Jason Weiser

The biggest and most consequential fact of all being that it was over.

Parting beneath the bridge, one left the other, never to see them again.

Longbody never married.

He had many offers, but no one ever shined as bright as Miss Thousandfeet.

He spent the rest of his years toiling in the darkness, alone, growing his wealth and leaving piles of it to nobody upon his death.

The same gossips that encouraged Miss Thousandfeet that Longbody was a terrible match immediately excoriated her as an ingrate who should have focused on the good parts of Longbody's character instead of finding fault, and they all agreed that it served her right that she was alone.

Miss Thousandfeet, though, didn't care.

She never wanted to marry.

after breaking things off with Longbody, and also retreated, shoeless, into the darkness, living in dirt tunnels and dreaming about what might have been.

These stories do not go together in the originals.

They're five disparate tales, but I do think they fit.

To me, they're about inner lives and vulnerability.

Each story has a character who projects one thing on the outside, but who's completely different on the inside.

And it's their own willingness and ability to acknowledge and reveal that interior that determines their outside.

The student and his sister are a genius, and a person who's practicing this sacrificial love...

but on the outside they look like a mourner and a nun until they let the stranger in.

For Chu and his wife, the centipede, they remained connected on a deep level the whole time, each trusting the other implicitly.

And so the former centipede woman reveals even more depth, and the husband even more trust, and it destroys a centuries-old curse.

Longbody and Miss Thousandfeet are the sad inverse of Chew and the centipede woman, because they don't say anything.

They don't trust the other.