Where Waters Meet

by Zhang Ling

wearing a tight smile that her eyes didn’t quite approve of.

for everything she wanted, there would be something else she had to give up, as the price.

Too late, death outruns everything, including truth.

I kept him alive for decades until I put him in words and lines, then I killed him. Writers are murderers: we give life and then take it away, in a most premeditated way.

What’s remembered gets a life, she read once in a book.

Stop thinking your bad thoughts. Bad thoughts lead to bad luck, they are the root of all the bad things.

There is a child in all old people. The lock guarding the passage from mind to tongue, overused and rusty, now no longer holds. They speak their mind. Children are cruel, and old children, brutal.