Free Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel by Mo Yan Page B

his shoulder, flattened it out, and stuck it onto the spot where it had been cut off. But it immediately hopped back off and burrowed into a patch of weeds. So he snatched it up and smashed it on the ground, over and over, until it was dead. Then he plucked a tattered piece of cloth from his body and wrapped the flesh in it.
8
    An uproar in the yard startled Shangguan Lu awake. She was crestfallen when she saw that her belly was as swollen as ever, even now that half the
kang
was stained with her blood. The fresh dirt her mother-in-law had spread over the
kang had
turned into sticky, blood-soaked mud, and what had been only a vague feeling suddenly turned crystal-clear. She watched as a bat with pink wing membranes flew down from the rafters, and a purple face materialized on the black wall across from her; it was the face of a dead baby boy. A gut-wrenching, heartrending pain became a dull ache. Then her curiosity was piqued by the sight of a tiny foot with bright toenails poking out from between her legs. It’s all over, she thought, my life is all over. The thought of death brought feelings of deep sadness, and she saw herself being placed in a cheap coffin, with her mother-in-law looking on with an angry frown and her husband standing nearby, gloomy but silent. The only ones wailing were her seven daughters, who stood in a circle around the coffin …
    Her mother-in-law’s stentorian voice overwhelmed the girl’s wails. She opened her eyes, and the hallucination vanished. The window was suffused with daylight; the heavy fragrance of locust blossoms gusted in. A bee banged into the paper window covering. “Fan Three, don’t worry about washing your hands,” she heard her mother-in-law say. “That precious daughter-in-law of mine still hasn’t had her baby. The best she can do is one leg. Can you come help out?”
    “Elder sister-in-law, don’t be foolish. Just think what you’re saying. I’m a horse doctor, I can’t deliver a human baby.”
    “People and animals aren’t that different.”
    “That’s nonsense, elder sister-in-law. Now get me some water so I can wash up. I say forget the expense and go get Aunty Sun.”
    Her mother-in-law’s voice exploded like a clap of thunder: “Stop pretending you don’t know I can’t stand that old witch! Last year she stole one of my little hens.”
    “That’s up to you,” Fan Three said. “It’s your daughter-in-law who’s in labor, after all, not my wife. All right, I’ll do it, but don’t forget the liquor and the pig’s head, because I’ll be saving two lives for your family!”
    Her mother-in-law changed her tone of voice from anger to melancholy: “Fan Three, show some kindness. Besides, with all that fighting out there, if you went out and ran into Japanese …”
    “That’s enough!” Fan said. “In all the years we’ve been friends and neighbors, this is the first time I’ve done anything like this. But let’s get something straight first. People and animals may not be that different, but a human life matters more …”
    The clatter of footsteps, mixed with the sound of someone blowing his nose, came toward her. Don’t tell me that my father-in-law and husband and that slick character Fan Three are coming in while I’m lying here naked. The thought of it angered and shamed her. Puffy white clouds floated before her eyes. When she strained to sit up and find something to cover her nakedness, the pool of blood she lay in made that impossible. The intermittent rumble of explosions from the edge of the village came on the air, punctuated by a mysterious yet somehow familiar clamor, like the magnified noise made by a horde of tiny crawling critters, or the gnashing of countless teeth … I’ve heard that sound before, but what is it? She thought and she thought. Then a flash of recognition quickly transformed itself into a bright light that brought into focus the plague of locusts she’d witnessed a decade or more earlier. The red swarms