A rooster crowed, and she woke up.
There was a hole in the top of the mosquito net, patched with a small piece of blue cloth. She recognized it: when she was fifteen, she had slept beneath this very net.
But she had gone to bed in her forties. She had dropped out of junior high and gone south to work, standing on an assembly line until her feet swelled. She had married twice and left both marriages with nothing, without either of her children. Later, she trusted someone who promised to treat her well, only to be betrayed. People called her a “homewrecker.”
Given another life, she didn't even have a golden finger. She still had the same mind she had back then, just with a lifetime's worth of memories and a body covered in scars.
There were two things she kept close to her heart: she wouldn't drop out of school again, and she would teach her mother to read.
A con artist had once swindled her mother out of five hundred yuan. The paper had only a signature and a fingerprint. She wanted her mother to know that there had to be words beneath the fingerprint for it to count. They started with “received,” “cash,” “yuan,” and “exactly,” learning three characters a week. Her mother grumbled that she was too old to learn this sort of thing, but later, in the kitchen, she quietly said, “Next time you come back, bring a pen and buy me a notebook.”
Starting with a batch of defective goods no one wanted, she set up a stall, stocked merchandise, opened a workshop, and bought a storefront in the county town. Step by step, she kept her family afloat. The villagers only said she was brave. Only she knew that she was helping her past self reclaim, one by one, the things she had lost.
Reading makes the path in your heart wider.
In this life, she would take her mother's hand and walk that path together.
My new work is now available on Tomato Novel. I hope you'll enjoy it. Your support motivates me to write, and I'll do my best to tell every story well!
