Slice of Life

On her seventieth birthday, Song Xiaotao found an unconscious young man in her vegetable patch. Judging by her years of experience cracking melon seeds and shooting the breeze at the village entrance, this fellow was clearly trouble. Yet, she brought him home anyway. Song Xiaotao had seen off her last living relative ten years ago. Even if he brought a calamity that wiped out her entire household, she was the only one left to go. When the young man came to and saw Song Xiaotao’s wizened face, his vision swam, and he nearly blacked out again. Heavenly Bodhisattva, why was his Love Tribulation partner an old woman?!

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

My husband thinks I’m one of those women who bleed their husbands dry for their brothers and sisters. What he doesn’t know is that my “eldest brother” is actually the son I gave birth to at nineteen, my “second brother” is the son I gave birth to at twenty-five, and my “little sister” is the daughter I gave birth to at twenty-eight.

On the night I married Lu Boya, my buddies warned me, “Professor Lu is a refined scholar with a delicate constitution. You’d better be gentle with him!”

I gave them a ferocious grin. “Gentle? Not happening. This lady has plenty of strength-and plenty of tricks!”

The next day, my voice was hoarse and my eyes were swollen as I shouted at Lu Boya, who stood there in a crisp suit and gold-rimmed glasses.

“Liar!”

Refined scholar? Delicate constitution? All lies!

I picked up a beautiful black snake.

I often held it in my palm, idly playing with it.

Its tail would coil around my arm, the cool sensation so pleasing I could hardly bear to let go.

Later, in the depths of night, that same cool tail wrapped around my waist, my stomach, and my thighs, bringing an entirely different kind of sensation.

After my sister passed away, Jiang Huaizhou treated me like her substitute.

He married me, yet he despised me.

Outside our marriage, he kept one lover after another.

He even mocked me, saying, “Even with Weiwei dead, you will never compare to her.”

He belittled me until I was worth less than nothing.

But then I remembered that there had once been someone who said to me:

“Yinyin, no one else matters. You matter most.”

I did something terrible back in middle school.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was even relieved that no one ever found out.

But once I learned the full truth, the despair made me want to die.

A person as vile and shameless as me is surely bound for Hell.

After my mother got divorced, she became the fiercest woman in the village.

She often cursed at me, “If I didn’t have you dragging me down, I would’ve remarried some rich man long ago.”

Behind her back, the villagers gossiped, “She can’t get anyone to marry her, so she uses her daughter as an excuse.”

My father mocked her even more. “With your mother’s firecracker temper, and since she can’t even give birth to a son, the only man who’d want her is one with four sons who can’t find wives.”

Later, a small business owner really did want to marry my mother.

Then my father regretted it. “Yufen, let’s get married again. The three of us can live a proper life together.”

After winning the lottery, the first thing I did was dump my sugar daddy.

Then, I turned around and sponsored the broke, handsome guy I’d had my eye on for ages, all while sending a three-hundred-point manifesto to my ex-benefactor, tearing him to shreds.

With money in my pocket and my pride restored, I was walking on air.

That is, until I decided to flaunt my new boy toy right in front of my former sugar daddy.

My handsome new man looked at him and said, “Hey, Bro.” Me: ?

It has been ten years since I died.

After a decade, I have finally seen the first person to come and pay their respects at my grave.

It is a man, limping as he walks toward me.

It is my father.