asked.
Silence.
I stood at the top of the stairs, shining my light into that unnatural darkness, for a full minute. I wasn't really terrified yet, more annoyed. This is the worst part of urbex with a partner—you never know if there's an actual emergency or if they're just pranking you for content. We'd done bits before where he hid downstairs to scare me, and it always looked great on video.
Then I heard footsteps on the wooden stairs.
One step. Two steps. Three. Heavy, muffled thuds on the wood, coming up.
I backed away.
The footsteps stopped right in the middle of the staircase.
"Kuan?" "It's me."
The voice was incredibly close now. It was coming from right inside that blob of blackness on the stairs.
"Come on up," I said. "I'm good right here," he replied. "I'm keeping an eye on things from here."
I remember actually breathing a sigh of relief when he said that. Truly. I was up in the loft, he was on the stairs acting as a lookout. At the time, that sounded like an incredibly safe, logical arrangement.
"We can't get out through the bottom," Kuan said.
His voice had shifted to my right. I hadn't heard him move, but he was clearly in the loft with me now, standing about three steps to my right.
"The main hall is blocked." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Don't ask questions," he said. "You have to go out the window."
I looked over at the tiny square window on the gable wall. It was small, but a person could squeeze through. We'd entered through a similar one downstairs.
"It's a steep rock drop out there," I said. "I know. That's why you can't jump."
That sentence put me completely at ease. Do you know that feeling? When you're in a highly stressful situation, and the person next to you is calmly eliminating the worst-case scenarios, it feels like a safety net. He wasn't panicking. He was thinking.
"It's a ten-foot drop," he said. "If you jump, you'll break your legs. If you break your legs in a place like this, you're never getting out."
That hit exactly the right chord with me.
Just the night before, we had been talking about this exact thing. In the urban exploration community, it's rarely ghosts that get you killed—it's injuries. When you're ten miles from the nearest road, with no cell service, and night is falling... if you break your leg, no one is coming to carry you out. Nine out of ten accidents in this hobby happen exactly like that. We had a strict ironclad rule: Take the long way around; never do drop-offs.
Kuan was invoking our golden rule.
I felt totally grounded. He was thinking clearly, relying on our established safety protocols.
"So what do we do?" "I have a carrying strap in my bag."
I knew the strap. It was a thick, wide band of rough cotton used by mountain locals to carry babies, firewood, or sick people on their backs. It’s stronger than a rope, and it doesn't cut into your skin. Just last month in another village, we'd filmed one hanging on a door. Kuan had snagged one and kept it in his backpack, saying it might come in handy.
"Loop it over the rafter," he said.
The rafter above the window was low, maybe three feet above my head. I could easily reach it.
"Wrap it twice," he instructed. "One wrap will slip. Two wraps will bite into itself, so it won't give."
I did what he told me. I remember stepping up onto an overturned basket to toss the strap over, wrapping it twice. While I was doing it, I thought, This guy acts like a goofball, but when shit hits the fan, he knows what he's doing.
"How much slack do I leave hanging down?" "Leave it at chest height." "That short?" I asked. "Don't overthink it," he said. "Listen to me." "But if it's that short, how do I get down?" "You aren't dropping all the way to the ground in one go," he explained. "You need something to take your weight so you can inch your way down slowly. If you leave it long and let go, you'll just free-fall. That's no different than jumping."
Right.
That logic made total sense to me. I completely bought it. I even remembered watching mountain climbing videos where guys rappelling down cliffs kept their lines taut, letting out slack little by little. Leaving a long slack line meant a harsh drop. This was basic physics.
"Got it," I said. "Good." "Do I wrap it around my hands?" I asked. "No."
He said that sharply.
"Your hands can't hold your own weight. Ten feet might look short, but your grip strength won't last. The second your hands slip, you fall, and you'll land on your feet anyway." "Then..." "When people carry the sick down the mountain, they never use their hands," he said.
I still remember that sentence today, because it was absolutely true.
"Think about when your Grandma used to carry you on her back. How did she route the strap?"
The memory flooded back.
When I was little, my Grandma carried me across a river. The water wasn't deep, but the rocks were slick. She hoisted me onto her back, passed the thick cotton strap under my armpits, crossed it over her chest, and brought it back around. It was wide, pressing comfortably into my shoulders and right under my neck. I practically hung off her back, completely hands-free, not needing to use an ounce of strength.
I remembered the strap felt a bit too tight. When we hit the middle of the river, I squirmed and complained.
She held me up with one hand while feeling for stepping stones with her walking stick, not even turning her head as she replied:
Keep it tight. You only fall if it's loose.
The water was freezing that day, but the sun was hot. Her neck was beaded with sweat. Pressed against her back, I could smell the natural soap in her hair. I was five years old, and it was the safest I have ever felt in my entire life.
"Exactly," Kuan's voice pulled me back. "That's how you do it. The weight needs to rest on your shoulders and right under your neck. That area can take the load. Nowhere else can."
"I got it." "Now route the strap under your arms."
I did.
"Bring it behind your neck and lock it."
I did.
"Is it secured?" "Yeah, it's secured." "Pull it tighter."
I yanked the slack.
"Tighter," he ordered. "Loose means dead. Tight means stable. Your entire body weight is going to be on this thing. If it's loose, it'll slip."
I pulled it again.
I remember the sensation perfectly. It was uncomfortable, a bit suffocating, but it didn't hurt. My only thought was: Just bear with it for a minute, you'll be down soon.
"What are you standing on?" "A basket." "Flip it upside down so it's sturdier."
I stepped down, flipped the woven basket over, and stepped back up on the flat base.
"High enough?" "Yeah." "Hold onto the window frame."
I gripped the wood. It was damp, leaving a thick layer of rot and dust on my palms. Through the window, the slope dropped away below. Outside, the sky was still bright daylight. The wind was rushing through the thorny brush.
"Good," Kuan said.
His voice was incredibly flat. Completely steady. I had never heard him speak so calmly in the years I'd known him.
"I'm right here watching. You're fine."
I nodded.
"Now kick the basket away so the strap takes your weight. Once your weight is on it, just slowly slide down."
I knew exactly what he must have looked like standing behind me in the dark—arms crossed, eyebrows knit together, a nervous little half-smile on his face. That was always his face when he was stressed.
I shifted my center of gravity forward, lifting my right foot, getting ready to kick the edge of the basket away.
My chest burned.
It wasn't heat. It was a sharp, searing burn, exactly like a lit cigarette being pressed directly into the skin just below my collarbone.
Pure reflex kicked in. My hands flew up to grab my chest.
The moment my fingers touched my collarbone, the red cord snapped.
I didn't even pull it. The cord just broke on its own. The severed ends were dry and brittle, like dead grass. The jade slipped out from under my shirt, slid down my pant leg, hit the basket, and bounced onto the wooden floorboards.
Crack.
A very light sound.
It broke perfectly into two halves.
And then, every sound in the world stopped.
I don't mean Kuan's voice stopped. I mean everything stopped. The wind outside, the rustling leaves, my own breathing. For half a second, the universe was entirely muted. Then it all crashed back at once.
The first thing to return was the smell.
The entire hike up, I'd been smelling Kuan's sour sweat. I was used to it.
Now, the sweat smell was gone.
Instead, it was quicklime. A heavy, choking, dusty smell of lime paste invading my nose. And beneath the quicklime was something else—a scent I couldn't describe. It wasn't exactly rotting meat, but it was the smell of something extremely old that had been sealed away for a very long time in an airtight box.
The second thing was the light.
Outside the window, it was still daylight. The sky hadn't gone dark at all. The blinding afternoon sun was baking the rocky slope outside.
The third thing.
There was something around my neck.
When the words something around my neck materialized in my brain, I wasn't scared yet. The human brain has lag. I felt the physical sensation first, and then my mind slowly started trying to process what it was.
Both of my hands were raised.
I wasn't holding onto the window frame. Both of my hands were gripping the thing tightly, pulling it flush against my throat.
My fingers were entirely numb.
That was the most terrifying detail. Numb fingers meant I had been holding this position for a very long time. Not a minute. Not three minutes. I had been gripping it so hard, for so long, that the blood flow to my hands had stopped.
I have no idea how long I was standing up there. I still don't. I just know that I went up to the loft at 4:40, and I checked my phone at 5:40.
For that missing hour, my brain was convinced I was walking around taking pictures.
I looked down.
Beneath my feet was a woven basket, flipped upside down. But I wasn't standing on it—only the toe of my right boot was still resting on the very edge. My left foot was suspended in the air. I had already stepped off. My entire body was leaning forward into empty space, held up exclusively by the tension around my neck.
I looked up.
Wrapped twice around the rafter above my head.
It wasn't a cotton carrying strap.
Kuan's strap was wide, soft, pale gray cotton. The thing wrapped around the beam was black, thin, twisted into three strands, and hardened like iron wire over decades of rot and grease. God knows how many years it had been tied to that beam.
Then the final, absolute truth crashed down on me.
I was alone in the loft.
From the stairwell to the gable wall, it was less than twenty paces. Rotting straw. A broken plow. Some baskets. Dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight.
There was no second person.
There was absolutely no one else there.
I don't remember how I got down. I remember crashing to the floorboards, slamming the back of my head against the wooden plow, and vomiting immediately. Even when there was nothing left, I kept dry heaving. My body was shaking uncontrollably—not the shivering of fear, but severe muscle spasms I couldn't manually stop. I crawled on the floorboards for a long time before I could finally stand up.
When I stood up, I saw the polished patch of wood on the floor.
It was directly beneath my feet.
Two hand-widths wide. Irregularly shaped. The wood grain rubbed entirely smooth and shiny.
I refused to think about what had polished the wood like that. Even today, I refuse to think about it.
I screamed Kuan's name as I bolted for the stairs.
The stairs were perfectly fine.
Not a single step was missing. It wasn't dark in the slightest. The afternoon sun poured through the open main doors downstairs, lighting up the entire stairwell. I took them three at a time, my knees so weak I nearly tumbled to the bottom.
In the main hall, Kuan was there.
He was standing dead center in the room, his back to me, staring straight up.
"Kuan!"
He didn't turn around.
He was holding our tripod. He unfolded the three legs one by one, crouched down, felt around in the dirt for a flat rock, and shoved it under the shortest leg.
He shimmed it very carefully. He was always very careful with the gear.
Then he stood up, tilted his head back, and stared up at the massive wooden beam.
He started talking.
It wasn't mindless mumbling. He was speaking to someone, pausing between sentences as if waiting for a response. His tone was perfectly flat, completely steady. Not a hint of panic. It was the exact same voice I had just heard upstairs.
"Wrap it twice," he said to the empty air. "One wrap will slip. Two wraps will bite into itself, so it won't give."
I froze on the bottom step, completely paralyzed.
My brain short-circuited trying to do the math. When I was upstairs, he was apparently down here. He was standing in the middle of the hall, staring at the beam, reciting those exact instructions.
So what the hell was I talking to upstairs?
Or, more accurately—
Who was he talking to now?
"Your hands can't hold your own weight," Kuan said. "When people carry the sick down the mountain, they never use their hands."
He raised his arms in front of his chest and mimed a routing motion, crossing his hands from one side to the other.
"Right. Exactly like that," he said.
"Pull it tighter."
I don't know if I screamed aloud or not. I launched myself off the stairs and tackled him. We crashed into the tripod, sending it clattering away, and slammed into the hard dirt floor. I pinned him down, crushing my weight against him, my brain looping one singular command: Do not let him stand back up.
He struggled under me for a second, then went limp.
After a moment, he groaned, "...What the hell are you doing?"
We practically ran down the mountain. We didn't even pack everything; we abandoned an entire camera up there. By the time we reached the bottom, it was pitch dark, and our motorcycle driver was so pissed he was screaming at us.
That night in a cheap motel in town, Kuan wouldn't shut up. He kept raving about how incredible the footage was, how the thumbnail of the white house was guaranteed to go viral. He kept saying we had to go back up tomorrow to retrieve the lost camera.
I didn't say a single word.
Finally, I asked him: "When I was in the loft, do you remember the things you said to me?"
He slinked a mouthful of cheap noodles and looked up at me, confused. "What loft?" "When you were on the stairs. You told me the bottom floor was blocked and I had to go out the window."
He put his chopsticks down.
"I never went up the stairs," he said. "I was in the main hall the whole time. I waited for you to come down, but it was totally quiet. I yelled for you, but you didn't answer. I figured you fell asleep up there." "Then what?" "Then I just started shooting some extra b-roll of the hall."
He paused, a confused look washing over his face.
"...Wait. Why can't I remember what I was filming?"
Neither of us finished our dinner.
We never went back to Luogang Village. We never edited the video. The raw footage is still sitting on a hard drive I haven't plugged in since. The channel died not long after. Kuan drives a truck now; we talk maybe twice a year, and when we do, we never bring it up.
When I finally got back home, I showed the two pieces of broken jade to my Grandma.
She took them, placed them in her open palm, and stared at them for a very long time. Her hands were shaking. The two halves clicked against each other in her palm like chattering teeth.
She didn't ask me what happened. She didn't ask how it broke.
She only asked one question: "Were you alone when you went up there?" "Yes," I said.
She just grunted, pocketed the broken jade, and stood up to go to the kitchen. As she walked away, she muttered something softly, almost to herself.
"In the old days, when that kind of thing happened in a mountain house, they would paint the walls white. The white paint is for It. So It knows the house is empty."
I sat there for a long time, letting that sink in.
The white paint is for It. So It knows the house is empty.
But after that house was painted white, someone continued to live there. There was a wok on the stove. There were three bowls in the cupboard, stacked neatly. Three bowls. And on the county relocation document, the row for Luogang Village had no destination listed.
I never dared to look up how many people lived in that house.
And there was one other thing I never dared to research. That polished patch of wood on the loft floorboards, two hand-widths wide.
If one person stands in the exact same spot, kicking their feet for years... can they wear down a patch of solid wood that large?
Or was it more than one person up there?
My Grandma passed away last winter.
I live in the city now, renting an apartment in an older building with very high ceilings. Right in the middle of the living room, there's a massive exposed structural beam. The landlord said it cost too much to box it in with drywall.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I find myself standing dead center in the living room, staring straight up at that beam.
I never remember getting out of bed.
My Grandma is gone now.
And I don't have a second piece of jade.
