The house did not explode from grief.
It didn't collapse, or crack, or burst into flames.
It just sagged.
Like a person whose back finally remembered how much weight it was carrying.
---
For the first few days after the funeral, people came.
They filled the empty space with noise, as if they were afraid of what would happen if the silence had the room to stretch.
They brought bowls and flatbread and advice.
"You should eat," they told Li Shen.
He didn't remember what he answered.
He remembered the sound of their voices more than their words. Everything blurred together into one long sentence made of "she was so strong" and "Heaven's will" and "at least she's at peace now."
He wondered how anyone could look at his father and say "peace" with a straight face.
Li Heng moved through it all like someone walking through deep water. Slow, methodical, as if each step had to be remembered. He thanked people when they handed him dishes, nodded when they spoke, accepted condolences that landed on him and slid off.
He didn't cry in front of them.
He didn't talk much at all.
When the last of the neighbours left and the door finally closed, the house seemed to exhale.
The quiet that followed wasn't the old quiet—full of muttering and coughing and the clink of bowls.
It was the quiet of an empty field after harvest.
Nothing left to grow.
---
The first day after that, Li Shen stayed on his mat.
No one told him to get up.
He watched the strip of light along the floor move as the sun climbed. He listened to the sounds of his father's footsteps: slow, heavy, going through the motions of morning—kindling the fire, chopping something, setting bowls down.
"Food," his father said from the doorway.
Li Shen didn't answer.
After a moment, the footsteps came closer. A bowl was set down within arm's reach. The smell drifted up—thin porridge, the kind they made when they didn't want to think about taste.
Li Heng stood there for a few breaths.
"Eat," he said.
"I'm not hungry," Li Shen whispered.
There was a pause.
"Eat anyway," his father said.
The footsteps moved away.
He stared at the porridge until it cooled and a skin formed on top. Eventually, he pushed it aside and curled around the empty space in his chest.
By evening, the bowl was gone.
He didn't remember moving it.
---
The days blurred.
They did not vanish; they smeared.
Light, dark, light, dark.
His father woke before dawn. The sound of flint, the soft thump of wood on wood, the low creak of the door. The cold air coming in for a heartbeat, then shut out again.
Sometimes Li Shen heard the door open again later, heavier this time, as his father left with a tool over his shoulder. Sometimes he heard him move around outside, fixing, stacking, cutting.
The house smelled less like herbs now and more like smoke and old cloth.
People came less often.
Grief, they discovered, wasn't as interesting to visit once the first shock had passed.
There were fields to tend, animals to feed, their own dead to remember. Life pressed on their backs. They nodded to Li Shen when they saw him at the well, or in the yard when he did go out, but the looks lengthened into something he didn't like: the way people looked at a scar. A thing that had happened, then healed wrong.
Most days, he didn't go out.
Eating became… optional.
The hunger was there, at first, sharp and insistent. Then, like everything else, it dulled. If he starved it long enough, it stopped knocking and curled up in the back of his ribs to wait.
He slept too much and not enough.
When he closed his eyes, he saw his mother's face the way it had looked in the last weeks: tired, bright, amused, stubborn, lined. When he opened them, he saw the place where her stool had been, the peg where her coat still hung.
Sometimes he found himself halfway through a movement—reaching for a bowl, turning his head to call—and then his hand would slow, his mouth would close.
There was no one to answer.
Why bother.
He didn't decide to die.
He just stopped deciding to live.
Stopped eating unless his father put the food in his hand and looked at him.
Stopped talking unless a question scraped at him hard enough.
Stopped looking into the future because, as far as he could see, it was just this room, this quiet, this tired man who shouldn't have to carry someone like him on top of everything else.
---
Li Heng watched.
He didn't say much. He never had. But now the words seemed to have retreated even further, hiding somewhere behind his teeth.
He worked.
He woke in the dark, lit the fire, went to other people's fields when there was work to be bought with his back. He came home, chopped wood, repaired a fence, mended a tool.
He moved like an automaton wound up by promises he didn't remember making out loud.
At first, he put food in front of Li Shen and left it there.
If the bowl was still full at midday, his jaw tightened. If it was half-empty, his shoulders loosened a fraction.
Some days it didn't move at all.
The boy grew thinner.
His cheeks hollowed. His eyes sank into his face, staring at nothing. His hair, which his mother would have nagged him to cut or at least tie properly, hung in his eyes until he shoved it back with an impatient hand and then forgot it again.
The house, already missing one voice, began to lose the sound of the second.
And something in Li Heng began to crack.
---
It happened on a grey afternoon that could have been any other.
Rain had come and gone, leaving the ground sticky and the air heavy. Li Heng returned later than usual, shoulders splattered with mud, hands raw from pulling someone else's broken plough out of a ditch.
He pushed the door open with his foot, set down the bundle of kindling he'd brought, and looked toward the corner where Li Shen's mat was.
The boy was there.
Curled on his side, back to the room, blanket twisted around his legs. The bowl from the morning sat untouched, the porridge a congealed lump.
Li Heng stood in the doorway for a long time.
Rain dripped from the edge of the roof outside with a slow, steady beat.
Finally, he moved.
He crossed the room in three strides, picked up the bowl, and set it down harder than he should have next to the mat.
The sound made Li Shen flinch.
"Sit up," Li Heng said.
Li Shen didn't move.
"Sit up," his father repeated.
The boy pushed himself up slowly, joints stiff, eyes unfocused. He looked smaller than he should have for his age. Too much space around his limbs.
"I'm not hungry," he muttered.
Li Heng's hand clenched at his side.
"I don't care," he said. "Eat."
"It doesn't matter," Li Shen said, staring at the bowl. "She's gone."
The words came out flat, but underneath them something sharp gleamed.
Li Heng took a breath, let it out slowly.
"No," he said. "It doesn't matter to her now. It matters to you. It matters to me."
"I don't want it," Li Shen said.
"Eat," Li Heng repeated.
The boy's hands stayed in his lap.
Something snapped.
Li Heng grabbed the bowl, thrust it into his hands so hard a little of the porridge slopped over the side.
"Look at me," he said.
Li Shen looked up, startled.
His father's face scared him more in that moment than any storm had.
It wasn't anger like he'd seen in other men—shouting and flailing. It was quieter. Focused. Like a blade that had finally remembered it was sharp.
"Your mother," Li Heng said, "worked herself into the ground, argued with Heaven, fought doctors, drank poison every day just to buy you another year to breathe the same air as her."
His voice roughened.
"You will not throw that away because it hurts."
Tears burned behind Li Shen's eyes.
"She's not here," he said. "I can't—"
"I know she's not here," his father cut in. "Do you think I don't know? Every time I turn, I look for her. She's not there. My hands reach for things she used to pass me. They grab air. That doesn't change what she did."
He jabbed a finger at the bowl.
"She drank medicine that made her gag," he said. "She let Old He stab her with needles and press on her ribs until she saw stars. She sat and taught you numbers when it hurt to sit up. She walked to the yard when every step felt like someone squeezing her chest. For you. For this house. For time."
He leaned closer.
"If you starve yourself now," he said, voice low and hard, "what are you saying? That she should have saved her strength? That she wasted it? That you are not worth the pain?"
The words hit like a slap.
Li Shen's fingers tightened around the bowl.
"That's not—" he started.
"That is exactly what you are doing," Li Heng said. "You are telling her ghost, 'You were wrong. You should have let go sooner. I am not going to use what you bought.'"
His own voice trembled then, just once, and he swallowed it down.
"I won't have it," he said. "I won't sit here and watch you follow her into the ground because you think lying down is more honest than standing up."
He straightened.
"I wanted to stop too," he said quietly. "When she stopped breathing, I wanted to lie down on that mat next to her and not get up again. Do you understand? I am not walking because it doesn't hurt. I am walking because if I stop, you die."
Silence pressed against the walls.
Rain ticked on the roof.
Li Shen stared at his father.
In that moment, the man looked old and young at the same time. Old in the lines around his mouth, in the way his shoulders drooped under invisible weight. Young in the rawness in his eyes, in the way his hands shook despite the control in his voice.
"You want to die?" Li Heng asked. "Fine. Tell me. Say it to my face. Tell me you want me to bury you next to her and then go back to eating alone."
The words lodged in Li Shen's throat.
He didn't want that.
He didn't want anything. That was the problem.
But somewhere under the numbness, something twisted at the image of his father standing alone by two mounds of earth, hands empty, house hollowed twice over.
"I…" he began, and the rest wouldn't come.
Li Heng's shoulders dropped a fraction.
"Eat," he said again. "You don't have to want it. You just have to do it."
He sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and waited.
Li Shen's hands moved, stiff as tools unused. He lifted the spoon, scooped up a mouthful of cold, thick porridge, and forced it down.
It tasted like nothing.
He took another bite.
His stomach protested, cramped, then remembered.
His father didn't speak.
He didn't move.
He stayed there until the bowl was empty.
When it was, he took it from Li Shen's hands, set it aside, and only then let his posture collapse a little.
"Tomorrow," he said, staring at the wall, "you will get up when I light the fire. You will come outside. You will carry water. You will hate it. Do it anyway."
"Why?" Li Shen whispered.
"Because you're not dead," his father said. "And as long as you are not dead, you work. That's what we do."
It wasn't philosophy.
It wasn't comfort.
It was a rule hammered out of pain and necessity.
Li Shen lay awake that night longer than he had in days.
The hunger had returned, a dull ache instead of an empty absence.
His father's words sat beside it.
I am walking because if I stop, you die.
He imagined his father getting up tomorrow, whether he did or not. Lighting the fire. Going to the fields. Coming back to find an empty mat and a cold bowl.
For the first time since his mother's death, he felt something like shame.
Not for being sad.
For betraying what she had fought for.
He stared at the dark ceiling.
"All right," he thought, not sure who he was talking to. "I'll get up."
It wasn't a promise to be fine.
It was smaller.
A promise to stand when the fire was lit.
Sometimes, that's where survival starts.
---
The next morning, when the first snap of flint echoed in the pre-dawn dark, he wanted to ignore it.
His body was heavy. His chest hurt in that strange, crushed way sorrow made.
He got up anyway.
The air was cold on his face. The smoke from the rekindled fire stung his eyes. His father glanced at him, said nothing, and handed him a bucket.
"Water," he said.
Li Shen took it.
The bucket felt heavier than he remembered. The path to the well felt longer. People glanced at him and then glanced away, as if looking too long might drag his grief into their own houses.
He hauled water. His arms shook. His hands ached.
He brought it back.
His father nodded once, as if this were nothing remarkable.
"Wood," he said, tossing him a smaller axe. "You'll work the smaller pieces. Don't cut your foot."
The rhythm of the day took shape around him, awkward and ill-fitting, but a shape nonetheless: fire, water, wood, chores. He stumbled through it, mind still hazy, body lagging behind, but he moved.
He ate when food appeared in front of him.
Not because he was hungry.
Because his father waited until he did.
Days stacked on each other, uneven bricks forming a wall between the moment of his mother's last breath and whatever came next.
Grief didn't fade.
It took root.
But it stopped being the only thing growing in him.
In its shadow, tiny habits sprouted: the way he straightened the tools by the wall without thinking, the way he checked the pot so it didn't boil dry, the way he counted sacks and measures the way his mother had taught him.
One evening, returning from gathering fallen branches with his arms full and his shoulders burning, he paused by the edge of the yard.
His father was in the distance, back curved, chopping wood.
The sun had already dropped behind the trees. The light was thin and blue. Every swing of the axe looked like it cost him more than the last. His movements were slower than they had been years before, when Li Shen had watched him from the doorway as a child.
He could have stopped.
No one was watching.
No one would have blamed him if he'd dropped the axe and sat down in the dirt.
He didn't.
He raised the axe again.
And again.
And again.
Something in that image burned itself into Li Shen's mind: the tired man who kept moving forward not because he believed it would fix anything, but because stopping would kill what was left.
Much later, when Li Shen would stand alone under different skies with his own body ready to give out, it would be this scene that came back—not a speech, not a teaching.
Just his father chopping wood after the house had gone quiet.
For now, it did something smaller.
It convinced him that he didn't have the right to lie back down.
If his father could keep walking with half his life torn away, then the very least a son could do was plant both feet and follow.
He adjusted his grip on the bundle of branches and stepped toward the house that no longer felt like a home, but still, somehow, refused to be a grave.