chapter 21

Chapter 21

In the story I just told, there were some details I only skimmed over. Next, he becomes the main character.

I mentioned before that I have an older brother, five years older than me. He was born in 1975, and I was born in 1980.

So at first, our family consisted of four people: my parents, my brother, and me.

I was afraid of Sheep Eyes, because sheep have horizontal pupils-calm yet uncanny, impossible to read, impossible to grasp. As I mentioned earlier, since childhood I was tormented by the horror of being watched by Sheep Eyes.

But my family did not raise sheep.

What I feared was my brother.

My brother had an eye disability, a congenital defect in his iris, which made his pupils not round, but horizontal like a sheep’s. This filled me with deep fear.

I was healthy from a young age, with regular features and a quick mind. My parents gave almost all their love to me.

In stark contrast, my brother looked strange, was slow and quiet, and not very bright. At first, my parents treated him well, but as time went on, my mother began to fear him.

He would use those eyes to stare at people silently. If you asked him something, he wouldn’t answer, just kept looking quietly. No one could stand it.

The villagers avoided him, even refrained from mentioning him. There was a Christian Grandpa in the village who said that in the West, goats are considered ominous, incarnations of the devil, tempting people to do evil. My brother was the devil.

The whole village ostracized my brother, and my parents were affected as well. Later, my father told me that subconsciously, he had excused himself, believing that his murder in 1985 was because this ominous child had led him astray.

After hearing what Christian Grandpa said, my father seemed to grasp a lifeline, and from then on, never showed my brother a kind face.

Knowing he was unwelcome, my brother dropped out of school early and left home to work. Soon, the villagers forgot about him; or rather, people simply didn’t want to remember anything bad.

My brother left and never returned, and there was no news of him. Even when the police visited, they didn’t know he existed.

It wasn’t until after my mother passed away in 2001 that he came back once.