In our parts, summer arrived early and lingered exceptionally long. By May, the sun was already scorching, the asphalt roads softened by the heat, making your soles sticky when you stepped on them. The air was filled with the sweet fragrance of gardenias and the reek of rotting waterweeds from the riverside. Back then, the cicadas hadn't started their chorus yet, but the afternoons always made one drowsy.
In those days, knowledge was still encased in paper shells, like fragile cicada exuviae, waiting to be ripped open to release the so-called "fate." But fate, you know, is like Schrödinger's cat; before the box is opened, it both exists and doesn't exist.
The truck driver, Old Wang, was a taciturn man with more wrinkles on his face than the roads he'd traveled. He drove his dilapidated Jiefang truck, carrying a load of answer sheets that determined the fate of countless people, bumping along the national highway. He felt like a fertility god, except he wasn't delivering babies, but rather the ethereal "future."