In the small courtyard in early spring, there are always some things that do not match the buds of acacia flowers and the warm breeze and sunshine, and the pottery jar in the southwest corner of the yard is one. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 info Nearly a meter high, lead gray, with a wooden lid on it, and a hinge and keyhole on the cover, the lock has disappeared after a long time. It is estimated that the tank was originally used for water storage, but later it was idle after running water. But why add a lid and a lock, I didn't think about it at the time, and now I think it's not as simple as blocking dust and insects.

I had a nervous fear of the tank since I was a child, and it came from my vague memories when I was four or five years old. I've been trying to forget, or relegate it to a dream that didn't actually happen. But every time a jar appears in front of me, that memory is like water in the jar, slowly reflecting the appearance of childhood.

It was Beijing in the 70s, I lived in a courtyard in Dongcheng, there was a lead pottery-colored wide-mouth fish tank in the southeast corner of the courtyard, the size of this tank was a behemoth for me when I was five years old, and the height also made me have to step on a small stool to pick up the edge of the tank, and see more than a dozen goldfish inside, hydrangeas, swollen eyes, black backs, every day, I would count and feed them by the tank. But that year, the year when winter was approaching, the family forgot to fish out the goldfish and moved it to the house. After a night of cold wind and freezing rain and a sudden drop in temperature, the ice edge pulled a foot, and the water in the tank froze, and the stiff goldfish had to be buried under the grape trellis. After that, I still went up to the tank every day to have a look, even though my uncle promised to buy some more goldfish in the spring, and my parents cleaned the remaining ice water in the tank, I still stayed in front of the empty tank for more than ten minutes. I told them the reason I was so obsessed with it, because every day I had a thought in my heart: "The goldfish is back." ”

For more than a hundred days until early spring, I repeated a single action, moving the stool, climbing up, moving the stool, and walking away. But the miracle never happened, and I still see empty cylinders every day. What sustains me, a five-year-old child who repeats such boring things, is now a blank memory for me. But in my heart, there are few disappointments, and it seems that the day I am looking forward to is coming.

On a spring evening, at about seven o'clock, shortly after the unchanging news broadcast began, I was sitting around the TV with the adults, and suddenly I felt that the moment had come, it was not daytime, it was night! I told them that I went to the toilet and left the main house. The distance to the fish tank was so far away at night, but I seemed to hear the sound of the fish wagging their tails. That night, my memory of everything around me was gone, from the outline of the yard to the sound of leaves, the picture slowly turned white, and merged with the tank into the same background.

Perhaps, it was a mistake for me to use my childhood memories to paint a picture of my childhood, and the only thing I can record is that the road to that tank is really long.

In fact, this children's story has a happy ending, the moment you climb the edge of the tank, the water clearly reflects the crescent moon, in the shadow of the clouds, the hydrangea shakes its head, spits bubbles and floats up, swollen eyes, black backs are there, with the water waves, slowly turning, slowly turning... The tank was spinning, too, at a speed I couldn't detect, with my eyes, with my bench, spinning up......

This is the end of the children's story, the problem is that I am missing.

From the end of the news broadcast to ten o'clock, the family searched all over the yard, room, alley mouth, commissary, public toilet, cabbage cellar, coal shed... At ten o'clock, the police station received a report, and at half past ten, the neighbors who were looking for me had arrived at Dongdan and Dengshikou.

There were no passers-by to see, no playmates to talk to, no traffickers in those days, no strange millet and no strange millet children, five-year-old children, limited radius of movement, when flashlights, oil lamps swept the streets and alleys, I was like a toon tree in the early spring night, and there were bare branches left in the morning.

After the incident of the boy in the water tank in Dongjiaohu Hutong passed, the people who experienced and participated in that night rarely talked about it again. And in the days when I was rampant in the alleys, I had few opponents because of this. I don't know if it's because of the weirdness of this thing, or if it's boring. Years later, I listened to my family talk about the day and my troubled preschool life, including a broken tongue, broken bones, dysentery, penicillin allergy, tonsils, and appendix...... But few people know where I was found that night, and that day, I slept in an empty tank for half the night.

In the spring of 95, when the water tank in the courtyard of Sweet Water Garden flashed, the sign was slowly introducing the second-hand poet Lao Hao into the courtyard, and then kicked to Jinzhong, and Shijie, Li Chan, and I were also pacing through the Taihang Mountain step by step, and we went west, but we didn't know it.