On the night of Grain Rain, Wang Tiezhu's coughs sounded like a leaking bellows. Chen Chunhua knelt before the stove, blowing on the fire; the thick smoke from the damp firewood was blinding.
The seven-year-old child curled up on a bed made of door panels, covered with a silk nightgown brought by the Ye family - this was her last bit of dignity, now stained with medicine and vomit.
At dawn, before the cockcrow, Wang Tiezhu began to convulse slowly. Chen Chunhua ran barefoot across the dew-soaked ridges of the fields, the child in her arms as light as dried corn husks.
The barefoot doctor's door knocker banged loudly, but from inside came a drunken curse: "Bad luck! Announcing a death so early in the morning!"
"Please take a look..." She pulled out a silver bracelet she'd hidden close to her body. The moonstone Hua Jinyue had given her had long since melted into a lump. The doctor burned Tiezhu's eyelids with a cigarette butt: "This is a reincarnation of a consumptive. Prepare a straw mat."
At three quarters past noon, Wang Tiezhu died in the haystack in the drying yard. His last breath, mixed with blood foam, sprayed on Chen Chunhua's neck, as warm as the goodnight kiss that Hua Jinyue had given her back then.
Wang Tiezhu's hand was still clutching a strand of her hair. It was the hairpin that Ye Qingliu had once taught her to use when she was tying her hair. The broken strands of hair pierced his palm without causing any pain.
"You're such a jinx! You're going to kill my only child in the Wang family!" The mother-in-law's saliva mixed with the morning mist stuck to my face.
Chen Chunhua stared at the red mole on Tiezhu's earlobe, and suddenly bit her finger in anger, then drew a crooked star between the child's eyebrows - Hua Jinyue said that this way the soul could find the way home.
(It was a night of heavy rain...)
On a night of torrential rain, the white candles in the mourning hall flickered in the draft. Wang Daniu, who had been out for a few days, stormed in and kicked over the table holding Tiezhu's portrait. The shattering glass of the frame pierced Chen Chunhua's cheek.
"I spent 80,000 yuan on betrothal gifts just to buy a family without any descendants!!" Wang Daniu grabbed Chen Chunhua's collar with a drunken breath, and held her belt in his right hand, ready to hit her.
Chen Chunhua stared at the bulging veins on his neck and suddenly realized that the lines were strikingly similar to the five-line musical notation on the Ye Qingliu zither sheet music of the past—that snowy night when the young master had used a fountain pen to draw notes on her palm: "Sister Chunhua's hands are living music."
When the belt ripped through the air, Chen Chunhua instinctively protected her head. But the expected pain didn't come, replaced by the dull thud of a heavy object falling to the ground.
Wang Daniu's eyes suddenly widened, his left hand convulsively grabbed his heart, and his gold-inlaid dentures fell out of his mouth, bouncing on the blue brick floor and rolling into the ashes of the incense burner.
Chen Chunhua huddled in the corner, watching the sturdy body that had broken her ribs begin to twitch. Wang Daniu's right hand was still unconsciously thrashing the ground, the replica Rolex watchband on his wrist breaking, and cheap electronic components scattered all over the floor.
Wang Daniu's face quickly turned purple, and a "ho ho" sound like a bellows came from his throat.
Wang Tiezhu's black-and-white portrait in the mourning hall seemed to be looking down. Chen Chunhua suddenly remembered the hamster Hua Jinyue had raised when she was five years old—the day it was accidentally stepped on and killed by Ye Qingliu. The little princess had cried out for "artificial respiration." Now she felt the same urge.
But Chen Chunhua's feet seemed to be nailed to the spot, and her nails were digging into the tortoiseshell hairpin that Ye Qingliu had given her in the crack of the wall.
"Help..." Wang Daniu's last syllable mixed with blood foam sprayed on the tablecloth, and his fingers scratching the ground left five blood marks on the "Nirvana Mantra" that Chen Chunhua copied overnight.
Chen Chunhua suddenly discovered that the posture he fell in was exactly the same as Tiezhu's last spasm before his death.
Torrential rain lashed the window frames as Chen Chunhua slowly approached the still-warm body. She picked up the bloodied dentures, still stained with chive leaves from lunch.
The man who had once crushed her night school textbooks with his yellow teeth now had his mouth open like a fish out of water. Chen Chunhua stuffed the dentures back into his mouth, and when her fingertips touched the still-warm skin, she suddenly remembered the etiquette lesson she had taken to prepare Ye Qingliu's remains.
"It's better to die." Chen Chunhua whispered to the air, her voice startling the bats on the beams. The candlelight cast her shadow on Wang Daniu's face, the dark shadow just covering his eyes that were still open.
Chen Chunhua took out the nitroglycerin tablets hidden in her socks - she had brought them from Ye's house. She gently placed the bottle of medicine on her late husband's gradually stiff palm.
When her husband's family members pushed open the door, they saw Chen Chunhua wiping Wang Daniu's face with a blood-stained cloth. Her movements were as gentle as if she were removing makeup from Hua Jinyue, while she hummed a tuneless rendition of "Requiem," the first piece Ye Qingliu had taught her.
The moonlight penetrated the clouds and shone onto the gold surface of the dentures, and the reflection stung everyone's eyes.
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The sound of suona suddenly rang out at dawn on the third day, like a pair of rusty scissors, brutally cutting through the tranquility of the village.
The sound first rose sharply, then suddenly fell, swirling in the humid air, and finally got stuck in the branches of the crooked old locust tree at the entrance of the village, lingering for a long time.
The mourning hall was set up in the main hall of the Wang family's house. On the faded door lintel, the newly pasted white paper couplet was dampened by the night dew, and the ink spread, leaving the four words "voice and appearance are still there" blurred like tear marks.
In the middle of the main room, a black lacquered coffin was placed on two benches. The paint surface was rough, and the original color of the wood was still exposed in several places, like wounds bitten by wild beasts.
A black-and-white photo of Wang Daniu was pasted on the head of the coffin. The frame was crooked. The person in the photo had his eyes wide open, but the corners of his mouth were strangely turned up.
Chen Chunhua knelt on the straw mat to the left of the coffin. She was wearing coarse linen mourning clothes and a straw rope tied around her waist, which forced her to hunch her back slightly.
Most of the paper money in the brazier had been burned, and the ashes had piled up. Occasionally, a corner was blown away by the wind, revealing the unburned yellow paper underneath.
Chen Chunhua's fingers mechanically twisted the paper money, and between her nails was still the black mud from yesterday's corn rubbing. The firelight reflected on her face, illuminating the right half while leaving the left half in shadow, as if it had been split in half.
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