Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

and give off foul odors. When I saw them I was more convinced than ever that by drifting downstream with Little Flower I’d transcended the life of pigs, transcended the Red Death, even transcended the now-ended Mao Zedong era.
    I know that in his “Tales of Pig-Raising,” Mo Yan had this to say about the pig carcasses that had been thrown into the river: “A thousand dead pigs from the Apricot Garden Pig Farm formed a corps of floating dead. Their carcasses swelled up, began to rot, exploded, were eaten by maggots, were torn apart by fish, all the while drifting downstream until they disappeared into the roiling waters of the Eastern Sea, where what was left of them was swallowed up, dismembered, and turned into all sorts of materials to join the transforming cycle of material objects.” I’m not going to say the guy can’t write, only that he missed a wonderful opportunity, for if he’d seen me, Pig Sixteen, with Little Flower on my back, riding waves in the golden waters of the river, instead of writing about death, he’d have praised life, praised us, praised me! I am the power of life, I am passion, freedom, and love, the most beautiful spectacle the world has to offer.
    We drifted with the flow toward that moon of the lunar eighth month, sixteenth day, a much different moon than the one under which you were married. The moon that night had fallen from the sky, but this night it rose out of the river, just as big and round as the other one, red at first, like an innocent child sent to earth from some hidden spot in the universe, bawling and bleeding and turning the water red. Your moon, sweet and melancholic, came down for your wedding. My moon, solemn and bleak, rose up for Mao Zedong. We saw him sitting on the moon — his bulk pressing down and altering its shape into an oval. He wore a red flag like a cape, held a cigarette in his fingers, and raised his heavy head slightly. A pensive look was frozen on his face.
    With Little Flower on my back, I drifted eastward, chasing the moon and chasing Mao Zedong. We wanted to get closer to the moon so we could see Mao Zedong’s face with even greater clarity. But the moon moved with us, the distance remaining constant no matter how hard I paddled, even as I moved through the water like a torpedo. Little Flower dug her hooves into my ribs and shouted “Faster! Faster!” as if I were her horse.
    Where Northeast Gaomi Township and Pingdu County met, a sandbar called the Wu Family Sandy Mouth divided the river, sending one stream northeast, the other southeast; the two streams merging again near Two County Hamlet. Now picture this scene. A fast-moving river suddenly divides into two, and at this juncture, schools of red carp, white eels, black-capped soft-shelled turtles, fly up to the moon, an expression of romanticism; but before they reach their goal, the pull of gravity brings them back in a bright and lovely, but ultimately tragic arc, for when most of them land on the surface of the water, scales fly, fins snap off, and gills shatter, turning the returned water creatures into meals for waiting foxes and wild boars. A small number manage to return to the safety of the water by virtue of their strength or by pure luck, and continue swimming to the southeast or the northeast.
    Now, given my body weight and the fact that I was carrying Little Flower on my back, although I too went skyward at that juncture, I started falling back before I was ten feet out of the water, and it was only the springy nature of the scrub brush that kept either of us from injury. We were, of course, too large for the foxes to consider eating; and to the wild boars, with their well-developed front halves and tapered rear ends, we had to be considered relatives; they would never eat their own kin. We landed safely on the sandbar.
    Food came easily to those foxes and wild boars, good, nutritious food, and they were all much rounder than they should have been. All foxes eat fish, that’s a rule of nature. But when we saw a dozen or so wild boars dining on fish, we could hardly believe our eyes. They’d grown so picky, their mouths so pampered, that they ate only the brains and the roe; the fat, rich meat held no attraction for them.
    Astounded to find us there, the wild boars slowly gathered round, mean looks in their eyes, moonlight glinting off their terrifying white fangs. Little Flower wrapped her legs around me even tighter, and I could feel that she was quaking. I started