Every village has a few corners that the old people keep secret about -
Maybe it's the old locust tree with a crooked neck at the entrance of the village. It always drips sticky black sap in late spring, and people who get it will hear the number of people under the tree at night "who still lack one piece of clothing";
It might be the abandoned grinding mill at the end of the grain drying field. After a heavy rain, blood will seep from the cracks in the stones. You will definitely find an old piece of cloth embroidered with your birth date nearby the next day;
It may also be that there is a wooden box locked in a secret compartment under the altar table in the ancestral hall that generations have not dared to open. However, on every first and fifteenth day of the lunar month, the sound of grinding teeth can be heard from the box, as if someone is chewing something crispy.
These stories are scattered in the cooking smoke, soaked in the field ridges, and hidden in the slits of the old man's eyes when he smokes cigarettes.
No one can tell whether it is true or false, they only know the rules passed down from their ancestors:
"Don't look in the mirror by the well, the shadows in the water don't like to smile."
"Don't scold the scarecrow when you are harvesting rice. When it turns to look at you, there will be nothing under its straw hat."
"When you pass by an old mill late at night and hear the sound of grinding inside, don't say 'Who is that?' - The millstone spinning might be the shepherd boy who didn't come back last year."
Each article here is a fragmented image fished out from a different village.
There are no earth-shattering ghosts, just something earthy and weird:
It's the bloody grains that suddenly pop out of the stove, it's the clothes hanging on the rope that are missing a button, it's the thread that went through the eye of the needle when grandma put the soles in, and it's the weeds that somehow got entangled on the grave.
Is there one or two things hidden in your village that the elders say, "Children don't ask"?
