The First Words

She sent the boy out with the sieve on his head, as the rite required. The mirror in the sieve caught the moon and threw a small bright disc of light across the lane, and Ah Cheng trotted out into the street, solemn and laughing by turns, because he was a child and did not know he was carrying a fate.

The wife followed at a distance, as the rite required. She was not to speak. She was not to choose whom she listened to. She was only to walk, and to hear, and the first human words that reached her ear after the sieve had left the house were to be the answer.

The lane was quiet. It was late. The houses had their lamps drawn in behind paper, and only the occasional dog moved in the dark. She walked with her hands folded in her sleeves, and her heart was beating, and she told herself again that she did not believe in any of this.

Ah Cheng stopped at the corner by the tea house, because the tea house was open, because two men were still sitting there over a last cup, and because children, being children, are drawn to light the way moths are drawn, and cannot be argued out of it.

The wife stopped a little way behind him, in the shadow of a door. She did not lean forward. She did not cup her ear. She stood still, and she waited, and the first words that came to her were not meant for her at all, which is the whole of how the rite works.

Two old friends were finishing their tea. One of them, a man with a weathered face, was getting up to go home. He stretched, and he said to his companion, in the lazy, exhausted voice of a man who has sat too long over a warm cup: It's cold out. Why didn't you go in and lie down and rest?

The words came softly, and they were not spoken to her, and she had not chosen them. They reached her out of the dark, exactly as the rite had promised. And then, because she had heard what she had come to hear, she called the boy and took him home.

She walked back through the quiet lane with the sieve under her arm, and the mirror swinging against her side, and she turned the words over in her mind the way one turns a coin over and over to read its faces. It's cold out. Why didn't you go in and lie down and rest?

She did not like the sound of it. A wife who has learned to read omens, even one who tells herself she does not believe in them, does not like a prophecy that speaks of lying down. Lying down, in the language of omens, is what men do when they have fallen, not when they have risen.

She put the boy to bed with a sweet from the neighbor's plate. She took the mirror out of the sieve and set it back on the dressing table, in the exact place she had found it, so that her husband would never know she had moved it. Then she sat in his study with the lamp burning, and waited for the long night to end.