By the gate of Gao Village there is an old well. Two rope-grooves are worn into the green stone of its rim; the villagers say the well is as old as the village itself.
I live at the bottom of it. A carp. A red one.
Don't ask my age. A well doesn't keep days. It keeps wishes.
This is a wishing well. The custom came down from the old people: when something weighs on your heart, take a copper coin, murmur it three times over the well-mouth, and let go. If the coin strikes the water with a bright note, the wish is received. If the note is dull, come back another day.
What the villagers never knew is where the difference lies between bright and dull.
It lies with me. The coins I catch on my tail ring bright. The ones I miss ring dull.
The caught coins I carry in my mouth to the stone niche in the well's east wall — where every wish this well has received across the centuries is stacked. One coin, one wish. I remember them all: this one, the mill-wife asking for a child; that one, the schoolmaster asking for rain; the green-rusted one at the edge, a frontier soldier asking to come home alive.
You'll ask: a wish received — then what?
Then, each year on the twenty-third of the twelfth month — the day the Stove God ascends to make his report — the well-bottom lights up once. A fine golden thread descends through a seam in the old brick, I hang the year's coins on it one by one, the thread draws up, and the wishes are collected. Collected to where, I don't know. The elder well-carp said only: above us, there is an office that administers wishes.
Not every collected wish is granted. But granted or not, an answer always came the following year: a granted wish returned as a mote of warm light that sank back into the well; a refused one came back as the coin itself, which I carried to the niche to hang again next year.
That procedure ran for hundreds of years without a single fault.
Three hundred years ago, on the twenty-third of the twelfth month, the golden thread did not come down.
I remember it exactly. The black moon had only lately climbed into the sky. I carried the coins to the old place and waited one night, two nights, waited past the end of the first month — the brick seam stayed dark. Nothing descended.
Nor the next year. Nor the year after.
In three hundred years, the golden thread has never lit again.
But the villagers still wish. Coins still fall, year upon year, and year upon year I catch them, remember them, stack them in the niches. The first niche filled long ago; I opened a second, a third… Today the east wall holds seventeen niches, packed tight: three thousand coins and more. Three thousand wishes with nowhere to be delivered.
In the deep of night, the coins hum. Not the water moving them — the wishes, stifled too long inside the copper, pressing and droning. It swells against my heart to hear. More than once I thought: then let me try. I carried the oldest coin — come home alive — up to the well-mouth and held it toward the sky through an entire night.
The sky did not take it.
I am only a well-carp. I can receive wishes. I cannot deliver them.
Some days ago, the boy with the medicine basket came to draw water. He glanced down the shaft and made a small sound of surprise: why is the bottom of this well so bright?
Everyone else who looks down sees darkness. He saw the light — the faint shine of three thousand wishes pressed together, hidden from the whole village for three hundred years, and not hidden from him.
I rose to the surface and told him the whole three hundred years, bubble by bubble.
He was silent a long while. Then he asked: the office that administers wishes — which direction does it lie?
I said: when the golden thread used to light, the glow came through the western seam of the brick.
He said: good. West is where we're going.
So here I am. The day I leapt from the well, the whole village came to gawk. Granny Wang declared: the old well's carp spirit has come out — the times are changing.
Granny, it isn't the times.
It's that someone has to go and ask — whether the office that took in wishes for centuries still opens its doors;
and if it never opens again, then who owes this wellful of wishes — three thousand coins, one by one — their answer.