The broken ice on the bluestone floor creaked loudly. When Ah Tang was dragged into the red lacquered door with a thick hemp rope around his neck, the ice edge from the eaves happened to fall, shattering into stars around his ankles that were bruised by the cold. The madam held the hookah in her mouth and leaned over to look at it. The sparks in the copper smoke pot flickered: these eyes looked like spring water in the south of the Yangtze River. He was twelve years old that year, and the fingerprints on the deed of sale were so red that it pierced the eyes. At night, huddled in the haystack of the woodshed, my wrists bruised with blood from the iron chains, I heard laughter like silver bells coming from outside the corridor. Through the crack in the door, he saw a half-naked man in the gauze with a gold chain dangling from his neck, leaning on the pale boy. There was a ferocious iron scar on the young man's neck, like a twisted centipede.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
