When Rape Flowers Bloom (2)
Swannlee-126 01/18 10381
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When Rape Flowers Bloom
By Swann Lee
Chapter 2
The second class in the morning is Teacher Zhang’s math class, following Teacher Chen’s Chinese class. I jump up and down with my right hand raised high, yelling “Me! Me!” Teacher Zhang likes to toss out hundreds of questions and I know the answers to almost all of them. He calls on me most of the time, and my face turns hot with excitement. Math class is so much fun! In tests I used to get the highest scores all the time. However, a boy who transferred here from the county town often gets the highest scores now. That annoys me since I want to be Teacher Zhang’s only favorite. He is the most handsome and refined man I have ever seen. Despite being the son of the Prefectural Party Commissar, he volunteered to come to this small village's primary school. Between classes, he often demonstrates highly difficult moves on the parallel bars or climbs a tall tree to scary heights over our cheering cries.
“We’ll hold a contest next month,” Teacher Zhang says at the end of the class, wiping his gold-rimmed glasses with a gingham handkerchief. “There’ll be a mysterious prize. Something you’ve never seen.”
On the way home, we try to guess at the prize but can’t picture anything mysterious.
By the time dinner is over, it is already dark. Mama pours warm water into the plastic basin on the wooden rack and asks us three sisters to wash our faces one by one. Then Mama pours the warm water from the basin into a big plastic tub on the ground and we wash our feet together. As we dry our feet with a cloth scrap, Mama hands my oldest sister a kerosene lamp converted from a brown-glass medicine bottle.
“It’ll be warmer in bed,” Mama says as she takes off her shoes and dips her feet into the tub. The water must not be so warm by now. Baba and Mama
always get the worst stuff.
The small quilt we share can’t keep us warm at all. Cold winds seep into the cracks between the red-painted window frame and the mud walls. We tremble under the quilt. The two older sisters drag the quilt back and forth with their feet. Every time the quilt shifts, cold wind fans in and blows away the little warmth that we have saved up.
The next morning, the white floury feathers have turned into icy needles, falling endlessly from the sky. It is even colder than the day before. By the kitchen table, my sisters are sneezing and coughing, refusing to eat the corn grits.
They begin to complain to Mama that I have grown so much in just four months after turning eleven that they can’t sleep with me anymore. As we have no more quilts in the house, my sisters suggest that I sleep with my big brother, who sleeps alone in the new brick house.
“That’s not very …” Mama turns to Baba, “is it?”
“I can give the new quilt to Hua,” Datong says.
“Nonsense! Engaged already, and still talk like a child.” Baba stares at Datong. “New quilt is for the new couple. Can others use it?”
“Where will Hua sleep?” my big sister asks. “Like I said, we have no space for her.”
“If the harvest is good next year,” Baba says, “I will buy six jin of cotton in the town fair and ask Pockmark Jiang to fluff a new wadding. For now, let this little monkey go squeeze some space on Datong’s bed.” Baba knocks slightly on my forehead with a knuckle.
Call me a little monkey? I love to be so skinny that I run as fast as the wind. Last time Little Black Three dropped a cricket in my shirt. Guess what? I caught up with him within fifty steps and dropped the cricket back in his shirt.
At night, after washing our feet, Datong covers the flickering lamp flame with a hand and leads me out of the kitchen, through the dark backyard scattered with tools and into his brick house. It still smells of whitewash. Baba has managed to add a red wooden trunk, a five-drawer chest, and a “Plum Flower” radio to the house.
Datong sets the lamp down on the five-drawer chest, undresses and crawls under the quilt. It is the first time for me to see him in the blue cloth shorts that Mama made for him. Datong works often in the fields, so his legs and shoulders are thick and strong. Wearing a faded sweater and a pair of thin pants, I crawl under the quilt, goose bumps on my thighs and arms. Datong sits up, blows out the lamp, and lies down again. I crawl into his arms.
As always, the bed is cold at first touch, but it soon becomes warm as the quilt is big enough to allow me ample room. Datong is giving off warmth like a burning stove.
“Are you still cold, Hua?” he asks me after a few minutes.
“Not anymore, gege,” I say.
“Good.” He holds me up and puts me down at the other side of the bed. “I snore, he explains. He lifts the quilt and tucks it under me. Then he lies down with his back to me. Soon his snores float up in the air.
Before the sunrise, the coldness in the room wakes me up again. The pale blue moonlight casts shadows of bare tree branches onto the windowpane. In the moonlight, Datong’s face is mythically handsome: thick eyebrows, long eyelashes, broad jaw, and determined lips. I have never felt so close to my brother. I slide into his warm arms, and soon fall asleep again.
This new arrangement works well. Every night Datong takes good care of me: pulls the quilt back on me after I have kicked it away, tells me lots of interesting things about the world outside, things that he has heard on the radio. For the first time, I can show off my exotic knowledge that even someone as smart as Linlin does not know.
I wonder why I have never taken the time to know Datong well, instead of wasting time with two sisters who have only given me things that they do not want. On the contrary, Datong always gives me the better things. One night he hears my stomach growl and in the weekends he starts taking me into the mountains. He shoots down sparrows with a slingshot that he made from a tree branch, builds a fire away from the wind with dried twigs from the mountain, and roasts the sparrows after we cut and clean them in a chilling mountain stream. He always gives me the big and fat ones.
