Poor, but Rich
One small denial, and the pressure lifts. That was always the lie.
Every morning the gate reads Chen Yuling before it reads her freight. She is a parcel courier in Tiefeng, a northern industrial city where the code in your pocket decides which doors will open, and she has long since stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing the smell of your own stairwell.
Ling's grandmother watches the foreign news from the sink and says only, They always come kind first. She has seen this before, and knows its shape from the inside.
Then a calm new order settles a fraying world, and the anchors on every lift screen say the worst is behind everyone at last. Tiefeng only shrugs. Lucky we're already sorted, the whole city tells itself, lightly, the way you say a true small thing.
The pressure always lifts. Until you learn what you handed over to lift it.
