The storm came in waves that smelled of rust and wet earth, smothering the village in an ashen haze. In the middle of it all stood Old Wen, the scraggly caretaker of the village’s public restroom, better known as the 模糊的toilet. A twisted wooden sign with fading red lettering marked its presence at the edge of a desolate field where weeds swayed like hesitant thoughts.
The toilet wasn’t merely a place of function. It was an entity–a being, some would whisper–that seemed to breathe with the murmur of the wind. The paint peeled off its walls as though shedding skin, and the dim light inside flickered erratically, casting distorted shadows that moved with a sentient rhythm. For decades, Old Wen had tended to it diligently, his gnarled hands scrubbing the tiled floors until they shone like mirrors reflecting a murky sky.
“Why don’t you leave?” asked Li Xiaoyi, a girl of sixteen with a face full of hunger—not for food, but for knowledge. She stood at the doorway one evening, arms crossed, her schoolbooks clutched under one arm. The river of rain behind her blurred the world, dissolving shapes into a watercolor of muted grays.
Wen barely looked up from his scrubby bucket. His back was stooped beyond redemption, his eyes forever downcast as though carrying the weight of untold tragedies. “Leave?” he repeated, his toothless voice like sandpaper against silence. “Where would I go?”
Xiaoyi stepped over the threshold, her curiosity outweighing the disgust of the pungent air. “Every day, people come and go. Farmers, merchants, travelers. They use the toilet, they wash their faces, and then they leave. But you—” She gestured vaguely at the crumbling tiles. “You just stay.”
Wen finally glanced at her, his eyes like the frayed ends of candle wicks. “This模糊的toilet keeps us all together.”
“Us?” Xiaoyi couldn’t help but laugh. “You mean the flies and the stink?”
“No,” Wen said calmly, his hand still scrubbing the same corner of the floor he’d been scrubbing for years. “It keeps the wandering souls and the fading dreams.”
That would have been the end of it, another strange story about Wen, had Xiaoyi not decided to visit again. Something about the old man’s words tugged at her insides like an itch she couldn’t reach. Over her next several visits, she began to see the 模糊的toilet through Wen’s weary eyes: a liminal space, suspended between the concrete and the intangible. Travelers lingered longer than necessary at the sinks as if something unseen held them captive. Shadows on the walls morphed into faces, grimacing or laughing silently. Even time itself seemed to waver, the hands on Xiaoyi’s watch circling slower around the dial.
“They come here to leave what they cannot carry,” Wen explained one damp evening when the lantern overhead sputtered like a dying breath. “Grief, fear, regret—it all seeps into the cracks of the walls.”
Xiaoyi tried to argue, her rational mind resisting. “It’s just a toilet,” she insisted. But her voice lacked conviction.
That was when she first noticed the trace of a woman’s figure in the glossy tiles. Pale, translucent, clutching what looked like a child in her arms. The figure turned, and its hollow eyes met Xiaoyi’s. Her chest tightened as if the room itself had collapsed inwards.
“What was that?”
Wen didn’t look up. “One of the many,” he murmured.
Days turned into weeks, and Xiaoyi found herself more entangled with the 模糊的toilet. One evening, she arrived to find Wen slumped against the wall, his broom lying across his lap like a soldier’s broken rifle. His lips moved as though forming words that no longer carried sound.
“Old Wen!” Xiaoyi knelt beside him, shaking his frail shoulders.
“It’s yours now,” he whispered, barely audible, his breath merging with the mist that seeped under the door.
“What?” Her voice trembled, but Wen only offered a faint smile before his body slumped, as if the fragile threads of his existence had finally unraveled.
The 模糊的toilet groaned, its walls trembling. The broken light above burst in a final gasp of luminosity, leaving Xiaoyi in utter darkness. When she lit the lantern hanging by the door, she saw her reflection in the cracked mirror: a girl, no longer merely hungry for knowledge, but consumed by it.
Years later, villagers whispered about Li Xiaoyi, the caretaker of the 模糊的toilet. Some said she had always been there. Others claimed she had replaced Old Wen. Travelers departed lighter, unburdened by invisible cargo, though none could recall her face.
In the end, the 模糊的toilet stood as a testament to the unseen burdens we all carry—a blurred passage between what we leave behind and where we journey to next.
When people dared to knock and ask, “Are you there?” a faint voice replied, “Yes. I am here.”
There was no telling if it was Xiaoyi or the wind.