Consciousness gradually stirred amid excruciating pain, as though those unbearable tortures had been inflicted all over again. When she realized she still had not escaped the suffering of life, her first response was despair.
After enduring such endless torment, had I still not died completely?
Her body was trapped somewhere cramped, dim, and rank with blood. She struggled hard, and a sliver of light leaked in from the side. She discovered she was wrapped in a filthy old blanket, with ropes bound around it.
The hoarse cries of crows. One dull thud after another, as though someone were pounding grain.
She tilted her head, straining to look through a gap in the fabric-two unfamiliar men in shabby clothes held a shovel and a pickaxe, digging with all their might. As far as she could see stretched the desolate Mass Burial Mound.
She immediately understood her predicament.
Two days earlier, the madam had told her there was a private banquet in Yongping Ward, in the west of the city. A regular customer needed a prostitute who could play an instrument to entertain his guests. The pay was pitiful, but she had little choice. She was nearly thirty, long past being a fresh face.
This trade fed on youth, and most patrons loved the new and tired of the old, faithless and fickle men. Though she had some beauty and played the pipa reasonably well, business was growing ever bleaker.
For women in this trade, advancing age was like the last light of a setting sun; the decline could not be reversed. But she had never imagined her life would end in such a brutal fashion.
The men digging the pit exhausted themselves and stopped, straightening their backs to catch their breath. She heard them talking.
The first panted, "Why bother burying