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the waist, hunkered down beneath the house eaves, staring blankly at the struggling chicken one minute and at the razor-sharp knife in their grandmother’s hand the next. Their expressions and movements were alarmingly identical; even the shifting of their eyes seemed orchestrated. For all her renown in the village, Aunty Sun had been reduced to a skinny, wrinkled old woman, although her face and her expression, her figure and her bearing, carried evocative remnants of her former self. The five dogs sat in a huddle, heads raised, blank, mysterious looks in their eyes, bleak gazes that defied attempts to guess what they meant.
    Shangguan Shouxi was so mesmerized by the scene in the Suns’ yard that he stopped to watch, his mind purged of anxieties and, more significantly, his mother’s orders. He was now a forty-two-year-old shrimp of a man leaning up against a wall, a rapt audience of one. Feeling the icy glare of Aunty Sun sweep past him like a knife, yielding as water and sharp as the wind, he felt scalped. The mutes and their dogs also turned to look at him. Evil, restless glares emerged from the eyes of the mutes; the dogs cocked their heads, bared their fangs, and growled as the hair on the back of their necks stood up. Five dogs, like arrows on a taut string, ready to fly. Time to get moving, he was thinking, when he heard Aunty Sun cough threateningly. The mutes abruptly lowered their heads, swollen from excitement, and all five dogs hit the ground obediently, legs splayed in front of them.
    â€œWorthy nephew Shangguan, what’s your mother up to?” Aunty Sun asked calmly.
    He was stuck for a good answer; there was so much he wanted to say, and not a word would come out. As his face reddened, he just stammered, like a thief caught in the act.
    Aunty Sun smiled. Reaching down, she pinned a black-and-red rooster by the neck and stroked its silky feathers. The rooster cackled nervously, while she plucked the stubborn tail feathers and stuffed them into a woven rush sack. The rooster fought like a demon, madly clawing the muddy ground with its talons.
    â€œDo your daughters know how to kick shuttlecocks? The best ones are made from the tail feathers of a live rooster. Ai, when I think back…”
    She stopped in midsentence and glared at him as she sank into the oblivion of reverie. Her gaze seemed to bounce off the wall then bore through it. Shangguan Shouxi’s eyeballs didn’t flicker, and he held his breath, fearfully. Finally, Aunty Sun seemed to deflate in front of his eyes, like a punctured ball; her eyes went from blazing to mournfully gentle. She stepped down on the rooster’s legs, wrapped her left hand around the base of its wings, and pinched its neck. Unable to move, it gave up the struggle. Then, with her right hand, she began plucking the fine throat feathers until its reddish purple skin showed. Finally, after flicking the rooster’s throat with her index finger, she picked up the shiny knife, shaped like a willow leaf, made a single swipe, and the throat opened up, releasing a torrent of inky red blood, large drops pushing smaller ones ahead of them. Aunty Sun slowly got to her feet, still holding the bleeding rooster, and looked around wistfully. She squinted in the bright sunlight. Shangguan Shouxi felt lightheaded. The smell of poplars was heavy in the air. Scat! He heard Aunty Sun’s voice and watched as the black rooster tumbled through the air and thudded to the ground in the middle of the yard. With a sigh, he let his hands drop from the wall.
    Suddenly, he remembered that he was supposed to be getting Third Master Fan to help with the donkey. But as he was turning to leave, the rooster, bloody but fighting to stay alive, struggled miraculously to its feet, propped up by its wings. Shorn of feathers, its tail stood up in all its strange, hideous nakedness, frightening Shangguan Shouxi. Blood still streamed from its open throat, but the head and comb,