by A. Yi
It’d been 12 years since anyone drank pesticide.
The news alone was enough to make people’s hearts pound and pound. The last time they were this tense was when Batu, who married into his wife’s family, fell into a well a dozen meters deep. As if venerable Death, now dragging the sack (it rustled, scraping against the ground covered with wet pine needles and fallen leaves), was, from the near future, from the dense fog with branches and shadows, distinguishable, walking up. Her bewitched reactions – the muscle spasms, the exposure of the whites of the eyes, and the animalistic howls – shocked the few people who arrived first. Hurry, hurry – anxious shouts with indefinite content were everywhere – hurry. A bunch of people holding emergency lights, flashlights rushed to the houses of the barefoot doctor and the driver. Unspoken coordination. The driver Anfang was informed by mobile phone. When he drove the truck, hurrying over, there were still people running toward his house. Even though the car lights already shone on them, they backed away to the side to let it pass. Someone took a shortcut through the fields, ran to the village committee a kilometer off, kicked the door open, found the First Aid Manual for Pesticide Poisoning from a pile of documents.
Shouts and reproaches abounded. Someone who simply thought doing so might help a little moved her away, stripped off her outer clothing, and kept pouring water on her forehead, neck, upper body, while at the same time wiping off the food sludge and foam spilling incessantly from the corners of her mouth. Some people fanned their shirts to circulate the air. After the door panel was taken down, they carried her into the car. Someone held a flashlight to light the stone heaps and wild grass by the road, while running ahead of the car, as if doing so would help the driver see more clearly, until the car easily passed him. By then, people felt a bit relieved, panted, and, along with the barefoot doctor who arrived late, watched the car skid this way and that (like a car stolen on TV, driven by a fleeing robber) as it rushed toward the emergency health center.
After Widow was conveyed back alive, it was broken.
Anfang parked it by the back door of Widow’s house.
Of course he could push it home – that meant convenience in fixing it, many people offered to help – but he still used fatigue as an excuse, left it there. It was a small demonstration: to see if there would still be people willing to save the dying and heal the injured in the future. He pushed away the toll money Zhifeng offered, he said: “Later.” And the women watching over Widow, while she was fast asleep (now her breathing was even and smooth), started talking: there were several ways to drink pesticide, the first was to not drink, the second was to drink, the third was to drink in front of others, hers was to drink not in front of others but knowing others would find out. The door was open. The lights were on. There was only a little at the bottom of the bottle, which had been drying for so long, exposed to the absorbing sun, the poison long decomposed. She, well, does need to let something out, needs to be cleansed, but doesn’t want to die for it.
This was some kind of ceremony.
They took turns going on watch, watched over her for several days, until she could get out of the bed. She leaned on the walking stick, helped by another, to check on her son. Still the same. A little shrunken. She said to everyone she saw, “Nothing to be done, really nothing to be done.” Saw someone, said it once. Fearing the cold, they set up a coal stove in the kitchen, used a poker to make the fire blaze, gathered around her for warmth. Someone said coal smoke was bad for recovery. She said it was no problem. She drank hot water, shivering, then spread her hands over the coal stove to get warm, sadly said: “There is nothing at all I can do.”
They remained silent. She was the only one constantly and routinely singing of helplessness and desperation, her rising and falling cry tearing their hearts. Eventually, to lead her out of weeping, Mrs. Ju said: “Auntie, you still want to die?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Pain.”
“Pain how.”
“A lot of pain, heartbreaking pain.”
“I’m afraid you still want to.”
“No, I don’t.”
Judging by her eagerness to argue, she had lingering fear about the tormenting experience. So everyone laughed. She didn’t laugh, though, but didn’t cry either. “You shouldn’t worry about me.” Widow nodded at them, then asked: “Ah, you eat candy or not.” All said they don’t. “No, no, Auntie, don’t move, I don’t eat it.” But she still got up. Someone stood to help her but was refused. “Better to walk a little,” she said. She stumbled over, opened the cupboard door, pulled out the middle drawer, dug around. People went on spreading their hands over the coal stove. Some were in a trance. Some looked at her. She dug out a cleaver with a red plastic handle and yellow rust, stared at it for a while, as if judging if it belonged in her house. She touched the teeth of the edge with the top part of her index finger, then aimed it at her neck, made a sudden cut. Like cutting a handful of straw, cutting a handful of wheat, she cut herself again and again, cutting without getting to the point, until finally cutting a main artery. There was simply nothing they could do to get up. Their faces were deathly pale, whole bodies trembling, sitting there frozen, no way to stand up at all. For a week afterward, they were all like that, as if paralyzed. Fresh blood, like the nation’s flag hoisted in the morning, was suddenly thrown out by the guard’s white-gloved hand. Humans have so much blood – from the blood streaming out endlessly you could tell if she hadn’t committed suicide, she would have lived for many years – like endless water gushing out from the hole of a plastic water tube, the enormous gushing force made the water tube wiggle crazily like a snake. This was a suicide method unheard of for a very long time, it belonged to the ancient times: throat cutting.
No need to think. No way to rescue. No possibility at all.
With one hand Widow held on to the kitchen, the doorframe, walked heavily out. As if walking out would give her relief. She covered her throat, pushed down the empty bamboo scaffolding outside, then threw herself at the white truck, which had been repaired and was driving away. Anfang slammed on the brakes. The truck thereby stopped there again. More and more people gathered around. They stood carefully, from time to time lifting a leg to let the red, bubbling blood flow away under their shoes. The body lay prone there, twitched for the last time.
Junfeng lived out his remaining days, died punctually.
About Mother’s death, he had no opinion. Cleaning his body for the last time, his younger brother Zhifeng couldn’t take it anymore, cursed him cruelly. Zhifeng gripped the toilet paper stained with his excrement, moved up to him, shouted: “You killed Mom. You know you killed her.” He had no response. No anger, and no grievance, no fear and no shame. He died when he got as thin as he could possibly be. The skin, already like a soaked shroud, clung tightly to his protruding skeleton, showing the prominent gaps between his ribs, made people terrified – or that is, like a rubbing, the appearance of a skeleton was rubbed out. His beard, like a handful of grass, grew on his proud chin. His eyeballs were particularly big. Almost as big as billiard balls, Zhifeng said.
In the moment of farewell, Dongmei came, she wanted to pry into the details of people near death. His lips slightly open, she put her ears closer to listen and guessed his obscure plea from his breath. She asked him about it, but there was no response. She moved to the other side of the bed, found the mobile phone under his pillow, plugged the charger connected to it into the wall socket. During this process, her older brother died.
Around that time, two strange incidents happened one after another in Laoyangshu Town: one, on the icy surface of the Yao River, a giant, one-meter-long lizard was found. Although human beings issued more than one hundred calls to it (they believed it was like an alien, could understand friendly signals from human beings), it still dared not go onshore. After busily spinning round and round on the ice, it simply died. Two, a truck slammed into the aud
itorium. The driver was killed, dozens of dogs jumped off the truck, ran east in packs like wild horses. These two incidents weren’t as shocking as Widow’s suicide. Many people said, “I really want to have a good long cry over this incident.”
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright 2020 A Yi. This edition is published by arrangement with the agency of People’s Literature Publishing House and China National Publications Import and Export (Group) Corporation. Translation copyright © 2020 Alex Woodend. Front cover image: ‘Seeing Red’ © Polly Rose Morris 2020.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Josie Karani, Molly Rosevear, Mike Spender, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB 978-1-78758-278-1 | PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-276-7
UK-PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-277-4 | ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-279-8
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