Thirty-Eight Kills in Wedding Shoes

In 1983, during the wheat-ripening season in northern Anhui, the swollen corpse of Widow Li surfaced in the old well at the village entrance, a fresh locust blossom caught on her embroidered left shoe. She was the first name on Ku Xia’s revenge list. Eighteen years earlier, thirty-eight pairs of hands had torn her mother’s wedding dress to shreds right here.