Cheng arrived at the workshop before the mist had lifted from the lane.
He had come from the house three streets over, carrying nothing but his jacket drawn around him against the cold. The workshop was kept separate from the house — his father had done it this way and his grandfather before him — because the smell of the pine soot never fully left a space where it had settled, and because the work needed its own air, cold and still in the morning and warming only slowly as the day came in.
The three streets between the house and the workshop took him perhaps four minutes to walk. He had walked them in all weathers, in all seasons, for twenty-eight years. In summer the lane was shaded by the tile roofs and the walk was cool even in the hottest part of the day. In winter the stone held the cold and the mist pooled in the lowest sections of the lane near the archway. This morning the mist was thick enough that he could see it moving slightly in the still air, a slow drift that was barely perceptible, more felt than seen. The stone walls on both sides of the lane had a faint dampness at the base where the mist had condensed in the night. He walked close to the centre of the lane.
He did not think about much on this walk. His mind in the early morning was quiet in a way that it was not later in the day, when the work had given it specific content to return to — a batch that needed attention, a mould he was assessing, the notebook observations he was accumulating. Early in the morning, before the work had begun, there was nothing to return to yet. He walked and the lane was quiet and his breath made a small visible cloud in the cold air and then dispersed.