Don't blink. Blink, and you'll miss me.
From the mouth of Water Curtain Cave to the old waystone at Aolai Town takes an ordinary monkey a whole morning. I do it there and back in the time an incense stick burns. When the mountain folk say wind crossed the ridge, most of the time it was me. The books say our red-rumped kind knows yin and yang, understands affairs, passes in and out of everywhere, dodges death and stretches life — very literary. In monkey terms it means: no place I can't get into, no place I can't get out of.
Which is why, for three hundred years, every letter on this mountain has been mine to run.
It was a glorious posting once. The Dragon Palace sent cards; invitations came down from Heaven itself. With the King's reply in my satchel I crossed cloud and sea, and even yakshas cupped their fists and called me "Lord Red-Rump." My farthest run took me to the foot of the Southern Gate of Heaven. A gatehouse blazing gold; the guard-general glared thunder at me — but he took the letter, and even poured me a cup of celestial wine.
That was the last time I saw the Southern Gate.
Not many years after the King left, the roads began to go wrong. The sea road first: fewer and fewer cards from the Dragon Palace, and the signature on the last one was a scrawl, as if the writer's eyes were on something else entirely. Then the sky road: the highest cloud-tops used to show that streak of gold; then the gold went faint; then clouds all the way up, and nothing but clouds. I refused to accept it. I tried seven different routes across a few more decades — all the same. The sky is still there. The light in it is gone.
So the courier's postings ended, one by one. I still run. I run the mountain's kitchen errands now: a cub gone missing by the east creek, blight in the peach trees on the west slope, a new notice pasted at Aolai Town. I tear each notice down and carry it back for the lettered ones to read. The latest said: all yao to be counted, registered, and bound. When the reading finished, a whole forest of monkeys said nothing at all.
Only while running am I at peace. Four legs loosed, wind at my ears — three hundred years, registers and bindings, all of it flung out behind me. But even the fastest monkey has to stop. And the moment I stop, the things flung behind come ambling up, one by one, and settle back onto my spine.
A few days ago, the herb-boy brought the little stone monkey to me. It wanted to learn to run.
I taught it. Short legs; it fell a lot. But the cub has the one thing it took me a lifetime of running to understand: it doesn't ask where a road leads — it runs first. Watching it barrel ahead, I suddenly remembered the King in the old days. He ran exactly like that. He never asked for the road. The road got run into existence behind him.
Lesson done, the cub panted and asked: Uncle Red-Rump, what's the farthest you ever ran?
The Southern Gate of Heaven, I said.
And it asked: what's outside the Southern Gate?
My mouth opened. Nothing came out. Three hundred years, and this is the first cub to ask what lies outside. All of us old ones kept counting the days until the gate might open again — and not one of us ever wondered:
if the gate never opens again, will some monkey have to run a road around it?
The cub means to go west. I never ran the west road through; half the waystones on the old post-road lie toppled, and the ones still standing have their inscriptions face-down in the dirt. But if the cub truly dares to run it, these old bones will pace it one more stretch.
After all, dodging death and stretching life is our family art. I want to see for myself whether this road nobody has run in three hundred years is a road that died —
or a road whose runner simply hadn't arrived yet.