Part 2The Wax Figure Corpse

Looking at my corpse wax figure, smiling but unable to hide the fear, still holding a phone in its right hand.

I remembered.

I remembered how I died.

I was working as a housekeeper to earn money, and the killer was the client I worked for yesterday.

He wore glasses and looked gentle and refined, seeming very kind.

He said he had been looking forward to meeting me for a long time.

He said tomorrow was my birthday, so he wanted to make me a birthday gift.

I asked him strangely if we knew each other.

The killer said he knew me from a post titled "What does it feel like when your parents don't love you?".

My answer was "Probably that if I died somewhere, they wouldn't know for a month, and even if they did, they wouldn't care."

Because of a casual answer, I was targeted by the killer.

Really, it's so helpless and scary to be alone on the internet.

The killer looked gentle, and even when he killed me, he was gentle. He was afraid I would be in pain, so he fed me sleeping pills, gave me anesthesia, and then drained my blood.

He was even gentler than when my parents beat me. He really made me cry to death.

Before I died, he let me call my parents. He said if they called me "precious daughter" just once, he would let me go.

But Dad didn't answer. I called ten times, and he never picked up.

Mom answered quickly, but she started scolding me as soon as she picked up, yelling at me for not coming home to cook and for not taking good care of my brother.

She cried and scolded, "How did I give birth to such a jinx like you? I should have drowned you in the toilet when you were born."

With the anesthesia, I couldn't feel the pain in my wrists, but waves of pain kept hitting my heart.

"Mom, I'm dying. Can you call me your precious daughter just once?"

Mom cursed again, mixed with the sound of her cooking.

"If you want to die, buy your brother's phone first, then go die. Even if you die, I'll arrange a ghost marriage for you and use the bride price to find a wife for your brother."

"Precious daughter? What a joke. You're nothing but a jinx."

The call ended, and with it, my chance to live.

As my blood drained away, my corpse still held the phone.

Dad received a timed text message sent from my phone by the killer and read it out loud.

"Mom, Dad, this is the last gift I'll ever give to my brother, an unforgettable gift. Do you like it?"

Mom, holding a spatula, stared at my corpse wax figure, very angry.

"Yesterday she said she was going to die, and today she sends a wax figure back. Why didn't she send her corpse back? I could have at least burned some money for her."

I stood next to the corpse wax figure, mimicking its pose of holding up a phone.

Mom, this is my corpse.

Mom, please burn more money for me. I was already so poor when I was alive, having to work as a child laborer since middle school. I don't want to have to work after death too.

Mom, you need to burn some clothes for me too. My clothes are all wet, and it's very cold.

I've tried to wring out my clothes several times, but they're still soaking wet.

Good thing I'm a ghost, the water droplets on my clothes stay on me forever. Otherwise, if they dripped on the floor, Mom would scold me again.

Like when I was little, it was raining outside, and I waited until dark, but Mom never came to pick me up.

I walked home in the rain by myself, and the water dripping from my body dirtied the doormat and wet the floor.

When my brother came out, he slipped and fell, and Mom scolded me, beating me hard with a clothes hanger.

Dad just stood by, smoking, and advised Mom.

"Don't hit the kid's face. If you leave scars, we won't be able to sell her for a good price when she grows up."

He talked about me like I was a pig being raised for slaughter.

Oh, in their eyes, I was even less than a pig. After all, a pig doesn't come out of Mom's belly, doesn't steal nutrients from a brother in Mom's womb.

Dad looked at my corpse wax figure and cursed it as unlucky, wanting to throw it away.

But my brother liked it very much, hugging the corpse wax figure and not letting go.

"This is my sister, my sister. We can't throw her away. I want to play with my sister."

Because my brother was mentally challenged, as innocent as a child, our sibling relationship was still okay.

In fact, it was my brother's innocence that repeatedly healed the wounds I suffered in this family.

When Mom hit me, my brother would clumsily protect me, saying, "No hit... sister... hurt."

When Mom wouldn't give me food, my brother would secretly hide chicken legs for me to eat, always getting his clothes greasy.

When Dad forced me to drop out of school to work, and I cried all night, it was still my brother who clumsily comforted me, making me laugh, threatening to run away from home to force Dad to let me go to school.

My suffering wasn't because of my brother, but because of my parents who didn't love me.

My brother wanted to keep my corpse wax figure, and our parents, who indulged him in everything, certainly had no objection.

My brother happily brought out his paints and started coloring the wax figure.

He tilted his head and looked at me, as if he could see me, and asked, "What color does sister like?"

"Green."

I answered, and my brother picked out green paint.

I like green because it symbolizes endless life.

Mom stared at the wax figure for a long time, until she smelled something burning in the kitchen and cursed as she walked away.

Dad took out his phone and called me.

"Ring... Ring..."

The sound of the call connecting was like my heartbeat.

I became hopeful.

The phone in the hand of the corpse wax figure wasn't a model, it was my phone!

Would Mom and Dad discover that I was dead, that this was my corpse?

Would they regret it?

Would they kneel in front of my corpse, crying bitterly, regretting how they never treated me well in these twenty years?