Folklore and Strange Stories: Chicken with Its Head Decapitated

My name is Wang Shitou. When I was twenty years old, I cut off my head by the lotus pond at the entrance of the village. Everyone in the village said that I was obsessed with the woman who was beheaded twenty years ago. That woman's name was Xiulian. She fled famine to Wangjiayu in 1978. She was seven months pregnant and was beheaded by my grandmother herself and buried in a mass grave. Grandma said this is the old rule. Use the head of an outsider to exchange for twenty years of peace for the whole village. My grandfather doesn't believe in evil. On my full moon day in 1998, he deliberately chopped off the heads of three chickens and threw them into a mass grave. From that day on, I never saw the real sun again. I always see a woman in a blue shirt with no head following me. She doesn't harm me, she just stays with me. Accompany me to grow up, accompany me to school, accompany me to spend every night when I am awakened by nightmares. It wasn't until I was twenty that I realized that she was not here for revenge. She came to take her children home. And I am the child she has been waiting for forty years.