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墨書 Inktalez
The scent of animal fat from the fur collar mixed with the car air freshener, drilling down my throat.
The man held the steering wheel with one hand, the cold light reflecting off his gold watch traced arcs on the ceiling, like a scalpel cutting through skin. I counted the tassels of the safety charm hanging from the rearview mirror—thirteen golden threads, just like the gaps in the attic floor.
"Are you cold, little girl?" The man suddenly turned on the heater, a wave of warmth wrapped around him, carrying the smell of blood.
A half-exposed iron chain clinked beneath the passenger seat, making faint sounds as we bumped along. I stared at the moving red dot on the navigation screen; our destination was an abandoned logistics park on the outskirts of town, marked as a gray patch on the map, resembling a scabbed-over wound.
As my mother’s high heels echoed in the garage, the man was wiping the surface of his gold watch with wet wipes. Suddenly, he grabbed my ankle, and the leather seat let out a hissing laugh as if deflating.
"Your mom liked to catch people when she was young," he said, his fingertip sinking into a frostbite sore. The blue light from the in-car screen illuminated the gold crown on his molar. "But she caught checks."
The attic floor groaned with familiarity. I felt around for something hidden in the wall crevice and touched a hardcover notebook instead.
My mother’s diary curled up in a mold spot, its inner pages yellowed like age spots, tucked between a prenatal checkup report—patient name field reading "Xia Wenjuan," gestational age crudely circled in red pen, with a note beside it saying "Handled Cleanly."
Suddenly, there was a crash of breaking glass from downstairs.
My stepfather's belt buckle clanged against the stair railing; the metallic sound echoed like a death knell.
I hurriedly shoved the diary into my sweatshirt's inner pocket; the paper pages brushed against my chest where a knife wound had scabbed over, itching painfully. When he kicked open the door, he held a plastic bag stained with KFC grease, and the smell of whiskey mixed with fries sprayed across my face.
"What are you hiding, little bitch?" He yanked my hair and slammed my head against the wall, dust from the drywall cascading down.
In that fleeting moment, the Prenatal Checkup Form fluttered down, landing on his shoes. He suddenly froze, the veins on his neck bulging like worms as he grabbed the empty whiskey bottle and smashed it against his temples, shouting, "Bitch! They're all bitches!"
When Mother rushed in, she stepped on the torn Prenatal Checkup Form, her freshly done Crystal Nails digging into Stepfather's arm. "You promised not to bring that up!" They tumbled down the stairs together, a Cashmere Shawl entangling with the crystal chandelier, and in that instant when the light bulb shattered, I felt the unsealed package at the end of the hallway.
Wrapped in yellowed newspaper from Twenty Years Ago was a Baby Onesie, with a striking headline on the society page: "Tracking the Female College Student Abandonment Incident."
The corners of the clipping were stuck to a photo of Mother from her college days, her tear mole transformed into a black hole by a pen. The Delivery Receipt bore the name "Xia Jian," dated on my tenth birthday.
From the attic came the sound of chains rattling. Stepfather's pupils glimmered beastly in the dark as he clutched a chain stolen from a man's car. "You two are just alike."
As the belt buckle sliced open the hem of my sweatshirt, photos from the Diary fell like snowflakes—seventeen-year-old Mother holding a baby outside the courthouse, with a tarnished plaque for the Minor Protection Law behind her.
I tasted the sourness of whiskey as I bit through his palm. In that moment when the chain tightened around my neck, police lights suddenly flickered outside, red and blue.
Stepfather panicked and let go. I crashed through the window and leaped down, freezing rain hitting my burned collarbone and sending up white smoke. Mother stood in the shadows of the garage, sending a voice message to the man: "The kid ran away; you need to deduct thirty percent from the final payment."
In a blind spot of the convenience store's surveillance, moldy cardboard boxes piled up. I flipped to the last page of the diary under an emergency light; the Blood Type on the Delivery Room Record hit me like a blunt force.
In my phone's lock screen photo, the man's serpent tattoo on his wrist overlapped with that newspaper photo from Twenty Years Ago—the Enthusiastic Reporter in Social News had a shedding Black Snake on his left wrist too.
A wildcat screeched past behind the funeral home wall. I crouched by the incinerator's vent, watching as my Diary curled into ash in blue flames. The Gestational Age numbers on the Prenatal Checkup Form revealed hidden writing in high temperatures: "Test Tube Baby, father unknown."
The wind whipped ashes onto my face, reminiscent of how Mother would dust me with talcum powder after each slap.
The rooftop was tangled with iron wire, glistening with frost. I counted the warm yellow lights of the neonatal ward across the street, feeling the scab on my wrist from the knife wound begin to itch.
Suddenly, my phone vibrated; a photo from an unknown number appeared—on that day in the mediation room, the female officer had quietly slipped me a business card, now burning between a man's fingers, the flames consuming the golden letters of "Legal Aid."
The cold wind lifted the hem of my school uniform, and an old burn on my abdomen began to throb faintly.
I gazed at the swaying safety rope on the fire escape and suddenly recalled the pencil writing on the back of my prenatal checkup report. It was my mother's handwriting: "If only I had had the courage to put you back in the uterus."
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