Tales and Strange Happenings from the Folk: The Headless Chicken

My name is Wang Shitou. When I was twenty, I cut off my own head beside the lotus pond at the village entrance.

Everyone in the village said I was being haunted by the woman who had been beheaded twenty years earlier.

Her name was Xiulian. She fled famine to Wangjiayu in 1978, seven months pregnant. My grandmother cut off her head with her own hands and buried her in the mass grave.

Grandmother said it was an old custom: use the head of an outsider to buy the whole village twenty years of peace.

My grandfather refused to believe in such things. On the day I turned one month old in 1998, he deliberately cut off the heads of three chickens and threw them into the mass grave.

From that day on, I never saw the real sun again.

I could always see a woman in a blue shirt, headless, following behind me.

She never hurt me. She simply stayed with me.

She watched me grow up, went to school with me, and stayed by my side through every night I woke from a nightmare.

It wasn't until I was twenty that I learned she hadn't come for revenge.

She had come to take her child home.

And I was the child she had waited forty years for.