Chapter 17: Butterfly
The night was deep. The boy by her pillow was sleeping soundly. A faint light shone through the gap in the un-drawn curtains, illuminating the boy’s deep and three-dimensional features. She also revealed half her face from the shadows. She reached out with her thin palm and gently caressed the boy’s gentle and handsome eyebrows and eyes. Under the pale moonlight, the prominent blood vessels on the back of her pale hand were clearly visible.
Something had suddenly rotted and spoiled. The smell that filled the air made Su Xi a little breathless.
She bit the tip of her tongue, resisting the urge to turn on the light.
She took one last deep look at the boy, then slowly sat up and got out of bed.
The spring breeze blew through the willows, and the river thawed. The narrow stream of water had not yet dried up. The water marks meandered through the bedroom and flowed to the corner of the dining table in the living room. A faint, ambiguous spring atmosphere still lingered in the air, a testament to the madness they had just experienced.
Su Xi lit the candle that had been inserted into the cake and had burned halfway. The faint candlelight dispelled a little of the darkness, flickering weakly, as if it were about to be extinguished in the darkness in the next moment.
The hands of the clock had long since passed midnight. She was already eighteen, an adult.
She opened her palm, and a few capsules that the boy had secretly hidden in the bedding rolled out. The other party had lied to her again, like a tamed little colt, pretending to be well-behaved and submissive in front of her.
The boy naively thought that after a night of tenderness with her, a little bit of gentleness in his eyes could deceive her. The boy was still living in the sun after all. In terms of darkness and cunning… he was not even half as good as her. How could he possibly deceive her?
In the end, the boy was just seduced by her body. It was ridiculous to think about it. This body, which she had once been so self-conscious and disgusted with, had now become her only bargaining chip to gain a place in the boy’s heart.
No matter how hard she tried, all she got in return was the other party’s hypocrisy. She was always blank in terms of emotion, just a futile and powerless struggle.
But he was still that reserved and gentle boy. Even though she had only brought him harm from beginning to end, the other party had never done anything to retaliate against her.
Even when his desire was burning and swollen to the limit of his endurance, he still extinguished the thought of venting it. He struggled in the pain of endurance and asked her to go away. But she wouldn’t. How could she dislike the boy’s things? As long as it was given by him, she would accept it all with relish.
There was still a box of birth control pills by her feet, the packaging still new. This was just a prop she used to deceive the boy. What she had taken in front of him was just a capsule filled with white sugar.
The fragile candlelight flickered in her dark eyes. She was in a daze for a moment, a little reluctant. This faint light had not yet warmed her, and it was about to leave her life.
Su Xi spread out a piece of paper and a pen on the table. The tip of the pen gently touched the paper. The thousands of emotions in her heart could not be condensed into a short sentence. She paused for a few seconds and accidentally drew a scratch on the white paper, like her flawed and bleak life. She finally put pen to paper.
Some things should not be buried with the ashes, such as… the bloody truth behind the lies.
…
Her father was a very incompetent person.
Gambling, alcoholism, domestic violence… he was involved in almost all the most heinous things in the world.
A man whom her mother had once loved to the bone. She had given up her studies, which could have changed her life, and had married him without hesitation. However, the family they had built with their own hands was destroyed by the man.
When she was young, she had an intelligence that was far beyond her peers. She was very good at math. The numbers that other children of her age needed to count on their fingers for a long time, she could quickly calculate in her head. However, this was not a skill worth showing off. Instead, it made the young her learn a cruel reality in advance.
When the belt buckle was pulled down with the tough leather strap, it would often carry a huge kinetic energy. The hard iron buckle would hit the skin and scrape off large pieces of flesh and blood. It was not just the excruciating pain that made people want to roll on the ground, but the scars left after the wound healed would also accompany the injured person through a period of shame.
She had gotten used to the days of submission. So she began to calculate how long she would have to endure such days. Her good calculation ability allowed her to accurately calculate the time to every minute and second on a draft paper. But the result was cruel.
She was still young, and her small brain couldn’t hold too many good methods. For a moment, she didn’t know what to do. She began to hope that her mother would make up her mind to divorce her father and then take her away from such days completely.
However, divorce was a very shameful thing in that era. Coming out of the civil affairs bureau with a divorce certificate would be laughed at by people behind their backs. Even if the woman walked on the street with a bruised and swollen face all day, most people would just advise her to endure it, making a beautiful vision that no one would believe, saying that good days would come. But her mother was soft-hearted and listened to those accomplices.
She suddenly realized that she should probably do something. With her tender, inexperienced hands, she would shorten the time she had calculated—preferably… to just one second.
This plan was deeply buried in her heart, because she found that she didn’t have the courage to take a life, to deny a person’s past, to extinguish a person’s future.
But this family had long since rotted. There was no future at all. There was only a rotten and disgusting past.
The person who had given her the courage and determination was precisely her father.
The story of the confession that day did not actually end as quickly as she had told the boy. After she had fled, she was caught in an alley. The enraged man kicked her to the ground and then began to vent his anger at his wife for cheating on him. She endured the pain, just wanting to crawl a little further away, not wanting the boy who had just heard her confession to accidentally appear in this alley and see her in this ugly state.
The white dress with blue dots was easily dirtied. The dust in the air blurred her eyes, and the yellow mud stained the surface of the dress. The warm blood soaked the hem of the dress…
She was later rescued by a kind-hearted passerby. Otherwise, she might have died in that deserted alley that day.
The blood, mixed with mud, seeped deep into the fabric of the dress. Many holes were torn in the material. This new dress, a birthday gift, she had only worn once before it was thrown into the pile of garbage downstairs, along with her awkward and innocent first love, annihilated in the raging flames of the incinerator, leaving only a field of black and gray ashes to scatter in the air.
Her father had mercilessly extinguished her light.
Even though she was always in darkness, she had never hated someone so much. She hated the smell of alcohol and mold that always filled the old and narrow house. She hated the arrogant and disdainful gazes of others when they gossiped about her family behind her back. She hated her weak and incompetent mother, and she hated this father who had destroyed this family with his own hands even more.
Almost everyone is born with a slight mental disorder. This is the violent nature of animals, ingrained in their bones. But as they grow up and their self-control becomes stronger, these tendencies weaken. The bloodlust, the irritability, the depression… they all lie dormant, and then, when they encounter a certain thing or person, they erupt uncontrollably.
Hatred condensed into a steel wire, prying open a hidden switch in her nerves. From then on, she suffered from a difficult-to-cure mental illness. Fortunately, no one knew… except herself.
Unfortunately, her father didn’t dare to get a divorce. How could an incompetent middle-aged man with no skills, who drank and gambled all day, dare to get a divorce?
The plan was implemented in her second year of high school. By then, she was no longer the ugly little duckling of her childhood. The endocrine disorder caused by malnutrition had suddenly returned to normal one day. Her skin was no longer greasy, and the acne scars and freckles on her small face had disappeared. Her features had also become delicate and three-dimensional. Except for the occasional new wound from her father’s displeasure, she had completely transformed into the beautiful appearance she had fantasized about in her dreams.
She spread her wings and became a swan soaring in the blue sky, and then she personally painted her white wings with bright red blood.
One night, after her mother had been beaten by her father, she cried and let her mother know that her father had put his hand under her skirt.
This was almost the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Her mother, who had always told her to be careful not to show too much of her girlish figure in front of her father, was now told by her guilt-ridden daughter that her father had molested her.
The mother, who had been submissive all her life, completely broke down at that moment.
A few days later, she noticed that her mother had bought rat poison, planning to put it in the porridge and die with the man she had once loved, to wash away the sin of bringing her daughter into the world to suffer with her.
However, this was just a lie she had made up. In order to shorten the time she had calculated in her childhood, she had made a lot of preparations early on.
For example, she had discovered an interesting thing. It was about the discovery that her father had become impotent due to years of malicious alcoholism. She had heard this in her father’s drunken sobs. Her father had also cried after that drunken episode, saying that he was not worthy of being a human being and that he was sorry for his wife and daughter.
But she didn’t feel a single bit of pity. Instead, she was deeply disgusted by the man’s ugly, tear-streaked face, and she even pushed forward the progress of her plan.
Of course, she would not let her mother die with such a heinous criminal. It was not because she felt sorry for her mother. She just simply didn’t want her father to die too easily.
She wanted her father to die a lonely and miserable death. A vicious gangster who had lived for more than half his life should die for such a ridiculous reason as a drunken accident. Then, when others talked about this matter, they would all spit a few times and curse that this was the retribution of an evil person, that he deserved to die, that he deserved it!
She had signed up for the International Chemistry Olympiad very early on and had joined the school’s chemistry experiment interest group. So a few bottles of industrial alcohol for experiments had appeared in a corner of the house by chance. She had also accidentally broken the bottles, so the industrial alcohol was naturally stored in old beverage bottles.
With her knowledge, which was enough to win the first prize in the chemistry competition, she of course knew that industrial alcohol could kill people. One bottle was enough.
The family was dirt poor. The man couldn’t afford to drink beautifully packaged wine and could only buy bulk wine in the alley. She had hidden the man’s wine jug, and a few useless old beverage bottles had appeared in the house for no reason. The man could of course only use them to get wine.
The man had to drink every day. So the wine and the industrial alcohol were both colorless. They were stored in the same packaged beverage bottles and were placed together in a corner of the room.
That day happened to be her birthday. Her mother had made an excuse to let her go to her aunt’s house after school, and they would celebrate her birthday together at her aunt’s house when she got off work. But in fact, her aunt was the only relatively reliable relative in their family. Her mother had planned to find an excuse to send her away, and then she would put rat poison in the white porridge for dinner and die with the man she had once loved.
The house was very close to the school. Her drunken father would not have noticed a small figure hiding in a corner.
After her father went in, he never came out again. The next person to go in was her mother, who had come home from work. The sudden scream was very harsh. She huddled in a corner outside the door and listened, her whole body trembling with excitement. Every tiny cell in her body was rampaging.
She left with a skip in her step. On the way, she passed a private pastry shop. The money in her pocket couldn’t afford a very expensive birthday cake, so she bought the cheapest cupcake in the window.
She was wearing a sky-blue school uniform, her face tender and youthful, especially her two crystal-grape-like eyes, translucent and bright. When she smiled, her eyes would curve into a crescent moon, and her two pigtails would hang obediently on her shoulders. She smiled and asked the shop owner to give her an extra layer of inferior cream, and she also lit a birthday candle in the center of the cake.
She held the cupcake and bounced on her way to her aunt’s house. Her baby-fat cheeks were puffed out, and she looked lively and cute, which attracted a few friendly smiles from passersby. She blew out the candle and tasted the cloyingly sweet saccharin in the cake, bite by bite.
She hadn’t thought about what the outcome would have been if her father hadn’t taken the wrong wine. But she was very lucky. This was simply a unique favor from heaven. Her birthday wish had been fulfilled before she had even blown out the candle.
It was always like this… fate would give her hope when she was at her most desperate—just like the boy who had once been a sudden light in the darkness, illuminating her gloom, giving her an innocent love, and supporting her through that dark period.
She had thought she was an ugly duckling. Otherwise, how could she have transformed into an elegant and beautiful swan? Later, she learned that this was not the only pair that would transform. The ugly and disgusting caterpillar in its childhood would also transform into a fluttering butterfly after it grew up.
So she was never an elegant and kind swan, but a seductive and fatal black butterfly.
She spread her wings and flew in the air. Her beautiful skin incited a surge of desire. Her antennae were seeping with a hallucinogenic poison, carrying the sin in her bones.
