Chapter 3 toad king

When grandma picked up her polished and sharp scissors and opened the curtain to come in, I suddenly mistook her for my second aunt.Second aunt is much fatter than grandma, sometimes I think she is much fatter than myself.At this time, she stood behind grandma, grinned at me with her big mouth full of gold teeth, and said, "Don't be afraid, it will be fine in a while." After hearing that voice, I realized that it was grandma who was holding the scissors.At this time, grandma smiled and said, "What is he afraid of? Even toads are not afraid. What is he afraid of?" The toad just lay quietly on a three-legged stool at the head of the bed, with a red silk thread tied around its neck, and the other end of the thread was tied under the kerosene lamp holder.It bulged out a pair of big eyes, and turned around towards me, just like the second aunt who was angry.I didn't bother to care about it, or my grandma and second aunt just felt uncomfortable with the sudden hotness on the face, so I closed my eyes--in fact, there is not much difference between closing and not closing. Since noon, my eyes It was "swollen bigger than a walnut".The second aunt said: "Let the fourth uncle catch a toad to relieve your fire in the afternoon."

After the fourth uncle caught Toad and came home, he had a quarrel with the second aunt. The second aunt was so angry that he scolded the fourth uncle: "The book is in the dog's stomach." The old yellow dog was under the stove with its tail between its legs, holding its tongue. Licking his nose, he squinted at his second aunt, as if unwilling to be compared to his fourth uncle.The fourth uncle just stepped out of the backyard angrily, shouting: "Anyway, I caught the toad, and it's not my fault if the post is blinded; I said earlier that the toad will not be more effective than the doctor."

"It's a shame Simao can tell!" Grandma took out her reading glasses, put the scissors on the flame of the oil lamp, and roasted them back and forth. "Those foreign doctors know a lot!" !” Grandma didn’t say anything more, she lowered her head to search for the toad.I watched her hold the reading glasses with one hand, and flipped the toad with the tip of the scissors with the other hand.The second aunt took a step forward and stretched out her five fingers to help grandma hold down the two front feet of the toad. The toad made a "gurgle", probably swallowing, and I swallowed the same.I only heard the second aunt continue to say: "Those foreign doctors can take people under the knife. If you send the pillars to them, you may suffer a lot!"

Grandma poked a shallow hole in the toad's stomach with a pair of scissors.I hardly dared to look any further, but my eyes could not be closed at all, just as they could not be opened: I had a clear glimpse of the toad's white belly bursting upwards from the opening made by the scissors, revealing a pile of pink, white and white inside. , lively stuff.Then grandma said: "Simao goes out early and returns late these days, what kind of tricks is he doing?" The second aunt's fingers on the front feet of the upturned toad trembled, and she said softly, "Who knows him?" "We are I can’t stand his troubles like this.” The grandma raised her hand to hold the reading glasses, saw the open chest of the toad, gouged it out, picked it up, took off a bright red thing, cut it in half, and said, “This is a toad. Child, he should be strangled as soon as he is born, so as not to cause people to worry about it!—Come on! Tie it to a pillar and wrap it on, this toad liver, put it on overnight, and it will be fine at dawn!"

The cool toad liver just pressed on my eyelids.But I still saw through the cracks of my eyes how grandma threaded the red silk thread with the needle she had prepared in advance, how she sewed a slit from belly to chest for the toad, how she threw it out of the window, and how she packed the scissors with a sigh, stool, and went out with the silent second aunt.Before she left, she said to me: "Then the toad goes back to the field, and he will become Prince Toad." That night, the old yellow dog barked all night, which kept me awake.The toad liver seemed to be dripping from the rainy eaves, hitting my eyelids bit by bit.But I couldn't help but think of what my fourth uncle said to me a few days ago: "Shut up the pillar, anyone who has a heart, no one can stand up." The gang of "green-skinned gangsters" are all his brothers, and some of them have not had braids since they were in high school.I was still a baby boy at the time! ——The fourth uncle seems to have said: "The world will be different until you grow dick hair, and the world will be peaceful." When he said this, he looked at the newly planted seedlings in the distance. In the green fields, there was a loud clatter of toads.

The day I went to the field to see the water, my eyelids were no longer swollen.Grandma sat under the pagoda tree by the side of the field, and told me with a straight voice: "If you meet someone you know, don't forget to ask about your fourth uncle; if someone stranger asks about your fourth uncle, don't say anything Say." As a result, I didn't meet any strangers or acquaintances, but the toad from before appeared again.I can recognize the seam between its chest and abdomen - the red silk thread is covered with mud, like black hemp rope; it still has a pair of big bulging eyes, waiting for me by the road leading to the county. "Don't come at me!" I held up my second aunt's green bamboo pole to catch chickens to scare it, "It was done by my fourth uncle and my grandma, if you have the guts, go to them, and don't kill you little bastard No wonder!" Toad ignored me, swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of saliva, turned around, and jumped to the other side of the road.Only then did I see thousands of toads, large and small, jumping out of the ditch behind it, following its buttocks and crossing the road one after another. All of a sudden, all the places I could see were jumping up and down. Toads are like rain swirls on the field in the summer afternoon.They jumped desperately to the other side of the road, endlessly.If it hadn't been for a mule cart running over from the county town, I would have been buried alive by King Toad's thousands of horses and horses.

The mule cart brought a piece of news that grandma should not know.My second aunt dragged me into the kitchen that evening, wiping away tears, and taught me to talk back to my grandma: "You just say that fourth uncle's friend helped him to go to the foreign school in the provincial capital." "Then I will go too!" "Go to your mother's head!" The second aunt made a gesture to slap my ears, and the old yellow dog licked her nose and slipped away in fright, so she said hoarsely, "Going to be a revolutionary party for someone? Like your fourth uncle? The one who picks the heart and digs the liver Die badly!"