Died

It rained like a boil that night, and when she swallowed the arsenic hidden in her sleeve, she still held her one-month-old baby boy in her arms. The cry was sharp, like a knife cutting through the dead silence in the room. She didn't coax, she just pressed her face closer and blocked the child's mouth with her increasingly cold chest, as if she could cover up the cry, the child's life, and her own crushed body in her arms. Obviously he just went to the rice fields to do ordinary farm work, but he was dragged into an abyss on his way back. Compared with the violence that night, what was even more unbearable was the lingering day and night after that - the low-pitched gossip outside the window penetrated like needles, "broken shoes", "bad luck", even the disgusted look in her husband's eyes and the broken bowl by her mother-in-law, all forcing her to admit: you are dirty, you don't deserve to live. But what she was most afraid of was actually her sister's eyes that were red from crying. Her mother's family didn't dislike her, and her sister even fought against her husband's family for her. But the more this happened, the dirtier she felt. She was afraid that her "dirtyness" would ruin her sister's reputation, and she was afraid that her parents' backbone would be broken by the villagers in order to protect her. She died—— Dying in a world where even struggling is considered "disorderly" is a grave they built together with silence and curses.