Sun Wukong Under The Mountain

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Under the mountain, where stone presses down like a thought that never finishes, Sun Wukong sits folded into the dark. The mountain is not heroic. It is administrative. It was placed there by a hand that preferred paperwork to thunder.

Only a small window remains, chipped open by weather and time, no larger than a begging bowl. Through it pass ants, dust, the occasional moonbeam that pauses as if uncertain it should be seen. Sun Wukong looks out, not to escape—escape is a word already used up—but to confirm that looking is still possible.

Five hundred years pass the way moss passes: patiently, without comment. Dynasties change above him. Rivers adjust their opinions. Children grow old and are replaced by children who resemble them but deny it. The mountain listens to all of this and remembers nothing.

Sun Wukong counts time by absences. The absence of laughter. The absence of enemies worth insulting. The absence of his own impatience, which once filled the sky like smoke and now fits neatly inside his chest. Even anger has learned to sit quietly.

Sometimes a bird lands near the window and tilts its head, as if considering a conversation. Sometimes a monk’s shadow passes and does not stop. Sometimes nothing happens so completely it feels like an event.

He rehearses sentences he might say if someone were to look in. He begins them carefully, like offerings.

“I was once—”
“The trouble was—”
“Tell them that—”

But each sentence ends before it can be finished, as if the mountain itself has learned where to place a period.

After five hundred years, Sun Wukong understands something simple and unbearable: that being trapped is not the punishment. Being reduced to a fragment—of story, of warning, of half-remembered legend—is.

He looks out through the little window and begins again, softly, patiently, the way stones learn to speak:

“After five hundred years, I finally—”

And there the sentence remains, unfinished, resting in the mouth of the mountain, waiting for someone who knows how to continue it.