Chapter 5 The Book of Shells (5)

When Chunchi went home for a short stay, I never went to school again, and stayed outside her door every day.Although she seldom goes out, she still carefully dresses up every morning, and then changes and undresses at sunset—presumably this should be a habit she has developed over the years on the ship. Sometimes her door is ajar and I can see her putting on makeup.She doesn't need a mirror, she stands at the window and draws her eyebrows in the best morning light.She stroked her face with her fingers, touching the starting point of the center of her eyebrows inch by inch, then tapped that place with an eyebrow pencil, and slowly traced backwards.Sometimes when she touches it, she stops suddenly, her hands touch the skin, and her mind wanders for a moment.She must have felt a new wrinkle and felt sad about it.

After dressing up, Chunchi will definitely close the doors and windows and concentrate on studying her shells. On those nights, whenever the maid prepared the footwashing water and was about to send Chunchi in, I would run up to her, take the wooden barrel from her hand, and send her away.I just walked into her room.Bend down at her feet, stirring the water until it is no longer hot.She lifted her feet and threw them into the water.Her feet are beautiful, with snow-white skin, like a girl, but the soles of her feet are red.I heard from Aunt Lan before that Chunchi's soles were red, and the more she washed, the redder she became. The color was dark and could not be faded off.

It was so red, so red that it dazzled the eyes.I watched, afraid to reach out and touch.It was a strange feeling, not fear, but awe.I was thinking, what kind of places have such a pair of feet walked.My slowly extending fingers finally touched the red lines on the soles of my feet.It must have bled a lot, does it still hurt now?I suddenly felt that my hands were not smooth enough, and I was afraid that the rough skin would hurt her.I hurriedly looked up at her.She was expressionless, not surprised. Bright feet, like trout in water, have their own tortuous lives, and are tied to the blurred past.Hold it with both hands and feel their breath.Gradually, my palms became hot.

Time passed like this for a long time, but I didn't notice it. She suddenly frowned and said stiffly: "The water is cold." I hurriedly took her feet out of the water and wrapped the wet fish with a dry cloth: "I'm going to change the water." I was terrified. "No need." She rejected me coldly. I picked up the barrel and exited her room sadly. Her house is filled with wooden boxes filled with shells accumulated over the years.She enshrined them like the spirit tablets of the dead. Her secret has to do with shells.I'm not curious about her secret, but just worried about her.Every time she got into the secret, it was always painful.I know she is lonely and maybe needs someone to talk to.But how can I get into her heart?

In some aboriginal tribes in Southeast Asia, human memory is regarded as something more precious than life.They can exist without physical bodies.There are even some legends that memory is hidden in the shell. Every day ships die in the middle of the ocean, and the dead let their bones sink to the bottom of the ocean.The body is slowly loosened in the soaking, and the memory is like a newborn fish egg, escaping into the warm water and attaching to the white shell again.Over time, they slowly melt and seep into their dark and light textures. It is said that the first person to discover this secret was a blind man.Inadvertently, the blind man touched the shell with his hand and made a wonderful sound.His fingers flicked faster and faster on the shell, and what he was chanting was actually what happened before he was born, and the words were so exact that one couldn't help but believe it.Since then, the blind man has been looking for shells everywhere, without eating or drinking, and living by touching the shells, as if possessed by a demon.In this way, he actually lived for many years.When the blind man was about to die, he suddenly became conscious. For seven days and seven nights, he told intermittently what the tribe had experienced for hundreds of years.