Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

egg with all seven of the facial orifices; it rolled around in the animal pen until I chopped it in two and a bright light shot into the sky. Stirring up the Wandering God was sure to cause a bloody calamity within a hundred days. I was well aware that the tall tree catches the wind and that wealth always causes envy. Many people could not wait for Ximen Nao to fall, and fall hard. I was troubled, but could not lose faith. If the gods wanted to punish me, why send the lovely Jinlong and Baofeng my way?
    Yingchun beamed when she saw me; with difficulty she bent down, and at that moment I saw the baby she was carrying. It was a boy with a blue birthmark on his left cheek, so there was no doubt he’d come from Lan Lian’s seed. How humiliating! A flame like the tongue of a poisonous viper snaked up in my heart. I had murderous urges, at minimum needed to curse someone. I could have chopped Lan Lian into pieces. Lan Lian, you’re an ungrateful bastard, an unconscionable son of a bitch! You started out by calling me Foster Dad and eventually dropped the word foster. Well, if I’m your dad, then Yingchun, my concubine, is your stepmother, yet you’ve taken her as a wife and have had her carry your child. You’ve corrupted the system of human relations and deserve to be struck down by the God of Thunder! Then, when you arrive in hell, you deserve to have your skin flayed, be stuffed with grass, and be dried before you are reincarnated as a lowly animal! But heaven is bereft of justice, and hell has abandoned reason. Instead of you, it is I who have been sent back as a lowly animal, me, Ximen Nao, who lived his life doing good. And what about you, Yingchun, you little slut? How much sweet talk did you whisper while you were in my arms? And how many solemn pledges of love did you take? Yet my bones weren’t even cold before you went to bed with my hired hand. How can a slut like you have the nerve to go on living? You should do away with yourself at once. I’ll give you the white silk to do it. Damn it, no, you are not worthy of white silk! A bloody rope used on pigs, looped over a beam covered with rat shit and bat urine, to hang yourself is what’s good for you! That or four ounces of arsenic! Or a one-way trip down the well outside the village where all the wild dogs have drowned! You should be paraded up and down the street on a criminal’s rack! In the underworld you deserve to be thrown into a snake pit reserved for adulteresses! Then you should be reincarnated as a lowly animal, over and over and over, forever! Hee-haw, hee-haw — But no, the person reincarnated as a lowly animal was Ximen Nao, a man of honor, instead of my first concubine.
    She knelt clumsily beside me and carefully wiped the sticky stuff from my body with a blue-checked chamois rag. It felt wonderful against my wet skin. She had a soft touch, as if wiping down her own baby. What a cute foal, you lovely little thing. Such a pretty face, and what big blue eyes! And those ears, covered with fuzz . . . the rag moved to each part of my body in turn. She was still as big-hearted as ever, and was covering me with love, that I could see. Deeply touched, I felt the evil heat inside me dissipate. My memory of walking the earth as a human grew distant and cloudy. I was nice and dry. I’d stopped shivering. My bones had hardened, my legs felt strong. An inner force and a sense of purpose combined to make me put that strength to good use. Ah, it’s a little male donkey. She was drying off my genitals. How humiliating! Images of our sexual congress back when I was a human flooded my mind. A little male what? The son of a mother donkey? I looked up and saw a female donkey standing nearby, quaking. Is that my mother? A donkey? Rage and uncontrollable anxiety forced me to my feet. I stood there on four feet, like a low stool on high legs.
    “It’s on its feet, it’s standing!” It was Lan Lian, excitedly rubbing his hands. He reached out and helped Yingchun to her feet. The gentle look in his eyes showed that he held strong feelings for her. And that reminded me of something that had occurred years before. If I remember correctly, someone had warned me to be on guard against bedroom antics by my young hired hand. Who knows, maybe they had something going way back then.
    As I stood in the morning sun on that first day of the year, I kept digging in my hooves to keep from falling over. Then I took my first step as a donkey, thus beginning an