Free The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison

of vapor. The sound of Litovsky’s stick echoed in her head like the report of a gavel on a judge’s bench, as if the captain’s wish—that lives could be traded—had been mandated into law.

T HE V IEW FROM THE G ARDENER’S B ACK
    M AY SPENT MANY HOURS IN THE COURTYARD , but rather than contemplating the disobedience that had brought her to her knees, embracing a stone, she looked around herself and plotted her escape. At suicide she’d been a failure. Perhaps, for the time being anyway, she’d have to make her way in this world. If she couldn’t die, she’d have to live; what she was doing now was neither. The silk merchant’s grounds were kept by three gardeners: one was old and wizened; one was burdened by a wife and twin daughters; and one was a huge strapping lout named Ahng-wah. On this last one’s broad back May rested her plans.
    After a month of decorous, almost imbecile docility—the purpose of which was to blend in, smiling and bowing, with the silk drapes and cloisonné vases, transformed from troublesome concubine to pretty possession—May gathered all her jewels into a purse and hid them under her mattresses. A simple swoon after the midday meal rewarded her with an afternoon undisturbed in her bed; after allowing curtains to be drawn and cool compresses applied, she dismissed her maid.
    Then, once the household had settled into the usual postprandial stupor, May sat up; she threw off covers and compresses, and retrieved her jewels. Ignoring the pain in her feet occasioned by haste, she slipped past the kitchen and into the back garden, where she found Ahng-wah alone, asleep and snoring in the shade of a maple tree, sitting with his back to its trunk, his head lolling and his bottom lip falling forward in a loose pout. Having made certain that no witnesses were lurking, she poked him awake. He opened his eyes to see a soft white palm filled with pearls and jade, around which delicate fingers slowly closed. “I am going to Shanghai,” May whispered. “If you help me, these will be yours.”
    Ahng-wah sucked in his lower lip and nodded, and so at nightfall, as they had planned in the scattered shade of the maple leaves, May ran away on the big feet and strong legs of the gardener. En route from Ch’ang-shu to Shanghai she made one stop, in the town where she had grown up.
    May knew her grandmother’s habits as well as her own and arrived at Yu-ying’s gate before dawn of the second Tuesday of the month, the day when her grandmother was sure to go out to play mah-jongg and gossip with her sisters. She hid herself and the big-footed gardener where neighbors and servants wouldn’t see them, inside the small shed where the spare rickshaw was stored alongside baskets of apples and onions and crates of eggs, which Ahng-wah broke into his mouth and swallowed, one after another, while they waited. It was nearly dusk before Yu-ying’s sedan chair departed, and May could creep through the courtyard to the house. She resisted her mother’s door, from under which beckoned a blue finger of opium smoke. At the family ancestor shrine she paused only as long as it took to spit on the soul tablet of her father.
    In a special chest in her grandmother’s boudoir, in a perfumed drawer lined with black silk, Yu-ying kept her sleeping shoes. Having secretly explored its contents many times, May knew where to find the key; and the brass lock turned with well-oiled ease. May had barely to touch the drawer’s handle for it to slide out toward her like a thing enchanted, a fairy-tale casket inside which were pair upon pair of red silk shoes: favorites saved from all the years of her grandmother’s marriage. Shoes decorated with birds and flowers, with symbols for life and health and fecundity. Shoes embroidered with gold thread and pearls. Shoes bearing little bells on their pointed toes. Shoes Yu-ying had worn when May’s father and his brothers were conceived. Shoes in which Yu-ying had kicked and writhed and