Cloud Moving Hands

Waiting for Jizo

20 They followed us like flies to honey, the unclaimed, through the afternoon streets of Pingyao before the rain came, their presence palpable as a multitude of hands reaching out from the walls. The old city seemed forsaken, its inhabitants retreating from the heat, trapped as if in sap, the amber recesses of forlorn shops, the dusty inventory of salted beef slabs, cardboard shoes and statuettes of Buddha, deformed like melted candles. No sound of laughter from these dwellers, inert as the ground itself, centuries of the living packed down hard as stones. The ground, unforgiving, unable to assume the dead. Devoid of tree and flower, schoolchildren supplied the only color, survivors in the land of the single-child policy. Skirting the shadow of their mothers’ ineffectual umbrellas, they licked, these cherished ones, icy treats, sucked on straws for the last sweet drop of pop. Others came here before us and prayed. They cleaned what they could, sweeping with a surge of devotion the clouds of bondage a city as old as this one inherits, compounds, an agitation on windless nights. In a tiny upstairs room at the De Ju Yuan Guesthouse, careful not to leave anything behind, � Waiting for Jizo 21 we prayed for Jizo to illuminate with his luminous jewel the way out of the ruins for those remaining unclaimed, long after the greedy ones had left on whatever flaming boat they could cling to. The little ones, forgotten in the frenzied exodus, hid between brick and mortar, suspended in the timelessness of these crevices, waiting for Jizo to ferry them to the other side where loneliness doesn’t weep through walls, doesn’t trickle out of alleyways like an overflowing communal latrine. 22 ...