Fallen

In the year I was desperately poor, I deliberately fed two of my fingers into the factory machinery and had them crushed, all for the thirty thousand yuan my grandmother needed for surgery. The factory manager frowned with such pain that he wanted to compensate me eighty thousand yuan. I was too guilty to take it, so I only asked for thirty thousand. Years passed. My grandmother had been gone for many years. Then I saw a trending news report: the factory from back then had been swallowed by a fire. The factory manager had died of a heart attack. His wife had vanished. Their twelve-year-old son had been sent to an orphanage. Looking at those helpless, terrified eyes on the screen, I poured the medicine I had been about to swallow down the drain. Then… let me live once more. For that thirty thousand yuan from back then.