Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

glass flying into the wall and up to the rafters. I didn’t know till later that when the bulb in the generator room blew, so did all the lights in the pig farm. The next thing I heard was the loud slap the belt made when it hit the wall, followed by Jinlong’s terrified screams. My heart sank. That’s it, I figured; my son, Ximen Jinlong was probably a goner.
    Slowly the darkness gave way to the light of the moon and I saw Mo Yan, down on his hands and knees, rear end sticking up in the air, just like an ostrich; scared stiff, he slowly got to his feet. Curious but cowardly, virtually useless yet pigheaded, stupid and cunning at the same time, he was incapable of doing anything worthwhile and unwilling to do anything spectacularly bad; in other words, someone who was always causing trouble and forever complaining about his lot. I knew about all the scandals he’d been involved in and could pretty much read his mind. He slipped cautiously back into the moonlit generator room, where Ximen Jinlong was sprawled on the floor, striped by moonlight filtering in through the slats in the window. One of the moonbeams fell on his head, including his hair, of course, from which threads of blue-tinted blood seeped down across his face, like a millipede. Mo Yan bent down, mouth agape, and touched the wet, sticky blood with two fingers that were black as a pig’s tail. First he examined it with his eyes, then with his nose, and finally with his mouth. What the hell was he doing? Whatever it was, it was strange, to say the least, so bizarre that even an intelligent pig like me couldn’t figure it out. He couldn’t tell if Ximen Jinlong was dead or alive just by looking at, smelling, or tasting his blood, could he? Or maybe this was his involved way of determining whether the blood on his fingers was real or fake. So there I was, trying to decipher his strange behavior, when, like someone who’s just emerged from a nightmare, he screeched, then jumped high in the air and ran out of the generator room.
    “Come over here, everybody! Ximen Jinlong’s dead!” he shouted in a voice that sounded joyful.
    Maybe he saw me hiding behind an apricot tree, maybe not. The moonlit trees and mottled leaves had a dizzying effect on people’s eyes. The sudden death of Jinlong was probably the first and most noteworthy news he’d ever had the opportunity to spread. He had no interest in talking to the apricot trees as he ran, shouting at the top of his lungs. I started following him after he’d tripped on a pile of pig shit and fallen headfirst to the ground.
    People emerged from the buildings, their faces taking on a pale hue in the moonlight. The absence of screams inside the room proved that the sedatives had taken effect on Jiefang. Baofeng was holding an alcohol-soaked pad of cotton to her cheek, which had been cut by flying glass when the lightbulb exploded. A faint scar would be left after the wound healed, living testimony to the unbelievable chaos of that night.
    People came running, some stumbling along, some nearly falling, and all of them horribly flustered. In a word, a disorderly crowd ran toward the generator room, following Mo Yan, who kept turning sideways to describe with showy exaggeration what he’d seen. I had the feeling that whoever it was, whether Ximen Jinlong’s kin or those with no familial ties to him, felt disgust toward the gabby youngster. Shut your filthy mouth! I took several quick steps and hid behind a tree, where I picked a piece of tile up out of the mud with my mouth — it was bigger than I wanted, so I bit it in two — grasped it in the cleft of my right front hoof, stood up humanlike on my hind legs, took aim at Mo Yan’s shiny scalp, and flung the tile as I landed on my front legs. I miscalculated the distance, and instead of hitting Mo Yan, the missile struck Yingchun in the forehead. The loud crack froze my heart and awoke slumbering memories. Oh, Yingchun, my virtuous wife, tonight you are the unluckiest person on earth! Two sons, one of them mad, the other dead, a daughter with an injured face, and now I’ve nearly killed you!
    Heartbroken, I let out a long oink and buried my snout in the ground, remorse driving me to chew the remaining half of the tile into powder. Like a scene from one of those high-speed movie cameras, I saw Yingchun’s mouth open to release a scream like a silver snake dancing in the moonlight as she fell backward like a figurine. Don’t think for a minute that