A dense, rich aroma of grease wrapped in hot steam rushed toward her face. In the dim main room, a square table was set out, packed to capacity with everyone sitting around it. Everyone’s bowl was piled high with glistening red-braised pork. When chopsticks picked up a piece of meat, droplets of oil dripped down along the pork skin, landing in the coarse porcelain bowls and sending up tiny splashes of grease. Immediately following this was a rising and falling chorus of “smacking” noises—the sticky sound of lips savoring the meat broth, the muffled crunch of teeth crushing fatty meat, mixed with sighs of satisfaction, like countless tiny insects burrowing into Lixia’s ears.
“Don’t smack your lips, it sounds awful!” Lixia frowned and shouted out, but her voice felt wrapped in cotton, floating lightly away and dissolving into the chewing noises that filled the room. No one looked up at her; Mother Yuan even purposely opened her mouth wider to make the smacking sound louder, splashing speckles of oil onto the tablecloth. Covering her ears, Lixia retreated backward, but the noise chased after her, circling from her ears to the back of her head, and then slipping down inside her collar, making her scalp tingle with numbness.
Suddenly, a bowl on the table overturned with a clatter. The red-braised pork that tumbled onto the floor unexpectedly began to swell. The glistening pork skin split open, actually revealing pale pink pigskin! Before Lixia could react, that clump of meat had already grown into a half-sized piglet. Its round eyes gleamed with a red light as it stared straight at her, as if staring at an irreconcilable enemy. “Oink—!” The piglet suddenly lunged at her, its coarse, stiff bristles brushing against the back of her hand. Terrified, Lixia shrieked and clutched her head, her feet kicking out as her entire body abruptly sat up.
Her chest was still heaving violently. Lixia opened her eyes and sat dazed for quite a while—so it was only a dream. She let out a sigh of relief, but just as she was about to lie back down, a faint “squeak-squeak” sound reached her ears, like a tiny insect gnawing on something, sharp and thin. The hairs on Lixia’s body instantly stood on end. She was all too familiar with this sound—it was a rat!
Before she could move her body away, a slight tugging sensation suddenly came from the back of her head, as if something had hooked onto her hair. Lixia froze, not even daring to breathe a little harder. She could only feel that tugging sensation becoming more and more obvious, to the point where she could even feel tiny claws crawling through her hair. “Ah—!” Her accumulated terror erupted in an instant. Lixia’s shriek was like a bolt of lightning cutting through the night sky, vibrating so hard that even the window paper trembled slightly.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” The eldest sister and the second sister on the bed scrambled up almost at the same time, their voices still carrying the nasal tones of incomplete sleep. Lixia pointed at her own hair, tears already welling up. “There’s… there’s a rat crawling on my head… woohoo…” Before she could even finish her sentence, she used the moonlight filtering through the window to see a rat, easily the size of two adult fists, quickly scrambling upward along the earthen wall by the bedside. Its gray-brown fur gleamed with oil under the moonlight, and its tail dragged behind it, looking disgusting and terrifying.
Footsteps approached from the main room. It was her parents and older brothers, who had been startled awake. Learning that a rat had crawled onto their youngest daughter’s head gave them quite a fright as well. One had to know that in neighboring Li Settlement, there was a child who had their nose bitten off by a rat when they were small; it was because the child was too young to walk and the family wasn’t home, which allowed the tragedy to happen. “It’s fine now, it’s fine. Don’t be afraid.” Father Yuan picked up the broom from the corner of the main room, stood on the bed, and tiptoed to whack against the roof beams. The “thud-thud” sounds shook the dust from the ceiling down. “Let’s see if you ever dare to come back!” Mother Yuan then pulled off the bedsheets and straw mat from the bed and shook them out several times. Only after confirming that no rat traces or dust were left did she lay them out neatly again.
Yet, no matter what, Lixia didn’t dare to sleep in her original spot again, her eyes staring fixedly at the edge of the bed as her whole body continued to tremble. The eldest sister smiled helplessly, turned her pillow around in the opposite direction, and scooted over a bit. “Come, sleep in the middle. Third Sister and I will shield you.” Only then did Lixia slowly lie down, purposely shrinking her head downward so the top of her head was lower than her two older sisters’ pillows, as if doing this could hide her from all danger.
In the darkness, the muffled chuckles of the eldest sister and second sister could be heard, as they couldn’t hold them in. “Hehe, the fifth child’s courage is a bit small.” Lixia had no energy to argue. She simply gripped the corner of her eldest sister’s clothes tightly. Listening to the even breathing beside her, that wildly racing heart finally began to calm down gradually, though the smacking sounds from her dream and that piercing “squeak-squeak” sound from just now seemed to linger in her ears, refusing to dissipate for a long time.