When Wang Daniu fell drunk on the kang after the fight, Chen Chunhua crawled to the woodshed. Wang Tiezhu curled up in the straw and sobbed.
"Mom, it hurts..." Wang Tiezhu stretched out his scabbed little hand.
Chen Chunhua suddenly flew into a rage: "Don't learn from him!!" As the wind from her palm brushed past Tiezhu's cheek, she saw the tearful eyes of six-year-old Ye Qingliu—after the young master's first scolding, he clutched her apron and sobbed: "Sister Chunhua, please don't abandon me..."
As thunder cracked the old locust tree, Chen Chunhua discovered a rusty biscuit box in its hollow. Ye Qingliu's crayon-drawn piano sheet had faded, and the glass beads from Huadengyue were covered in moss. Wang Tiezhu, curious, reached for them, only to have his finger cut by the broken glass.
"Serves you right!" Chen Chunhua tore open her inner garment and bandaged it, her movements identical to the ones she had used to treat Ye Qingliu's zither string injury. Blood seeped through the cloth, leaving a rest on the yellowed music sheet, like a fateful period.
(One day————)
As the torrential rain turned the sheets on the clothesline into shrouds, Chen Chunhua knelt on the bluestone slabs, scrubbing the family's winter clothes. Her mother-in-law dug out a woolen coat from the bottom of the closet—a relic of Wang Daniu's ex-wife. The musty smell, mixed with the tang of goat, fermented in the rain.
Chen Chunhua was wrapped in a leaky quilted jacket, but a plastic-bound music score was pressed tightly against her arms. The "Moonlight Sonata" that Ye Qingliu had scribbled with crayons when he was six years old felt hot against her chest.
"What an unlucky star! All the clothes have been blown away!" The mother-in-law hit her shoulder blade with a bamboo stick, and the old wound immediately split open and oozed blood.
Chen Chunhua pounced on the sweater that was floating in the dirty water. Just as her fingertips touched the wool, she suddenly noticed that the edge of the music score was wet - the star stickers drawn by Ye Qingliu were melting.
She remembered a quiet morning at that time.
Ye Qingliu suddenly pressed his honey-covered fingers into her palm. As their fingers intertwined, the twenty-eight-year-old nanny and the six-year-old master sealed a bloody contract in the morning dew.
The firefly wings soaked by rain stuck to the backs of each other's hands, like tattoos given by nature.
The sudden thunder woke Chen Chunhua up suddenly.
Chen Chunhua saw Wang Tiezhu stuffing a dry leaf into his mouth and chewing it, and her hand that was digging his throat suddenly froze - from this angle, the curvature of the child's eyelashes was exactly the same as Ye Qingliu's.
Vomit sprayed on the third movement of the piano score, and the sunflower painted by Hua Jinyue curled up under the erosion of stomach acid.
"What a sin!!" The mother-in-law dragged the iron pillar into the house, "You will never learn any good from your unlucky mother!"
Chen Chunhua knelt in the sewage to rescue the music score, and found that the blurred notes coincided with the ink stains of Ye Qingliu from that year.
Rain washed over "Adagio sostenuto" (Continuous Adagio), and the Italian words spread on the paper like blue streams.
Wang Tiezhu suddenly rushed over to grab the "sequins" on the music score, and his nails left three bloody marks on the back of her hand.
The pain overlapped with the sting of the ashtray scratch, but there was no longer the chilled towel held by Hua Jinyue. Only the heavy rain washed the bloodstains into a pale pink stream, winding over the rest on the music score.
When Chen Chunhua accidentally fell into a mud pit, the music sheet slipped out of her lap. The star stickers Ye Qingliu had drawn were dissolving in the mud, the gold dust shimmering eerily in the methane.
Tiezhu picked up a broken umbrella rib from somewhere and was poking a toad in the mud with great interest. His focused expression was exactly the same as Ye Qingliu's when he was adjusting the metronome.
"Don't move!!!" Chen Chunhua screamed as she reached for the last remaining page, her fingernails filled with foul-smelling mud.
The words "Aunt Chen's Exclusive Music Score" written on the music sheet are being decomposed by microorganisms, and the words are stained into blue-green bacterial spots.
Wang Tiezhu's umbrella ribs suddenly pierced through the remaining pages, splitting the last legato line in two.
Chen Chunhua tightly grasped the bacterial-covered torn pages in her hands and watched Wang Tiezhu rolling in the mud.
The child's giggling and Ye Qingliu's piano playing resonated in his mind, but were gradually swallowed up by the gurgling sound of methane.
When the last golden meteor sank to the bottom of the mud, she vaguely saw six-year-old Ye Qingliu standing at the end of the sewage, with the wisteria corridor and Steinway piano behind him, and Hua Jinyue was handing her wild strawberries covered with dew.
"Mom!!" Wang Tiezhu ran over holding an umbrella rib covered in mud, with a dying dragonfly strung on the top.
Chen Chunhua looked at the broken compound eyes and suddenly discovered that one thousandth of the rainbow was reflected in them - it was the spectrum refracted by the Huajinyue crystal hairpin.
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