晓竹天下 个体空间

THE ARTISTIC

THE BLOCKED
X Drew Liu

Another dull rainy day, monsoonal and drenching. Zhou is staring at the grey sky through a clouded window. No prospect of clearing. Outside all is muddy and mossy; fungus sprouts up on dead trees, in quiet lanes and under the eaves of the house. Inside is no better: dark patches of lichen emerge on walls as if gloom has filtered in. Season of rot. For the past three days Zhou has not been able to pen a single word; any ideas coming to him seem rotten to the core. In short, he is blocked; writer-blocked.

THE BROKEN
By X Drew Liu

The clock struck midnight when Song sat up from a huge bed that occupied almost half the room. He had not been asleep, though it was his habit to go to sleep at nine o’clock every evening, for by then he was mostly drunk. He shook his long shaggy hair to settle it over the greasy patchwork quilt wrapped around his skinny shoulders. Four, five, six, still keeping count, he turned to look at the clock on the wall. It was not there. He looked around the room. Nothing was where it had been.

Bottom

Jack was a climber. He had always wanted to be one, perhaps, since he was about two years old when, as his mother had fondly recalled, he would climb the stairs of the house whenever he got a chance. In his adult life Jack was a well respected architect, but climbing was his true passion. He climbed all the major mountains in the United States, then in South America and then in Europe and Asian. He made two attempts on Mount Everest, though failed both times due to harsh weather conditions.