If there is an afterlife (novella) Zhang Baotong

She looks forward to the growth of her child every day, but when the child grows up, there are also places that make her feel uneasy. When the child is young, she can wrap the child in a blanket and carry it behind her back, or put the child in the back of her back so that she can free up her hands to do other tasks. However, now that the child is old enough to crawl and walk, it is no longer possible to carry her behind him. One is that the weight of the child has been a little heavy, but the main thing is that the child no longer wants her to carry it, he wants to move freely by himself, and if you want to carry him, he will cry and make you put it on the ground.

However, the garbage heap was on the edge of the ditch, and she did not dare to put the child on the ground, for fear that if she was not careful, the child would fall into the ditch. However, she can't help but pick up the rags, which is the dependence of their mother and son. So she put the child on a mat and tied a rope around the child's waist, and the other end of the rope was tied to her waist, so that she could turn around and look at the child whenever he moved.

That afternoon, she had picked up the rags for an afternoon, and the harvest was not small, the big snakeskin bag was full. When the sun went down, she packed up the mat, held the child in one hand, and prepared to go back to the house to cook with the snakeskin bag in the other. However, when she came down from the garbage dump, she found that the goats tethered to the river were gone. She hurriedly dropped the snakeskin bag in her hand and went to the place where the sheep were tethered to check. Only then did it turn out that the sheep had broken free of the stake and ran away with the rope.

She hurriedly stood on the top of the garbage heap and looked around. However, the wheat in the field had grown so tall that she could not see where the sheep had gone. She picked up the child and looked around the field, but she still couldn't find it. At this time, there is an endless sea of green in the wheat field, and no one is working in the field. She held the child and panted all the way to the river, to the fields everywhere to look for it, but still did not find it. So she wondered if the sheep had gone back to the house by herself, so she carried the snakeskin bag and headed home. However, I didn't see the sheep along the way. She went back to the house, threw the snakeskin bag at the door, and ran back to the river to look around. When it began to get dark, she ran to the village again and shouted, "Who saw my sheep?" By this time, it was already completely dark, and she had to drag her tired steps and carry the child home.

When she returned to the house, she didn't pull the lamp on, and sat down on the stool at once. The sheep would have cost two or three hundred dollars, to say the least, in exchange for the large piece of land on the edge of the ditch. It is also the child's milk source, and without it, it will be a problem for the child to feed in the future. She was so uncomfortable that her heart was tightly choked with extreme sorrow and despair, just like her husband had died, and she just wanted to cry out loud. However, she also knew that not to mention that she cried a lot, even if she hung herself on the beam, it was useless, and the goat was probably lost and could never be recovered.

The child lay in her arms, crying and making a fuss. Li Xiuying then remembered that it was time to breastfeed the child. She boiled the goat's milk she had milked in the morning and fed it to her child, but she didn't know what to feed her tomorrow. She hadn't slept well all night, and had been complaining that she was too careless, just picking up the rags, and not paying attention to the sheep. Then she thought about where to look tomorrow, hoping that the sheep might have been lost and not stolen. If the sheep is lost, it is possible that she will run back again, and maybe someone else will send her back, but if someone steals it, then she will never be able to find it again.

In fact, she understands very well that the sheep are lost by themselves, but the lost sheep will be pulled away by those who are greedy for cheapness, or sold, or killed. This situation is not impossible. So, that's what worries her the most. Because I was thinking about finding the sheep all the time, the whole night seemed very long. So much so that there was some movement outside the door late at night, as if something was banging on the door. She wondered if it was the sheep that had run back on its own and wanted to get into the sheepfold. So, she turned on the light, put on her clothes, and opened the door to go out to look. But she saw nothing, only the night wind blowing the door of the sheepfold, making a clicking sound. She walked to the canal in front of the door, stood on a high place and looked into the depths of the night, only to see that the moon and the starry sky were dark in the night, and a cold night wind was blowing from afar. She let out a long sigh and went back into the house.

When the rooster crowed, she opened her eyes and saw that there was some light outside the window, thinking that it was dawn, so she hurriedly got up, and then walked alone towards the path on the other side of the ditch. When she came to the edge of the ditch, she searched for the wheat fields around her and shouted "Woo Woo Woo Woo At night, the ditch was quiet, and her voice could be heard far away. She thought that if the sheep heard her cry, it would come to its owner. However, she did not hear any echo. When she had almost searched all the surrounding wheat fields, she saw that the sky was starting to shine a little. In the distance, the sound of roosters crowing could be heard incessantly.

She knew that there was no hope, but she was still not reconciled, and wondered if the sheep would burrow into the reeds, so she continued to look for them along the reeds by the ditch. By the time she ran from west to east along the edge of the reeds, it was already getting dark, and in the distance you could see people working in the fields. She hurried back.

Before she could reach the door, she heard the child's cry from afar, and she cried fiercely. She ran madly towards the house. When I entered the house, I saw that the child had fallen from the bed and was lying on the ground crying at the top of his lungs. She hurriedly rushed over and hugged the child in her arms, and saw a big bag on the child's head, which was red and swollen, which made her cry out in distress, "My heart, my baby, it's my mother who is not good, just looking for sheep, and forgetting you in the house." ”

She kept rubbing the child's big bag, but the more she rubbed the child, the more she cried harder, so she got the child food so that she could coax the child to stop crying. While holding the child, she dug up half a small bowl of milk powder, poured it into the small milk pot, entered the small kitchen outside the house, and began to heat it up.

After the milk powder is boiled and cooled, it is poured into the bottle and fed to the child, but the child is still crying while eating the milk. Seeing the child's pitiful appearance, she couldn't help crying. In order to coax the child and let the child not cry, that day, she didn't pick up the rags all day and kept holding the child in her arms. The child cried intermittently, cried and cried and fell asleep. She kept holding the child in her arms, and she was so tired that her arms were numb, so she put the child on the bed, but the child immediately woke up and began to cry again. She picked up the child again until he was completely asleep.

Although the child was asleep, his little face was still full of tears. She wiped away the child's tears and sat on the edge of the bed and watched the child sleep. The child was very peaceful and pitiful, which made her feel very sad and uncomfortable. Because she is too poor and incompetent, she can't let her children enjoy happiness with her, so she can only suffer with herself. Thinking like this, she couldn't help but start crying.

The sheep is lost, there is no goat milk, the milk powder will eat very quickly, and in three or four days, a bag of milk powder of seven or eight yuan will be gone. In order to reduce the consumption of milk powder, Li Xiuying began to feed her children with rice soup and eggs, reducing the amount of milk powder. However, when she saw that the child's face was pale and thin, she felt that she should still feed the child more milk. So, she took out the money she had saved bit by bit, came to Jia Yougen's house again, spent 250 yuan, and bought a dairy sheep.