Muú (Cattle)

Sadi’s my hometown—my real one. I hadn’t been back in over a decade. Got off that rickety black minibus from the county—five yuan, no receipt, driver didn’t even look at me—and took three steps. Just like that: village entrance.

There it was—a yellow ox, tied to a bamboo post right by the gate. Big eyes. Wet and watchful. Not chewing, not blinking much. Hard to guess its age—could’ve been ten or thirty. Looked ancient, but moved like it still remembered how to run.

I reached out. It flinched. Tried again—head jerked sideways. Third time, I held my palm steady, slow, low. It didn’t bolt. Just stood there, breath shallow, ears twitching. I lifted my hand, sniffed. Smelled like warm hide, dried sweat, and something faintly sour—like the barn door left open after rain. Livestock. Yeah. That smell stuck to you.

That night, family threw me a “welcome home” feast—Fujian style, which means: lots of beef, some seafood, and zero mercy. Shrimp? Crab? A single prawn floated in my soup like a tiny, pink apology. The rest? Thick, glossy braised beef, golden broth with star anise, and rice so oily it clung to my chopsticks.

After dinner, I waddled out—full, greasy, slightly dizzy—mouth slick, elbows shiny, shirt sticking to my back. Took a wrong turn down a narrow alley, half-lit by a flickering bulb in someone’s doorway… and there he was: the same ox, led by a barefoot man in rubber sandals, walking slow, steady, into the dark. No streetlights. No moon. Just black air—and that sound: clop… clop… clop… heavy, hollow, unhurried. Like the earth itself breathing through hooves.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.