3、Ants
1053 Words
Yan Mou returned home close to 10 pm at the moment. Although the aunts from the funeral home and Qin Yan's studio helped out, she was the only one from the family, and was kept busy to the point of being dizzy. She didn't even have a chance to eat, let alone hide in a corner to lick her wounds.
She carefully placed the bone ash urn, which was emitting a cold light, on the dining table and said, "Mom, we're home."
Yan Mou skipped the steps of washing the citrus leaves in the fire pit and other procedures because it was a very unlucky thing for her. She undid her braids and her hair, with its memory shape, didn't immediately fall down. She walked towards the bathroom, her beige silent slippers treading lightly on the bright wooden floor.
The small daisy hairpin was placed on the white porcelain washbasin, her black dress and white stockings were quietly lying deep in the laundry basket, as well as her simple and plain underwear.
The misty warmth from the heating system made her eyes moist, and when everything had truly returned to dust, Yan Mou couldn't help but cry once more. Tears mixed with hot water were mercilessly swallowed by the drain.
In mid-July, her mother had taken her to Italy to celebrate her liberation from twelve years of exam-oriented education.
"Either travel or study. Your body or soul must be on the road. Since you have finished studying, let's travel," her mother said.
They basked in the sun beneath the Trinity Cathedral and recited the lines from "Roman Holiday," were chatted up by several Italian boys at La Terrazza, counted the colors of the houses on the island of Burano, and picked out a heart-shaped antique brooch near the Milan Canal.
On the evening of the 31st, they had dinner together because that day, she had received her admission notice from S University.
However, a few hours later, she saw her mother lying in the mortuary.
"…To avoid pedestrians running red lights…The electric pole…The route to the hospital was no longer possible," the policeman's words intermittently drilled into her ears.
Yan Mou dialed Yan Jie's phone number in Africa, but it was always busy, forever unreachable.
Since her parents' divorce, she had not had any contact with Yan's grandparents, her own grandfather and grandmother. She knew that they had never liked her and her mother, and they lived in the United States where she couldn't reach them.
Yan Mou's voice trembled as she sighed, no longer thinking about how long her biological father would disappear this time. She quickly searched for a funeral home on her phone and entrusted them with the funeral arrangements.
After turning off the shower, Yan Mou habitually wiped away the water stains on the glass and tiles. She grabbed a towel and carefully dried off the water droplets on her curvaceous body, which was now covered in a faint cherry blossom pink due to the steam.
She wiped away the fog on the mirror with her hand and looked at herself, her nose and eyes red from crying. "Come on, Yan Mou," she encouraged herself.
The young girl put on a pearl white lantern-sleeved silk nightgown and carried the laundry basket to the balcony, where she separated the clothes into their respective laundry bags before putting them into the washing machine.
The underwear had to be hand-washed, and the scent of jasmine filled the air as she washed them in her hands. The house was especially quiet when she was alone, but Yan Mou had long since gotten used to being alone. Even when her mother was still alive, she wasn't always at home, and Yan Mou attended a boarding school in high school, only coming home on weekends. Sometimes, she couldn't even see Qin Yan for a week or two.
She connected her phone to the Bluetooth speaker on the dining table and randomly played her favorite old song playlist. The nostalgic melodies and female voice quickly drifted out, and she hummed along softly to the notes of songs from an era before her time.
"…………*ち*わせした**へと、*うときめかせて…………"
(To the place where we agreed to meet, my heart is pounding)
"……Happy birthday, Love for you……"
She walked into the kitchen, where the half-bowl of salad she had made earlier was still in the fridge. She took the oil and vinegar dressing and poured it into a glass bowl, then carried it with a silver fork to the dining table.
"Mom, I'm going to eat now," she said to the urn containing her mother's ashes.
A few months ago, someone had started a hashtag saying "Qin Yan hurry up and die," and it was said that the public WeChat account received countless malicious insults every day. So Qin Yan really wrote an article called "If I Were to Die," in which she retorted against the haters.
Qin Yan wrote about the funeral she hoped for, one where Mr. A to Mr. Z would come to pay their respects, where people wouldn't cry uncontrollably, and where her daughter would write a thousand-word eulogy.
Qin Yan also wrote that she hoped to have a sea burial after cremation, preferably in the sea of S city.
Yanmou had fulfilled her mother's previous wishes as much as possible, except for the sea burial.
Suddenly, a memory of what happened in the funeral home corridor this morning flashed through her mind.
Hmm, she couldn't help but be impulsive, even though she had thought that he might have low blood sugar from waking up so early and had prepared chocolate in her pocket ahead of time, she didn't expect to actually use it.
Why did he suddenly cut his hair so short? Wasn't the previous length long enough to tie into a small braid?
She scratched the palm of her right hand, still able to recall the sensation of Shidust's fingertips lightly brushing over it as she handed him the candy earlier today. It felt like being bitten by an ant crawling out of damp soil on a spring day, a tingling sensation.
"Is this S City?" she wondered.
Could she trouble him a bit more?
- Writer
