Ji Chun x Mao Mao ①
When Ji Chun was in elementary school, his Chinese teacher assigned an essay titled "My Friend." Ji Chun wrote about Maomao, who was not a person but a golden retriever puppy doll that his father gave him for his fifth birthday.
Back then, he and Maomao were inseparable. He would hold her in his arms while eating, and he could only feel at ease when he held her furry ears while sleeping.
When I was sixteen, everything changed.
His mother passed away suddenly, and his father remarried without hesitation. He hated his father's heartlessness, and even began to dislike the things his father gave him. Maomao, whom he used to hug every night, was stuffed into a cardboard box and buried at the bottom of the wardrobe.
After the college entrance exam, he deliberately chose a city thousands of miles away from home. The night before leaving home, while packing his luggage, he found the doll that had been gathering dust for a long time in the cardboard box.
Ji Chun stared at it for a long time, then grabbed the doll and threw it out the window. A torrential downpour was falling outside; the doll arced through the air before crashing to the ground with a "thud," rolling twice in the mud.
He drew the curtains, pretending not to see anything, and continued packing his things.
But that night, just before going to bed, he returned to his room and saw that the doll he had thrown away had reappeared on his bedside table. The mud and water had made the doll dirty, and its once round eyes now seemed to be staring straight at him.
Ji Chun panicked, grabbed Maomao and threw her out the window again, and checked the doors and windows repeatedly to make sure they were locked before daring to lie down.
But to his surprise, he saw Maomao again the next morning. Maomao was lying next to his pillow, the pillowcase stained with mud and the damp, cold fuzz sticking to his face.
Ji Chun was terrified. Was her house haunted?
He instinctively grabbed the scissors from the bedside table and stabbed the doll hard. The blade cut through the fabric, revealing the cotton inside, and also slashed one of Mao Mao's eyes.
He was panting heavily when he stuffed the broken cap and the cotton-soaked scissors into a garbage bag and threw it into the garbage truck downstairs.
He left that very day to enroll at his new university. During his four years of university, he studied diligently, winning scholarships time and again, and landed a good job after graduation. He tried dating a few times during that period, but each relationship ended without a lasting commitment.
At the age of twenty-five, Ji Chun had already established himself in an unfamiliar city. One evening, a relative from his hometown suddenly called and said to him, "Xiao Chun, your father... drank too much and fell into the septic tank, and he's gone. Come back and handle the funeral arrangements."
Seven years had passed, and the first time he heard news of that man was of his death. Ji Chun remained silent for a long time before finally booking a plane ticket and traveling across most of the country back to that long-forgotten home.
After landing, he first went through some trivial matters with relatives, and it wasn't until late at night that he stepped into that old house. His father had moved to his wealthy wife's house after remarrying, and the house had been empty for seven years, yet it was surprisingly clean, with hardly any dust on the furniture. He had originally planned to do a thorough cleaning, but it seemed unnecessary.
He was exhausted from the long journey and was very tired, so he went back to his old room, found a clean sheet, spread it on the bed, and quickly fell asleep.
He didn't know how much time had passed when he was suddenly awakened by a suffocating feeling, as if a huge boulder was pressing down on him. He barely managed to open his eyelids, and in his blurry vision, a dark figure was lying on top of him.
It started raining again outside the window, just like the day he left seven years ago.
"Who are you?" he asked in a panic.
Before the person on top could respond, a sudden "boom" was heard outside, and a bolt of lightning ripped through the night sky, instantly illuminating the face of the dark figure.
It was a strange man. In the flash of lightning, his face was deathly pale, devoid of any color. Only one eye was intact; the other eye contained only a cloudy white, like a glass bead covered with a layer of gray, exuding an indescribable eeriness.
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