The Well Beneath the Bamboo

A short story of loss, a moon goddess, and the choice to remember

At first, I didn’t notice the well. The bamboo clattered and swayed, tangled with undergrowth, all of it thick with the life of the forest—but the well, low and stone-ringed, was hidden in a pocket of stillness. Its moss-covered walls stayed cloaked in shadow, damp and green where sunlight could never reach.

But once I saw it, it was as if a veil lifted. The shape shimmered into visibility—not just a well, but something older, like a circle of silence that had waited years to be seen.

The sun pressed heat into my black linen shirt until I had to keep moving. I wore black out of habit. I told myself it was because dark fabric handled salt and dust best, but really, it was mourning. Years-old mourning, unspoken and unfinished.

I stepped into the shade and approached the well. Its opening yawned deep and dark. I saw no bottom—only a depth that made my ribs ache.

A round gray stone, smooth as an egg, sat waiting on the lip. I didn’t know why I reached for it, only that it felt left for me. I let it drop.

I expected silence. Or the echo of stone on stone.

What came was a soft splat.

Then—a toad’s low croak.
Ribbit.

The sound wasn’t loud. But it landed hard.

A breeze stirred behind me, rustling the tall bamboo. The hollow click of stalks touching, the dry creak of their sway, made it feel like a stage was being set—by what, I couldn’t say. The air under my shirt cooled my back, a brief relief. The sun was low.

And that’s when I felt it.

A pull. Not in the muscles or skin. Deeper.
A thread behind the heart.

I walked away, but the sensation only grew stronger. An itch behind the ribs. A whisper between heartbeats.

By the time I reached home, I knew I would return.

The house was small, wood-framed and slightly tilted, its joints creaked when the wind came in off the sea. Salt softened the nails and sills. Bamboo grew thick behind it, and the ocean lay just beyond the ridge, close enough to hear the tide shift but far enough that I could pretend the world was still.

Solitude was the point. Not a retreat. An extraction.

I lived alone, by design. Writing, when it came, covered what little I needed. I only went to town when the rice got low or the post office held a check. Even then, I left quickly. The sound of conversations made my skin tighten.

Dinner was always simple. A handful of greens from behind the house, a small cut of fish, steamed over rice in the cooker. I ate on the beach with my knees drawn up, letting the cooling sand leech the heat from my calves. The waves hissed gently in the distance.

I watched the sun bleed out over the water, the last light smeared gold across the sea.

Then the moon rose—huge and white, washing the cabin in its pale hush.

I slept.

It was a deep sleep—the kind that pulls you under like a tide you don’t fight.

But just before waking, something shifted.

A flicker of memory, not mine—and yet it lived inside me.

A three-legged toad. The sound of a stone meeting soft mud.
A well, silver-lit.

And a breath so deep it felt like my chest opened all the way to the moon.

A breath like forgiveness.

I woke to light pooling across the floorboards, golden and soft. I sat up slowly, bones stiff, and shuffled to make coffee—one cup, always one. I no longer reached for the second mug. No longer glanced at the empty chair across the table. But those motions still lived in my muscles, like echoes in the body’s joints.

The ache had lost its sharpness, but not its weight.

There were things I did not speak aloud.

Only once had I written of it, in a margin no one would read:
“You never know how quickly everything can unravel—even on a crowded train. One moment you’re laughing. The next—metal, glass, no sound but your own heartbeat.”
I never finished the sentence.

I rinsed the mug, coiled one of the old ropes from the shed—one I’d bought years ago, for no reason I could name—and walked the ten minutes back to the well.

Today it was fully visible. Clear. Solid. As though it had always been there.

I tied a knot in one end and lowered it slowly. The rope slid down without resistance until nearly halfway—then slack.

I pulled it back up. The knot was slick with mud. The kind that doesn’t dry. The kind that remembers.

I made loops—simple footholds, knotted wide enough for bare feet. I didn’t wear shoes. I needed to feel each one.

I tied the rope off around the thick trunk of a leaning tree behind the well, one that had probably grown alongside it. I gave it my weight. It held.

I climbed over the lip.

One step at a time, I descended—into the hush, into the dark.

A third of the way down, the light dimmed. The walls closed in—not tight, but old. Holding memory.

I paused, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Breathing slowly.

And then—
“You came.”

A woman’s voice, as quiet as steam rising from stone, or wind through bamboo. It wasn’t echo. It was presence.

I gripped the rope. For a moment, I almost climbed back.

But then she spoke again—
“Thank you.”

The words fell into me like warmth through winter skin.

My foot touched mud—warm, soft, not sucking. As though it meant to hold me, not trap me.

And there, half-shadowed against the curve of the well wall, sat a toad.

No larger than my palm. Deep brown with soot-black markings. Its forelimbs were strong—fingers like carved root, jointed and deliberate. But behind—

Only one leg.

A single, curved hind limb that grew clean and whole from the center of its body. Three-legged. Balanced. Unmistakable.

“You did not imagine this.”
Her voice coiled gently through the air, not from her mouth, but from somewhere deeper.
“Either madness has dressed itself in ancient names… or I am as real as your sorrow.”

“My name is Chang’e.”

The sound of it rang like wind chimes in still air.

And something within me stirred. Something deep, something old.

The tale returned: the goddess who rose to the moon. Who drank the elixir meant for two. Who fled to cold exile to keep it safe.

Who changed.

Who became this.

A flicker of movement behind her—barely visible. The soft twitch of a rabbit’s ears, white and watching from the shadowed curve of the wall.
And then it was gone.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

She tilted her head, as if listening for something far off—like a bell beneath water.

“Because your silence has grown too wide,” she said. “And the grief you buried has kept breathing in its dark.”

“You chose solitude so that your sorrow could survive. But I offer a different path.”

“What kind of path?” I asked. My voice felt dry in my throat.

“You may remain as you are,” she said, “unchanged. Unreached. Alone.”

“Or—you may step into the place that sorrow sealed off. You may choose to remember. And you may choose to ask.”

I closed my eyes. The scent of the well rose up—mud, old stone, bamboo, and something older.

Behind my eyelids, color bloomed and blurred: rust and ivory, violet and gold. The dark beneath those colors wasn’t empty. It churned.

And I sank.

Not like drowning. Like dissolving.

My limbs slipped downward. My breath grew thick. The mud received me like silk. Not cold. Not suffocating. Just... deep.

And then—release.

I rose.

I opened my eyes.

The sky above wasn’t sky. It was a dome of broken porcelain—veined with pale light, shifting like breath.

I stood on soft moss. No mud now. The well was gone. Or maybe the world above had simply let go.

A pale stone path stretched ahead, glowing faintly with remembered moonlight.

Mist curled at the edges of the path. Within it, fragments drifted—window glass, a fallen chopstick, a child’s sandal.

I walked forward.

In the distance: a grove of plum trees. Blossoms fell in slow motion, though the air was still.

And at the base of the largest tree, a figure waited.

Not the toad. A woman.

Pale robes, shifting in color—silver, parchment, milk. Long hair spilled like black ink. She turned.

It was my daughter’s face.

No—older. No—younger.

Then my wife’s.

And then... neither.

It was both.

And it was not.

It was grief, given shape.
Not a trick of light. Not a dream.
It was what I had refused to see.

“This is the place where the unspoken waits,” she said.
“Here, the questions that were never spoken are heard once.”
“You may ask one.”

I paused.
Years of silence tried to hold my tongue.
But the ache broke through.

“Can I be with them again?” I said.
“I miss them more than I miss my own breath.”

Chang’e smiled—not with joy, but with a kind of mercy.

Then the mist returned, circling her in slow spirals.

And I was rising.

Light cracked upward. The moss vanished.

And I was standing aboveground again.

The well was gone.

And in its place—

My wife and daughter stood.

Not as they had been.
Their bodies glowed faintly, outlines soft as fog, radiant from within.

They smiled.

And ran to me.

My daughter’s hair smelled of jasmine and sea salt—the scent I thought I’d forgotten. My wife’s fingers brushed my cheek, warm and sure, the way she used to when I couldn’t sleep. I held them.

And they held me back.

My arms glowed too.

Not from light—
But from joining.

The place where sorrow had hollowed me now pulsed with presence.

And the sharpness of memory began to blur.

I took them home.

We never worried about supplies. Somehow, there was always enough.

I wrote again—stories, poems, strange dreamlike things. Before, I could barely finish a page without seeing them in the margins. Now, the words came freely. Grief didn’t vanish. But it changed shape. It flowed.

It became story.

The best work of my life. I don’t know how the manuscripts reached the world. But they did.

---

Some say the house still stands.

The windows are always clean, though no one sees who cleans them. The garden never wilts. The front gate swings open in the breeze, but the pathway remains undisturbed.

A fisherman once said he saw movement in the window—two figures. One tall. One small.

But when he knocked, there was only warmth. And silence.

The rope still hangs from the tree above the vanished well.

Faded now. Green with age. Swaying in the wind.

A reminder.

No one remembers him coming back.
Only that the well stopped hiding.

And sometimes, when the moon is full, if you walk the forest edge at dusk, you might see a shimmer in the moss.

A flicker of silver light.

And if you’re very still—
you may hear a soft sound among the bamboo—
Ribbit.