In Memory of a Mother | Part 3

1998, she found her husband cheating on her. This man of virtue turned out to be a whoremonger, sneaking into nightclubs night after night to seek palliatives with prostitutes, regularly drinking himself under the table so that he could go home to puke his guts out and piss anywhere he'd feel free and rave and rant on and on.

She was smart enough to catch him fooling around with a whore, but ditzy enough to confront him. He slapped her across the face so hard that she fell into a paddy field alongside the road. The man then called home. The son picked up the phone.

"Your mother is dead now. You have no mother from now on."

This stupefied boy didn't know what to say or do. Before long, his mother crawled out of the field and slogged her way back home.

Slimy mud covered all over her. Rolling tears clogged her throat. Searing agony distorted her face.

She thought about divorce, but again and again, she budged: she couldn't even pluck up enough courage to ponder if it was too much to hope that a single mother could shoulder aside all mockery, and soldier on with nothing but a measly income. The most practicable thing she could come up with was to prolong this marriage of torment and torture so that she could imprison and enslave this man long enough to wring every last drop of profit out of him.

She had a boy to raise, after all.

Again, they both went on a wild rampage smashing everything within their reach and yelling their heads off. The boy was so frightened that he knelt down on the ground to apologize to his mother: "if you hadn't had me, you would've lived a happier life." She stretched out her bruised arm, gently patting her boy on the head, loving and caring:

"It's not your fault. Now that I've already given birth to you, I'll fight tooth and nail for you."

December, 2020, during the last days of her life, the son arranged a final transfer to the best hospital in the province. But he sent back home his old father, with one leg already crippled and mind demented by years of alcoholism; he just couldn't resist the temptation to be ill-disposed to this do-gooder, so he told his father not to come to the hospital and visit her any more:

"You can't help at all. "

He bit his tongue. What he really wanted to let loose was "you don't deserve to see her one last time. After 30 years of slavery and resentment, now I'm doing you a favor by bringing forward the final separation between you two. An end, once and for all."

At first sight of his late wife in a glass coffin, this old man burst into tears, whining and howling like a swine hung up for butchery, while his son remained silent next to him, squinting at this funny scene, with a derisive smile on his face.