The Embroidered Shoes by Can Xue Page A

bring him back to life. But he did not intend to tell the old man. He did not tell me the reason. After a long silence, he said quietly to himself, “The struggle in the dark depths is spectacular. In no sense can an ordinary person reach such a place.”
    One year later, I became confined to a wheelchair. Ever since that happened, my visual and audial abilities have been developing rapidly. It seems that the world surrounding me has become a crystal palace, transparent and shining from morning to night. However, at the extreme depth of my vision there is a small, moving black spot similar to a colon in a piece of writing. One night when I woke up I heard a weak noise resembling the clawing of a rat scratching among scraps of paper. I did not turn on the light—because darkness has no existence for me. Looking straight ahead, I could see that the black dot had turned into a small torch that disappeared after bobbing up and down several times. That rat’s noise grew steadily louder, until it became deafening. My husband was startled awake. Sitting up, he mumbled, “Father’s dead, died just now. I didn’t tell him about your illness.” I could feel the hesitation in his subconscious, though it was only a flash. In the end, he had come around to my point of view.
    My complete victory increased a certain feeling of safety in me. It seems that my father-in-law was too fragile to withstand a single blow. After he passed away, I became more and more contented with my life in the wheelchair. One day a doctor came and gave me a thorough examination. His diagnosis was that my legs were perfectly normal. Immediately he ordered me to stand up.
    â€œBut why?” I stared at him with hatred.
    At this moment my husband came in. With great effort he explained to the doctor, emphasizing repeatedly the advantages of my life in the wheelchair, as well as the disadvantages of standing up and walking, and so on. Finally, he said, “It seems to me that it’s good enough for her to be able to live like this. It is much more natural than her running the marathon in the past.”
    Blinking his eyes, the doctor was completely confused. After a while he stuttered, “Then why should you ask me to come in the first place?”
    My husband said, a little annoyed, “I asked you to treat her cold. These days she has a slight cold. We would like you to prescribe some medicine. But as soon as you arrived, you started to treat her legs indiscriminately. You are too subjective.”
    The doctor wrote a prescription and left in a rage. After the doctor was gone, my husband said to me, “Take it easy. Now that father is gone, nobody will come and bother you anymore.”
    Once in a while I hear news of sports from the outside world, such as who has won the championship or placed second and so on. Such things have become like smoke and clouds from another world to me in the wheelchair. My mind is becoming duller and duller and stiffer and stiffer daily. Every day I wander around from this room to that room by pushing the two wheels with my hands. Sometimes, I even go out the door and circle around the houses nearby.
    The years of my life in this crystal clear world have caused my body to become radiant. At the beginning it was a little bit phosphorescent, starting from the nails on my toes. Because of the shoes I had on, nobody could see it and it was nothing. Finally, the day came when my husband told me that my legs had disappeared completely from his sight. From a distance I looked like a half-bodied person floating on a cloud of phosphorescence. Besides that, the crown of my head had started to shine with little dots of light. He also discovered that my arms had become extremely strong and powerful. Maybe it was the result my pushing the wheelchair. Thus I float and swim freely in and around the house. I feel completely satisfied and comfortable. The only trouble is that I can’t help feeling