David Li remembered that the afternoon sunlight was especially harsh. The dorm room reeked of a mixture of instant noodles and sweaty socks. Yellowed mosquito nets hung over four iron bunk beds. As Ethan Zhou threw out his last two cards, the corner of his mouth twisted. "Lost again. No wonder—they say poor people bring bad luck even when playing cards."
That sentence was like a rusty knife slowly sawing through the last of David Li's sanity. He saw the other three exchange glances. He saw Ethan Zhou holding the three-yuan pack of cigarettes he had just bought—meant specially for the Spring Festival—between two fingers. Cheap tobacco turned into smoke rings in Zhou's mouth, drifting across the cracked lenses of his glasses.
"Still playing?" Leo Liu, who slept on the upper bunk, leaned halfway out. The scar on his ankle looked like a centipede—an injury David had accidentally caused while playing soccer last week. Under the dim light, it writhed.
David Li counted the seven coins left in his pocket. The ridged edges dug into his palm, like the fingerprints his father had left on his face after slapping him in the rice fields. He suddenly remembered the day he left the village—his father squatting on the threshold saying, "City folk look down on us. You have to endure it."
At 2:17 a.m., David marked the thirty-seventh tally line in his notebook. Outside the mosquito net, snores rose and fell. Zhou's teeth grinding sounded like bones being chewed. He opened the ledger hidden under his pillow and circled the names Ethan Zhou, Leo Liu, Harry Wang, and Jason Chen in red ink—those who borrowed money and never returned it, those who used his soap without asking, those who tossed the quilt his mother had sewn onto the floor and said it had fleas.
The pen pierced the paper, ink spreading like a small pool of blood.
March 7, overcast.The hardware shop owner's wife had black grime under her nails."The strongest one," David heard his own voice echo like it came from a metal pipe. "For hammering nails."He picked a claw hammer, its head wrapped in an orange plastic sleeve that made it look like a toy.He bought the thickest plastic bag—extra-large, the kind that could hold twenty kilograms of rice.
On the way back to campus, he stopped by a grove to test the hammer's grip. The dull thud as it struck a tree trunk startled a few sparrows. Woodchips flew when the bark cracked, sticking to his eyelashes. He suddenly laughed. It felt even better than dunking a basketball.
Ethan Zhou was the first. He was crouched, tying his shoelaces with his back to the door, the third vertebra on his neck sticking out like a button.David remembered his biology textbook said that was where the medulla was. As the hammer came down, he counted his heartbeat—just three strikes and Zhou slumped like a sack of grain.
Turns out the sound of a skull breaking was much like cracking open a coconut.
Leo Liu stared wide-eyed before death, lips twitching as if trying to say, "Brother David." That term of respect made David hesitate for half a second. But the hammer still came down on his temple. A blood vessel burst. Blood arced onto the title page of a Molecular Biology textbook, right over a blot where the professor's signature had bled.
Harry Wang was the most troublesome. He kicked over the thermos while struggling. David had to hit several extra times. The hammer jammed in the skull, scraping with a sickening sound. Sweat streamed into his eyes, turning the world into a blurry red. He thought of the pig he'd slaughtered at age twelve—the rush of hot breath from its throat felt just as scalding.
By the time he stuffed the last foot into the wardrobe, dawn had already broken. He sat in the pool of blood, counting his breaths. They were unusually calm.Dark liquid seeped from the wardrobe's cracks, drawing eerie, branch-like patterns across the floor.He suddenly craved a cigarette, but found only half a melted White Rabbit candy in his pocket—a gift his mother had sent for his 20th birthday.
"Dad, they can't laugh at me anymore."David spoke to the empty air. The sound startled a crow outside the window.He noticed pale pink tissue stuck beneath his fingernails and slowly dug it out using Ethan Zhou's nail clipper.
Day 36 of escape.David found half a newspaper in a trash bin. The wanted poster showed his student ID photo—glasses taped at the hinge, lips pressed into a stubborn line.On the back were four ID photos side-by-side. He ran his finger over the smooth surface and suddenly realized he couldn't remember if Leo Liu had single or double eyelids.
Rain washed over the neon sign of a takeout restaurant, distorting the lights into colorful worms in the puddles.A girl in a red dress dropped her hairpin as she ran past. David bent down to pick it up, and in that moment, saw a stranger in the reflection—hair matted like dead grass, bloodshot eyes, sauce at the corners of his mouth.
He suddenly remembered the winter of junior year, when Ethan Zhou carried him back to the dorm drunk.He had vomited all over Zhou's new jacket, but Zhou only laughed, saying: "It's okay. It's a knockoff anyway."The hairpin left a crescent cut in his palm. Shallow, but it stung.
When the police surrounded him, he was crouching behind the takeout shop, gnawing on half a moldy piece of bread.He looked up at the barrels of countless black guns. Suddenly, he wanted to ask Ethan Zhou how much that jacket had really cost. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a sob, mixed with breadcrumbs and blood, dripping onto his frayed pants.
Under the interrogation room's harsh lights, David began counting cracks in the wall.When he got to the 127th, he heard his own voice say:"Can you pass a message to my dad? Tell him... tell him I don't have to endure it anymore."
A fly landed on the confession paper the police handed him. David stared at it for a long time, until those transparent wings became the dragonflies from his childhood.The evening his father chased him with a bamboo stick, the sky had been the same muddy blue.