Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

and pressed her back against its belly. With a loud bray, it planted its feet and stood up, and at that moment, a large, slippery object slid out from the birth canal, along with a great deal of blood and a sticky fluid, right into Fan Three’s arms, and from there to the ground.
    Fan quickly cleared the little mule’s mouth of the fluid, cut the umbilical cord with his knife, and tied off the end, then carried the animal over to a clean spot on the floor, where he wiped down its body with a rag. With tears in her eyes, Shangguan Lü muttered over and over, “Thanks to heaven and earth, and to Fan Three.”
    The baby mule staggered unsteadily to its feet, but quickly fell back down. Its hide was satiny smooth, its mouth the purplish red of a rose petal. Fan Three helped it to its feet. “Good girl,” he said. “A chip off the old block. The horse is my son and you, little one, you’re my granddaughter. Sister-in-law, bring some watery rice for my donkey daughter, returned from the dead.”
7
    Shangguan Laidi hadn’t led her sisters more than a few dozen paces when she heard a series of sharp noises that sounded like strange bird cries. She looked into the sky to see what it was, just in time to hear an explosion in the middle of the river. Her ears rang, her brain clouded. A shattered catfish came on the air and landed at her feet. Threads of blood seeped from its split orange head; its feelers twitched, and its guts were spread all over its back. When it landed, a spray of muddy hot river water drenched Laidi and her sisters. Numbed and sort of dreamy, she turned to look at her sisters, who returned the look. She saw a gob of sticky stuff in Niandi’s hair, like a wad of chewed grass; seven or eight silvery fish scales were stuck to Xiangdi’s cheek. Dark waves churned in the river no more than a few dozen paces from where they stood, forming a whirlpool; heated water rose into the air, then fell back down into the whirlpool. A thin layer of mist hovered above the surface, and she could smell the pleasant odor of gunpowder. She struggled to figure out what had just happened, gripped by a foreboding that something was very wrong. Wanting to scream, all she could manage was a shower of tears that fell noisily to the ground. What am I crying for? No, I’m not really crying, she was thinking, and why should I? Maybe they were drops of river water, not tears at all. Chaos reigned inside her head. The scene arrayed before her — the sun glinting off the bridge beams, the churning, muddy river, densely packed shrubbery, all the startled swallows, and her stunned sisters — enveloped her in a chaotic mix of images, like a tangled skein of string. Her eyes fell on her baby sister, Qiudi, whose mouth hung slack and whose eyes were squeezed shut; tears ran down her cheeks. A sizzle filled the air around them, like beans popping in the sun. Secrets hidden amid the riverbank bushes produced a rustling sound like skittering little critters, but no sound from the men in green she’d seen in the bushes a few minutes before. The shrub branches pointed silently upward and their gold-coin-like leaves shimmied slightly. Were they still there? If so, what were they doing? Then she heard a flat, distant shout: “Little sisters, hit the ground … little sisters … down on your bellies …”
    She searched the landscape to locate the source of the shouts. Deep down in her brain a crab crawled around, and it hurt terribly. She saw something black and shiny fall from the sky. A pillar of water as thick as an ox rose slowly out of river just east of the stone bridge, and spread out once it reached the height of the dike, like the branches of a weeping willow. Within seconds the smells of gunpowder, river mud, and shattered fish and shrimp rushed into her nostrils. Her ears stung so badly she couldn’t hear a thing, but she thought she saw sound waves spreading through the air.
    Another black object fell into the river, sending a second pillar of water skyward. Something blue slammed into the riverbank, its edges curled outward like a dog’s tooth. When she bent down to pick it up, a wisp of yellow smoke rose from the tip of her finger, and a sharp pain shot through her body. In a flash, the crashing noises of the world rushed at her again, as if the now searing pain in her finger came from her ear, breaking up the blockage. The water was lapping noisily, smoke was rolling upwards. Explosions rumbled in the air. Three of her