“The asteroid is coming,” he said.

The electric fan overhead revolved slowly at a nerve-wracking speed, making an awful noise. But somehow, his voice, with a laid-back drawl at the end of the sentence, was loud enough to break through the humid air of a tropical island and catch my attention.

I looked up from my laptop screen and sighed, “That is not true.” 

The man on his smartphone kept talking anyway. 

“It is true. Really,” he stressed, holding his smartphone in my direction. “See, they are experts.”

I had to pause again and take another look.

Neat suites, glasses, dazzling titles after the names. Of course they are the experts. Videos like this had barged into his life. He is certainly not an astrophysicist, but that was how big data worked. It kept feeding you the same thing just because you stayed for more seconds. 

I had heard the news before actually, so I knew their tricks to reap clicks and views. 

Asteroids and meteors were coming to Earth all the time. But unfortunately, most of them burned up in our atmosphere without causing significant damage. Although the extinction of dinosaurs had taught us a lesson, we shouldn’t live in such unfounded fear.

If it wasn’t for my broken dialect, I would have explained it to him. After groping for the right words for a minute, I compromised.

Apparently, he didn’t expect me to stop arguing with him that easily. His gaze lingered for a while before the following video was automatically played.

I turned back to my laptop.

The noise reigned again.

-

It was not the first time he mentioned an asteroid strike, so I was not surprised at all. Over the years, the whole family had grown patience for such repetition. 

“Grandpa is old,” they said. So naturally, he could not ride his motorcycle anymore. He had to go easy when picking betel nuts. And he forgot things. 

Grandma was often annoyed by his forgetfulness, since they lived under the same roof all year round. It can be frustrating to repeat yourself again and again.

After Grandpa stepped down from the head of the village, cooking and shopping became his job. One thing about this kind of chores is that you need to keep a mental note of your storage. In that case, you would know when to replenish.

The fridge in our house was always stuffed with miscellaneous kinds of food. Whenever I wanted to put something in, I had to resort to my scanty knowledge of solid geometry.

Luckily, I was not the one in charge of it. Only when I felt snacky or bored would I open the fridge. But Grandpa, as the chef of the house, was supposed to deal with it on a daily basis.

Tedious summer vacation and secluded seaside village can easily turn a person into an amateur anthropologist. In the past, I discovered Grandpa’s “pattern” little by little. He woke up at six in the morning, got duded up with black hair gel, and left home at seven sharp. The market was 2 miles away, bustling with people coming and going. He walked towards it with his missions but always got lost in the middle. As long as the vendors greeted, he accepted every offer they made. I tried to stop him once, and failed. On the way back, he seemed quite satisfied. 

That was exactly why Grandma bickered with him almost every day. He would refill the fridge with several kilos of vegetables bought from the market when it was already crammed with wilting greens.       

If French beans and sweet potato leaves had souls, they would start haunting our house a long time ago.

Mother was especially discontented with his munificence to the vendors. 

“Dad, why must you buy these shrimps? We have not even finished the last batch yet!”

“They looked nice,” Grandpa replied while shuffling the boxes in the freezer. “Besides, I know the shrimp guy. He is good. He lives on the shore. His father and I used to work together. Really.”

Usually, Mother stopped reasoning under circumstances alike. Her supporting statement was outnumbered.

Every member of our family knew that it was useless to convince him because he would not remember any of it at the end of the day.

The culprit behind his stubbornness was the side effect of a heart bypass surgery. Decades of hard work had worn on his body like salty sea breeze tarnishing the metal on the ships. And there was nothing we could do.

“It’s something about his brain, old people stuff.” said Mother.

“Yeah,” I murmured my agreement. 

My parents seemed not worried, because there was not a definite diagnosis. I knew the right word for a similar condition, but I tried as hard as I could to not say it out loud, in case it weights too much on the resonance cavity of my chest.  

Time is the first thing we can hold on to and the last thing abandoning us in the world. Generous and mean at the same time, it makes us richer than a millionaire sunbathing under the azure sky of Malibu or poorer than a beggar straying on the muddy street of Old Delhi.

Bottles of pills took up their fixed positions under the table, whose names I avoided reading every time I passed, even though they were usually befuddling for laymen like me.

Two from the blue and one from the white. Grandpa never mixed them up. He had been taking these pills so many times that the routine had found a way to settle in.

Nevertheless, his memory remained poor. One time, the Dragon Boat Festival was around the corner, and all family members were supposed to gather together to have a meal. 

Aunt Li called Grandpa the day before, saying she would come home with my cousin. But a few hours later, she called again. An unexpected lockdown swept the whole city, so she would not be able to join us.

“Well, take care then,” mumbled Grandpa. 

He sounded upset, though nothing showed on his face. He hung up the phone and kept himself in countenance. But I could tell from the way he wandered around the yard that he was disappointed: slow and quiet. A rare permission was given to our clingy dog to block his every step. 

The next day, Grandpa arrived home with his panache as usual, colorful plastic bags in both hands. When I was looking for my morning snacks in the kitchen, I recognized the smell of mutton ribs puffing from a wok. Next to it, the earthenware pot was working some magic on a free-range duck. 

This place should not be a squash of aromas at this time of the day. 

“I thought Auntie Li was not coming back today,” I said tentatively.

“She is not?” Grandpa turned around and gazed at me.

“SHE IS,” I nodded, with my tone a shade firmer.

“That’s odd. She never told me.” Grandpa was stunned as if this was news to him.

I sighed inside my own head. He really did forget about it.

Unfortunately, Grandma heard us talking and became snappish at once, “What do you mean she never told you? She called you last night! You are indeed OLD!” 

That was a sign of coming storm. Like an seasoned captain, I furled. 

The dinning room would be a perfect haven for me, and I sneaked out as fast as I could. 

I walked in. Changed Slippers. Stopped in my tracks.

What is that box for?

Feeling a sudden sense of foreboding, I headed to the fridge, opened it, and found a mountain of crunchy peaches. 

They were my favorites and the only kind of fruit I would eat in this season. The last time I checked, we still had a dozen of them in storage.

Grandpa must have forgotten Mother’s words and bought more.

At that moment, I decided to do something for him out of a weird guilt of taking bribery that I did not really ask for. 

In the backyard of our house, there were rows of coops. Standing in the shadow of a beach gardenia, I opened the wooden fence and let out one of the beloved chickens Grandma raised.

“Grandmaaaaaaaa!” I shouted, “The chicken! They are prison-breaking again!”

And while she was too occupied with the egg layer, I started chewing the peach I had just grabbed from the fridge. 

It was sweet.

-

Although bothered by memory lapse, Grandpa still remembered the good old days vividly. Sometimes at dinner tables, he told us about how he became a Party member at the age of 19.

“You see the road outside our house? I built it fifty years ago with a bunch of workers.”

“When I was presiding those meetings, people always asked about me. ‘Who is he? He is way too young to be the leader of production team.’ They had doubts. But I AM the man.” 

More often than not, all he talked about was his big moments like these. But there were other things he clenched on. 

One day, I came home pretty late and unintentionally woke him up when taking the stairs.

“Where have you been?” Grandpa emerged from the darkness and asked, clearing his throat. 

His voice startled me in the dead silence of the night. 

“The club,” I said drily. “Mom and Dad are staying in the city. They have to go to work tomorrow.”

“Ah. And what time is it now?”

“Eleven, maybe.” I was not quite sure.

A quiet pause followed. Grandpa’s mouth was slightly open like a light-shocked animal. 

Innocent? Not quite. Confused? Maybe.

For a second, I stood in stillness too, staring into the dim light behind him.

Rain stains.

Butterfly frozen on the windowsill.

At some point of time in between, asteroids could have came and burned into ashes.

Finally, words flew again. 

“You don’t sleep until twelve, do you?” He asked but brushed off the question with a smile like it did not matter.

To hide my embarrassment, I gave a short laugh.

“Are you going to watch TV or......”

“No, no!” I cut in before he could frown at me. “I am heading upstairs to get some books.”

“Good,” he nodded in satisfaction. “You should read more. They said a craftsman must sharpen his tools to do his job. If you want to land a decent job in the future, you should study hard.”

I blinked swiftly, herding the cells in my brain to process the information I received. 

Did he just quote Confucius? 

My heart lurched, pumping a thrill into my veins. Even I could not recall the famous saying that accurately. And I was in my twenties.

Strangely, I rested assured at my inability. 

Maybe Grandpa wasn’t actually that old yet. 

-

Anyway, time slipped by as Mother kept complaining about the unnecessary supplies and Grandpa kept forgetting her words. Days later, while I was training the dog to fetch my slippers, Grandpa brought up the asteroid strike again.

“It is coming. Really,” Grandpa showed me his smartphone, voice drawling. 

There was a different guy on the screen, but the part about the asteroid remained the same. 

“Hmm.” I did not retort this time. 

That afternoon was a typical one. No particular things to do. And the never-setting sun had gave us too much daytime to kill. 

What do we remember? And what do we forget? It is a myth.

The harvesting season of betel nut? Tricks to differentiate shrimps of all kinds? The responsibility of a chef in charge. The joy of receiving a call from a daughter away from home.

I looked at Grandpa and realized that, I wanted to make every day with Grandpa unforgettable, even if it might just last a sun and a moon.

 “Do you want to have afternoon tea? It is three now, and I am hungry.”

I steered the conversation in another direction.

“Sure,” he answered without hesitation, almost a little bit too fast. “The tea shop had some fresh pumpkin pies this morning. Really.”