cry of a butterfly

The woman in the wheelchair sat in front of the window in a daze.

It was the meal time for the patients, the smell of food and the sound of the pan filled the surroundings, but the woman in the wheelchair turned a deaf ear to everything.Her expression was very dull, her eyes didn't know where to look, she didn't blink, she seemed to be cut off from the world.

Four years ago, she was sent to this isolated psychiatric hospital for mental correction. Repeated chemical injections and electric shock treatments made her more haggard than autumn, her eyes were deeply sunken, her hair was gray, and the hair on the top of her head was thinning. The scalp can be seen, and the appearance is no longer as delicate as it used to be.

But the brilliance of the rising sun sprinkled the rickety body of a mother, and her face was still young and beautiful in the eyes of her children.

Facing his stepfather and his biological mother, his emotions are so different.The exhaustion from the bumps along the way disappeared without a trace. The boy knelt in front of his mother's wheelchair and buried his face in her lap.

"Mom... Mom..." Rubbing his cheek to touch his mother's cold fingers, big tears kept falling from the boy's eyes, he choked up and called his mother to return to the world, "Mom, look I... Mom, can you still recognize me..."

The repeated calls finally made the woman respond. She turned her two dull eyes dumbly, and lowered her head towards the boy kneeling in front of her—suddenly bent down, her hands were almost touching the ground, and the whole body People also seem to fall off the wheelchair.

Kang Xiaoqi was shocked and asked his mother what he wanted to do.

The woman fiddled with the boy's loose shoelaces.It took a lot of time to complete a simple tying action, raised his head, and smiled like a child who ate candy, "My little pumpkin, your shoelaces are unraveled..."

"Little Pumpkin" was the woman's pet name for her son, and only the two of them knew it.

The mother and son cried in each other's arms, which made others sigh.

Some distance away, a man with a cane watched the mother and child.His lower jaw was lifted slightly, his eyes were slightly squinted, his gaze was devoid of any emotion, it seemed that he was just observing from above.

Standing beside the man was a woman in a white coat and glasses.She was a professor of psychiatry and the attending physician for Compaq's wife.

The woman was under forty, with simple and regular features, and the narrow and long facial lines revealed a sense of fortitude that only a man possessed, but her face was covered with more intense makeup.She was enthusiastically thanking the man next to her for funding the construction of a multi-functional building for the mental hospital, when she suddenly lowered her face and reprimanded a nurse: "Put away these reflective tableware! You know that things like blood Items such as knives and knives will make patients very nervous!"

The nurse was a young man with a simple and honest face.He repeatedly said sorry, hurriedly picked up the tableware that had fallen on the floor, then turned and fled away.

"These young people who only let their hormones do their thing will always be so careless!" The female doctor cursed in a low voice, and explained to the man beside her, "Your wife's condition has stabilized a lot, and she has both persecution delusions and body paranoia. So we allowed her to move around in a small area, bask in the sun, get some air... But she still can't stand the stimulation, those reflective tableware will make her associate with 'dagger' and 'weapon', which will tempt her made her very frantic..."

Compo slightly hooked the corners of his lips, and said in a regretful voice: "Because she witnessed her father's death—at that time, he suspected that there was a thief in the house, so he went to check with a knife, but he never Rolled and fell down the stairs, and the knife went straight into the chest. I will die with regret."

"It's a sympathetic experience." The female doctor sighed, and couldn't help but look at him again—this man was born beautiful, not damaged by his pale skin and blood-colored eye sockets .He looked either very young, or lived to be hundreds of years old.After a pause, she said, "When your wife first came here, she kept insisting that she was not sick. She said that you poisoned her, that you filled the bathtub with blood and hid the poisonous snake under her pillow..."

"That was my daughter's prank." The man shook his head, his eyes still on the mother and son not far away, "A 13-year-old girl doesn't want to accept the fact that her stepfather is remarried, thinking that by doing so she can help her dead mother .”

"She said that you gave me sleeping pills, which made her sleepy all day long, and her hallucinations became more and more serious. She wanted to find the key while you were not at home and escaped from captivity, but she was bruised all over her body by a sharp object in her own house. She also thought that you put her Your father pushed down the stairs because he found out about your evil deeds and tried to protect his daughter."

"Because her condition is getting worse and worse, in order to prevent her from hurting others, I have to lock her in the house when I go out." Compo shook his head, "In order to fight depression, she takes a lot of psychotropic drugs every day, and those drugs made her worse She had a mental problem. The cause of her father's fall was the aging and broken stairs, which the police have found out."

"But it's these continuous stimuli that brought a good-looking woman here." The female doctor sighed again showing compassion, but her expression was very relaxed, and she shrugged in a playful gesture that didn't match her age .

"I believe in the 'justice' of the law. Criminals cannot escape punishment, and innocent people will not be implicated in vain."

"Your wife still has a newspaper clipping full of news about husbands killing their wives for inheritance, and I'm afraid she's just read so much that she can no longer distinguish story from reality. However, there is no need , isn't it?" She pushed her glasses and smiled flatteringly, "Before you married her, you were already very rich."

"The power of 'schema①'," Compo also smiled slightly, and gracefully leaned over to the woman beside him, "The clear one clears itself."

After a few words of conversation, this spinster who has been celibate until now and has strong resistance to men is completely overwhelmed by the other's knowledge and elegance.She is no longer a professor or a doctor at this moment, but has changed back to the original identity of "a woman", completely forgetting his notoriety, and the four women who were his wives either died or went crazy.

Seemingly aware that the other party's eyes became hot enough, Compo made a move that showed the intimacy between the two—reached out and took off the female doctor's glasses, closed them, and inserted them into her breast pocket.His gestures were neither intimidating nor frivolous, but he just smiled and said, "Men rarely flirt with girls wearing glasses②."

The woman who took off her glasses still wanted to chat with her, but the man was already walking towards his wife with a cane.

"Sorry, I have to present a flower to my wife." After finishing speaking, he took out a rose from the vase on the windowsill, avoided the thorns on it, and held it in his fingertips.

The woman once again felt the touching charm, and sighed in her heart: He is such a good husband.

※※※

"I want to speak with your mother alone."

Before the boy could say no, he was dragged away by two nurses who were signaled by Compo with his eyes.

The man holding a rose knelt down on one knee in front of his wife, and the woman in the wheelchair had her eyes wide open, looking terrified.She wriggled her dry lips with great effort, and even tried to drive the wheelchair to escape, but the man pulled the rocker of the handbrake.

Pale and slender fingers brushed across her cheeks that looked like withered roses, lingering tenderly back and forth.The woman who couldn't escape tried her best to turn her face away, avoiding the man's touch stiffly.Her face twisted like an electric shock, and her whole body was trembling.

Compo leaned over, touched her hair with the tip of his nose and lips, and said softly, "You are still so beautiful."

"I'm not crazy..." The woman's tears finally slipped down, not because of the joy of reunion after a long absence, but because of the lamb that is about to be slaughtered. "You know I'm not crazy..."

"Yes, I know, I've always known..." His lips, which are more seductive than the rose in his hand, curled up slightly, he held his wife's hand to accept his gift, forcing her fingertips to touch the thorns on the branch ——There was a very small wound on the skin, and a little bit of bright red blood flowed out.

Forced to place the woman's bleeding fingertips in front of her eyes, he whispered softly in her ear, "Be careful of the spikes that are sharper than a dagger, be careful of the blood, it's like flowing from your father's chest... "

"I'm going to kill you!" Grabbing the rose, she repeatedly stabbed her husband's shoulder with a dagger in her hand, and the woman began to scream uncontrollably, "You are a cruel devil! I'm going to kill you! I I'm going to kill you!"

The doctors and nurses rushed forward and clamped her arms tightly.

"Mom! Let me go—Mom!" Kang Xiaoqi wanted to struggle to protect his mother, but he was also restrained by the shoulders of the two nurses on the left and right, unable to move.

The boy saw his mother howling and screaming at the top of his lungs, saw the nurses pin her to the ground like an animal, saw them fetch a needle and inject a sedative into her body, and saw a breast pocket with a The female doctor with glasses stepped forward and ordered the men to lock his mother back to the ward and give her an electric shock if necessary...

Of course, he also caught a glimpse of how Compaq was talking and laughing with this female doctor just now - in Kang Xiaoqi's view, the two of them were flirting at all, in front of his crazy mother!

A series of "seeing" completely ignited the boy's anger.From the moment his mother was sent to the lunatic asylum by this man, he was swallowed by boundless pain—including his deformed and obsessed sister Kang Enya, but he always had a desire to win over any woman who showed affection to his stepfather. desire to attack.

Now, because of the tragic situation of my mother, this thought, which I had tried my best to restrain, exploded in full force.Kang Xiaoqi suddenly turned his head and bit the back of the hand of a nurse beside him, then broke free and rushed towards the female doctor.

Spitting in her face, he grabbed her by the neck and yelled, "You shameless woman! I'm going to send you to hell!"

If it weren't for a group of people rushing forward and trying to tear him apart, he could really strangle him to death.

"I'm very worried about my son's mental state. He started to show the same symptoms as his mother at that time." Compa, who was always alone out of the chaos, walked forward with a cane, and said to the terrified woman clutching her neck , "He has unreasonable thoughts about my current wife, ordered my housekeeper to steal her underwear, and peeped into her living room with a pinhole camera... and he showed increasingly uncontrollable aggression. He attacked My own sister, just like attacking you just now."

It wasn't until those nurses wanted to put him in the ward that the boy realized that he was in danger.He yelled frantically at his stepfather, "No! Don't leave me here!"

The other mentally ill patients around were also stimulated by the chaos, and they began to cry one after another—a drooling big man clapped his hands and sang nursery rhymes, and another short, thick and honest man cried bitterly and said that aliens A bomb had been placed in his belly, and he had to cut it open right away.

The boy looked around in horror, thinking desperately that he might spend the rest of his life with these lunatics.In the end, holding on to the last chance, he begged his stepfather for mercy, "Dad! Dad! Please, please don't leave me here!"

Compo, who was about to leave, turned his head——

"Dad! Dad, I was wrong... Dad, I will tell you... I will tell you everything..."

Facing his son's begging eyes, the man shook his head and turned away, "It's too late."

The author has something to say: ①Schemas, that is, the knowledge and experience accumulated and extracted by the human brain in the social world.To give a simple example, most prostitutes wear heavy makeup and revealing clothes, which leads us to suspect that she is a prostitute when we see other women with heavy makeup and revealing clothes. Women with heavy makeup will be more likely to be identified as prostitutes.The meaning in the text is that Compo's wife watched too much news about killing his wife, and had relevant associations in her mind, which resulted in delusions of being murdered.

②Menseldommakepassatgirlswhowearglasses, the author forgot where he saw that it was said to be an American folk proverb, but he has not verified it.