Nirvana Phoenix Girl - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

My mother was gone.

Nanny Xu buried her in a desolate stretch of countryside.

Stubbornly, she carved words into the stone marker. Blood ran freely from her callused hands, but she seemed not to feel it at all.

As she carved, she said, “Your mother was very brave. Brave people shouldn’t come to an end like this.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant.

Nanny Xu had no intention of explaining it to me, either.

After that, she somehow got her hands on a great many books and forced me to learn to read.

She said I was clever, that I learned everything quickly.

By the time I was six, I could recognize every character in those books, and I often managed to come up with my own thoughts about them.

I was very proud of myself then, and I was always tugging Nanny Xu over to listen to me read.

She would always look at me with reddened eyes, as if she were looking through me at someone else.

I knew she was thinking of my mother again.

She had said that, aside from me, my mother was the smartest woman she had ever met.

What a pity that she had been born at the wrong time and married the wrong man, never able to realize her ambitions.

And just like that, Nanny Xu stayed with me until I was eleven.

One day, I was reading in my room.

Nanny Xu brought in a bowl of food and set it in front of me.

In the bowl was a rare serving of white rice and a chicken drumstick, rich with the smell of oil and meat.

I tilted my head and stared at it for a long while before saying softly, “I remember this bowl. It’s the one they use to feed Ah Hua.”

Then I laughed and teased her, “Nanny Xu, why did you steal Ah Hua’s food? If I eat it, what will it have?”

Ah Hua was a little black dog kept by the Zhou Family.

Because Zhou Lingjiao’s rising status had lifted the Zhou Family along with her, plenty of people bribed my father through them. As a result, the Zhou Family was extremely wealthy.

Even the dog’s meals were sumptuous.

That was what I said, but I still put down my book, wiped my hands, and obediently picked up the bowl. Then I comforted Nanny Xu.

“It’s been so long since I had white rice and a big chicken drumstick. I ate so many wild greens the other day I nearly threw up. Thank you, Nanny Xu. You’re so good to me!”

Nanny Xu’s eyes reddened at once.

She sighed, snatched the bowl from my hands, and got up to walk outside.

“Wait here. Nanny will go buy you a roast chicken.”

Nanny Xu had said those words many times before.

When she coaxed me into eating wild greens that burned my throat, she said that after I finished that meal, she would buy me roast chicken.

When I curled up in a stiff, freezing quilt in the dead of winter, she told me to get up and move around, and that once I was warm, she would take me to eat roast chicken.

When I was so ill my breath had grown faint and I could not even swallow medicine, she coaxed me, saying that once I got better, she would buy me roast chicken.

Over the years, roast chicken had become the name Nanny Xu and I gave to all our hopes for a better life.

I thought this time would be the same as always.

But I never imagined that I would wait and wait until the sun had sunk in the west, and Nanny Xu still would not return.

Two maidservants hurried past the courtyard gate, quietly discussing the commotion in the front courtyard that day.

“It’s all that wretched woman’s fault. She bled so much, and now we have to come all the way here to dump the bloody water.”

“Did she really think her worthless life could threaten Madam?”

“Who would’ve thought she would really dare ram herself into a pillar? Her neck snapped on the spot. Tsk. That must have hurt.”

I lit a lamp and stood inside the courtyard, only a wall away, until my limbs went stiff.

I knew Nanny Xu would never come back again.