One Story by Huina Zheng

How to Find a Singing Leaf

Ahma is the one who teaches me how to find a singing leaf. How, in a forest, among identical greens, to use my breath to locate the mouth that wants to tremble. She takes me into the thickets behind the mountain. Ahma narrows her eyes, searching for the leaf that shows its veins in sunlight, its edges bitten into small arcs by insects. A shape like lips. I ask her if leaves can be hurt. When insects bite them, do they cry out? Do their voices grow hoarse? She laughs, revealing the gap where a front tooth is missing, and tells me not to worry: pain makes a leaf stronger, more fluent in trembling. The meaning of suffering, she says, is to awaken the will to survive. To want the breath more than Death does. She teaches me to observe, to test them one by one, to use my lips to interrogate the soul of each leaf. I try sixteen before the seventeenth presses back against my mouth. I try sixteen without finding anything. A cold shiver runs through me. It is not the wind. There is no wind at all. It is the leaf’s own spasm. Ahma tells me to blow gently, to wake the leaf’s sleeping “ear.” The forest has already darkened. The gaps between the trees have filled with indigo shadows. Some melodies, she warns, must not be played after dusk, especially those that imitate the mating calls of birds and beasts. Those sounds give directions to bodiless things wandering in the mountains. Her childhood playmate did not believe her. He played a mountain partridge's mating song at twilight. The next morning, people found him sitting against a bamboo root, his body cold, no trace of blood beneath his skin. As though something had emptied him.

Remember, Ahma says, her voice sinking into the soil: blow life into it. Imagine your breath as green, carrying the force of new shoots breaking through earth. If you blow with grief, she says, what has been held inside will begin to clot, filling your lungs until there is no room left for air. If you blow with anger, what you have stored away will ignite, turning your chest into a chamber of echoes.

***

I message my mother from time to time. She works in a city so far away that our seasons do not match. The snow begins to fall where I am and she is still wearing short sleeves. One evening she messages that there are only three months left until the Spring Festival, that she will be home soon. I send her a short video of me playing the leaf in response. At first, the sound is nothing but a rasp, caught tight in the throat. Then it thickens, dulled, almost swallowed. Finally, it clears. Rises into the treetops and startles a yellow oriole into flight. I tell her this is the song I play when I miss her.

No, I correct myself. It is not something I play at all.

The leaf catches the sound of the cicadas, all that summer singing, and twists it into a thin strand that rises slowly back into the sky.

Listen, I say. That is the sound of nine months of longing, gathered together.

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.