There was a silence growing between Lian and his father.
Not a new one—but a deeper kind. A silence that wasn't from lack of things to say, but from too many words gone unsaid for too long.
It lingered at the dinner table, in the way his father scrolled through his phone while Lian chewed, and in the way neither of them looked up at each other when dishes clinked into the sink.
His mother filled the space with small sounds. Chopsticks tapping. Water pouring. Her voice soft as cotton when she reminded Lian to finish his rice.
That night, after dishes and the usual blur of homework, Lian found himself outside his father's office door. Not knocking. Just… listening.
He still hadn't seen any animal in him. Not clearly.
A shadow, once. Something rigid and cold. Maybe a wolf with its back turned. Maybe not even an animal—just a wall.
What kind of father had no form at all?
At school, Lian noticed something else.
The more he tried to see someone's animal, the fuzzier it became.
Like when he stared at Jamie during lunch. She was laughing at a video and nudged him to look, and for a moment he caught a glimmer of a monkey—bright, quick, a little chaotic—but then it flickered, and he saw something else.
A dog? Loyal. Protective. Kind.
No. A bird?
Everything blurred. And for once, he didn't draw her that day.
Just her name.
With a question mark.
He started walking home alone more often.
It gave him space to think.
One cloudy afternoon, he wandered off his usual route and found himself outside a forgotten bookstore wedged between a laundromat and a dentist's office. The window was dusty. The sign crooked.
Inside, it smelled like leather and ghosts.
The shopkeeper was an old man who didn't look up when Lian entered.
"Something quiet," the man murmured, more to himself than to Lian.
Lian browsed without knowing what he was looking for. He ended up with a thin book bound in dark blue cloth. No title. No author. Just embossed gold lines that looked like waves—or maybe threads.
When he opened it later, curled on his bed with rain tapping against the window, he realized it wasn't a story.
It was a collection of questions.
"What do you see when no one is looking?""What shape does your silence take?""Have you ever mistaken protection for distance?"
Lian closed the book and held it against his chest.
He thought of his father again.
Of the way he stood just outside of every family photo.
Of how he never raised his voice, even when angry. Of how he always walked away before a fight could start.
Maybe that wasn't coldness.
Maybe that was fear.
That night, Lian opened his journal to the page he'd left blank for months.
Dad:
He stared at it.
Nothing came.
Not an animal. Not a form.
But a memory surfaced instead.
Of the one time his father took him to the lake, years ago. Before things got quiet. They'd fished without catching anything, and his dad had just watched the water, eyes distant. Lian had asked him what he was thinking.
His father had said:
"That sometimes, being a man means not knowing how to explain anything at all."
He hadn't understood it then.
He still wasn't sure he did.
But now, he wrote:
Dad: Not invisible. Just guarded. Like a turtle without a shell.
Then added:
Still waiting to see the animal. Maybe that's okay.
In the morning, he felt different.
Not clearer. But softer.
Like he could live with the not-knowing.
Like maybe that was the point.