Once upon a time—that's how the stories begin—there was a child who lost his mother. In fact, he had started losing her a long time ago.The disease that took her life, that sneaky bad thing, gradually eroded her in her body, and slowly consumed the light in her body, so every day she died, the light in her eyes became dimmer and her skin became darker and darker. Pale. When she was stolen bit by bit, the boy gradually became afraid, afraid that he would lose the whole of her in the end.He wants her to stay.He has no brothers, no sisters, he loves his father, but to be honest, he loves his mother more.The thought of living without his mother made him miserable.

This boy, David, did everything he could to keep his mother alive.He prays.He tries to be nice so she doesn't have to be punished for his mistakes.When he walked around the house, he tried to be as quiet as possible, and when he played war games with toy soldiers, he kept his voice to a minimum.He invented a program because he believed that his mother's fate was linked to his actions.When he got up, he always let his left foot land first, and then his right foot.When brushing his teeth, he always counted to twenty and stopped immediately.He touches the faucets in the bathroom and the doorknobs a certain number of times: odd numbers are bad, even numbers are good, two, four, and eight are great, but he's not interested in six because six is ​​twice as much as three, and three is Thirteen is a single digit, and thirteen really sucks.

If he hits his head on something, he hits it again to keep an even number, and sometimes his head seems to bounce off the wall a few times so he can't count, and sometimes because the hair goes against his will , Skimming the wall, he had to bump it again and again until his head hurt and he felt dizzy and nauseous.For a whole year, during the worst days of my mother's illness, he followed a constant routine, from first thing in the morning in the bedroom or kitchen to last thing in the evening: a small selection of Grimm's fairy tales , a folded corner comic magazine "The Magnet" (The Magnet), the book is neatly placed in the middle of the magazine, neatly placed together in the corner of his bedroom carpet at night, and placed on his favorite kitchen bench in the morning .In this way, David contributed his strength to keep his mother alive.

Every day when I came home from school, he would stand beside her, talk to her if she felt strong, and the rest of the time, just watch her sleep, count every labored, difficult breath she took, and hope she survived ,together with him.Often he would bring a book, and if Mama was awake and her head wasn't too bad, she would ask him to read it aloud to her.She had her own books—romances, mysteries, and novels with thick black covers and tiny print—but she liked to hear him read older stories: myths, legends, fairy tales, There are castles, treasure hunts and dangerous talking animals.David doesn't object.Although he was twelve years old, not much of a child, he still loved them, and his mother's pleasure in hearing them told him made him love them all the more.

His mother used to tell him before she got sick that stories were alive.They live differently from humans, cats and dogs.People live whether you care or not; and a dog will try to get your attention if you don't pay it much attention.Cats, when used to being around people, are very good at pretending that people don't exist.But that's another matter entirely. But stories are different: they live in the telling.They haven't really lived in our world if they haven't been read aloud by a human voice, and followed by a pair of wide-open eyes under the blanket following the light of a flashlight.They are like seeds in a bird's beak waiting to fall into the ground, or songs written on paper longing for instruments to turn them into music.They are silent, hoping to have a chance to show their faces.They can make a difference once someone starts reading them.They can take root in the imagination and change whoever reads them.Stories want to be read, David's mother said softly.They need to be read, which is why they desperately came from their world to ours.They want us to give them life.

That's what David's mother had told him before the disease took him.She often held a book in her hand when she was talking, and her fingers ran across the cover affectionately, just like sometimes when David and Dad said or did something, reminding her how much she cared about them, The way she stroked their cheeks with her fingers.Mom's voice is like a song to David, a song that constantly showcases improvisational inspiration and unheard-of finesse.As he grew up, music became more and more important to him (although never as important as books), and he felt that his mother's voice was not just a song, but a symphony, able to play in those familiar themes and melodies. Among them, there are endless changes with her different moods or sudden thoughts.

Year after year, reading a book became more and more a separate experience for David, until his mother's illness brought both the reading and the experience back to his childhood—only the roles shifted.However, before his mother was ill, he would often walk into the room where his mother was reading, greet her with a smile (the mother always smiled back), and then sit down next to him and immerse himself in his own book. , though they are immersed in separate worlds, they share the same time and space.Watching his mother's face as she read, David could tell if the story in this book was in her heart and if she had walked into it, and he could recall everything she had said: Stories, fairy tales, and the power with which they govern us and we control them.

David will always remember the day his mother died.He was in school at the time, learning--not really learning--how to peruse a poem, and his mind was full of dash, pentameter, nouns and the names of weird dinosaurs that lived in a long-gone prehistoric age. It's no different.The principal pushed open the door of the classroom and walked to the English teacher Benjamin (the students also called him "Big Ben" because he always used to take out the pocket watch from his vest pocket, and in a deep tone, announced to the unruly students that slowly passing time) around.The principal whispered something to Mr. Benjamin, and Mr. Benjamin nodded solemnly. He turned his head to face the class, his eyes searched for David's eyes, and his voice became softer than usual.He called David's name, told him that he could be granted leave, and asked him to pack his schoolbag and go with the principal.By this time David knew what was going on, before the headmaster took him to the nurse's office, before the school doctor brought him tea, and the headmaster stood before him, still looking stern, but obviously trying to deal with him. The child who lost his mother was gentle, and when he tried to speak while bringing tea to his lips, he burned his lips, reminding him that he was still alive, but without a mother... Before that, he had already understood.

Even those procedures that were repeated endlessly could not keep her alive.He kept wondering afterward if some program had gone wrong, or if he had miscounted something that morning, or if he should have added an action that might have changed the situation.It's useless now.she left.He should have stayed at home.When he went to school, he was always worried, because if he left his mother, he had no way of knowing whether she would survive or not.Those procedures don't work in schools because it's hard to implement, schools have school discipline and procedures.David had tried the school's procedures instead, but they were different.Now, Mom is paying for it.

It was only now that David began to cry.He is ashamed of his mistake. In the days that followed, there were only vague memories: neighbours, relatives, tall weird men who stroked his hair and gave him a shilling, held David to his chest while weeping, making him squirm Fat women in black, smelling of perfume and mothballs.He stayed until late at night, then squeezed into a corner of the living room where the grown-ups were taking turns telling stories about his mother, whom he didn't know, who they were telling about a strange person whose past had nothing to do with him : A child did not cry when her sister died, because she did not believe that a person who was so important to her would disappear forever and never come back; a girl ran away from home for a day because her father made a small mistake to her. Impatient with his fault, he told her he would give her to a gypsy; a beautiful woman in red was stolen from under another man's nose by David's father; At the wedding, under the watchful eyes of everyone, he pricked his thumb with a rose thorn and dripped blood on the wedding dress.

When David finally fell asleep, he dreamed that he was part of those stories, involved in every stage of Mom's life.Listening to stories that belonged to another era, he was no longer a child, but a witness to these stories. David saw his mother for the last time in the undertaker's room before the coffin was closed.She looked a little different and the same as before.She was more like her adult self, the mother she had been before the disease came.She dressed up like she used to do on Sundays when she went to church, and when she and David's dad went out to dinner or to the movies.There she lay in her favorite blue dress, with her hands folded across her chest, a rose wreath wrapped around her fingers, and the ring had been removed.Lips are red.David stood beside her, touching his mother's hand with his fingers, which felt cool and wet. Dad stood beside him.Only the father and son were left in the house, and everyone else had retreated outside.A car was waiting to take father and son to church. It was big, black, and the driver wore a pointed hat and was serious. "You can kiss Mommy goodbye, son," Dad said.David looked up at him.Dad's eyes were wet and their sockets were red.Dad cried on the first day, when David came home from school, and Dad hugged him and promised him everything would be okay, and never cried again, until now.Watching and watching, a big tear came out without disappointment, and slowly slid down his cheek. He turned his head to face his mother, leaned against the coffin, bent down, and kissed his mother's face.She smelled of medicine or something, David didn't want to think, he could taste it on her lips. "Goodbye, Mom." He whispered.His eyes hurt.He wanted to do something, but didn't know how. Dad put a hand on David's shoulder, then leaned over and kissed Mom lightly on the lips, pressing his cheek against Mom's, and whispered something that David couldn't hear.They left her.When the coffin reappeared, being carried by the undertaker and his helpers, it was tightly shut, and the only indication that it belonged to Davy's mother was a small metal plate on the lid bearing her name and date of birth and death. They left her alone in church that night.David would stay there with her if he could.He wondered if Mama felt lonely, if she knew where she was, if she had gone to Heaven, or if she would not go until the priest had finished his last words and the coffin was lowered into the ground.He didn't like to think about her alone in there, sealed up with wood and brass and nails, but he couldn't tell Dad about that.Dad wouldn't understand, and the thought always affected something.He couldn't be alone in church, so he went back to his room and tried to imagine what his mother was like.He drew down the curtains and closed the door so that it would be dark enough for him to imagine.Then he crawled under the bed. The bed was low and there was very little space underneath.The bed was at a corner of the room, so David squeezed until he felt his left hand touch the wall, then gently closed his eyes and lay down quietly.After a while, he tried to lift his head, but he slammed hard against the mattress support board.He tried to push it with his hands, but the bed board was firmly nailed.He raised his arms upwards, trying to lift the bed, but it was too heavy.The smell of ashes and urinals made him cough until his eyes watered.He decided to crawl out from under the bed, but it was much harder to get himself out than it was to squeeze in.He sneezed and hit his head on the bottom of the bed with a "bang" pain, and suddenly panicked, his bare feet flopped on the wooden floor, trying to find a grip.Finally caught it, he used the bed board to pull himself out until he reached the edge of the bed, and then squeezed out again.He got up and leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. That's what death is: you're trapped in a small space, forever oppressed by a gigantic force. Mom was buried one morning in January.The ground was cold and the mourners wore overcoats and gloves.The coffin looked so short when it was placed in the tomb.His mother had always looked so tall in life, death had made her smaller. In the weeks that followed, David tried to immerse himself in his books, for his memories of his mother were inextricably intertwined with books and reading.Her books, some deemed "suitable," are left with David, who finds himself trying to read novels he doesn't understand and poems that don't rhyme.Sometimes he would ask his father for advice, but his father seemed to have no interest in books.At home he was always buried in the newspaper from which the thin plume of smoke from his pipe rose like an Indian signal.He's fascinated by how the world is changing now, especially recently, as Hitler's armies move across Europe and the threat of war looms closer to their country.David's mother once said that Dad used to read a lot of books, but gradually lost the habit of letting himself into the story.Now he loves to read the long columns printed in newspapers, with each letter painstakingly written by hand, creating something--something that loses its meaning almost as soon as it hits the kiosk, and the news on it is read before it is read. Old, dead, quickly obliterated by events in the outside world. Stories in books hate newspaper stories, David's mother would say.Newspaper stories are like freshly caught fish, as long as care is taken to keep them fresh, they are by no means permanent.They are like newsboys peddling evening papers down the street, yelling at you, and stories—real stories, properly created stories—are like staid but helpful librarians in a well-equipped library.Newspaper stories are illusory, and their lives are fleeting.They never take root, but grow like weeds across the ground, stealing sunlight from stories that really deserve attention.Pa David's mind was full of screeching voices, and any one he listened to, it was lost and replaced by another noise.That's what Mama laughed and whispered to him, and Papa, frowning at his pipe, knew they were talking about him but didn't want them to know he was offended by them. So David was left to protect his mother's books, including those he had planned to buy for him.It was all about knights and warriors and dragons and sea beasts and folk tales and myths and legends, because those were the stories Davy's mother liked when she was a girl and he read them to her later--when the sickness was coming. Gradually it took her away, making her voice a whisper and her breath rough like sandpaper on dead wood, until finally all the effort seemed unnecessary and she stopped breathing.After his mother died, David tried to avoid the old stories because they were too tied to his mother's old interests, but they were not easy to get rid of, they always called out to David.They seemed to recognize something in him, something new and rich, even he began to believe.He heard them talking: softly at first, then loudly, more and more noticeably. These stories are very old, as old as humanity, and they exist because they are really powerful.These are the books that ring in your head long after they've been put on the shelf, and they're both an escape from reality and an alternative reality.So ancient and so strange, they acquire an existence independent of the pages they occupy.The old legends run parallel to us, Mama told David, but sometimes the wall that separates two worlds becomes thin and brittle, and the two worlds begin to mingle with each other. That's when the trouble started. Just then, something bad happened. Just then, the "twisted man" appeared in front of David.