Chapter 32: Thunder

On the fifth of the eleventh month, the sky over the old Shan mansion went the color of a bruise at noon. Ming watched it happen from the garden. She was standing on the path by the frozen pond in her blue robe and padded jacket, with her writing box open on a stone bench and a strip of entry paper weighted down with her inkstone, and the brush ready in her hand. The morning had been clear and cold. Then, a little before noon, the light changed. The light thickened, the way ink thickens when you grind it too long, and the blue went out of the sky and something yellow-gray came into it, and the bare willows over the pond stopped moving. The air smelled of iron. The Huangfu were in the house. All of them: the old silver-bearded father, his wife, the elegant eldest son, a girl…