Get out, but leave the child behind: The demonic nature hidden beneath a veneer of respectability, and the heavy price paid by the cruel
PART 1: THE VICE OF EXISTENCE AND THE FIRELESS WINTER
In a certain poor city, in a hidden street corner where city lights never fully reached, rows of rickety level-four houses pressed tightly against one another, forming a gray, moldy block of concrete. There, life dragged on heavily like the creaking of rotted window frames whenever the bitter northern winter winds swept in. In a cramped room suffocating with the smell of kerosene and sour sweat, a young woman was burying her youth in physical and mental torture.
She had stepped into the threshold of that family since her naive twenties, carrying countless hopes for a peaceful, simple home. Yet, that dream of youth was quickly choked by the bitterness of the mother-in-law—an early-widowed woman bearing an angular face, thin lips constantly weighed down by razor-sharp scoldings, and a heart completely drained of human warmth.
The husband—the only son whom she spoiled to the point of corruption—was essentially a useless shadow, a cowardly man used to clinging to his mother’s autocratic authority. In front of his mother, he bowed and obeyed; in front of his wife, he was cold and indifferent, taking her sacrifice for granted like breathing. The entire financial burden from food and medicine to his hidden gambling debts weighed heavily on the wife’s frail shoulders.
Yet, the only thing keeping her anchored in this earthly hell was not the pale affection of the unfaithful husband, but the clear laughter of her young child—the tiny and purest soul she considered her entire life. Her child was the sole sky amid these four gray walls.
PART 2: THE VEIL OF HUMILIATION AND THE DECISION OF UTTER SEVERANCE
As time passed, forbearance failed to soften human hearts, only allowing cruelty to spread like weeds. Arguments, veiled insults, and assaults on her dignity appeared more densely in the small house. The mother-in-law viewed her as nothing more than an unpaid servant, a useless parasite even though her own hands bled to feed the entire household.
The climax of the impasse occurred on a dreary, rainy night, when the pouring rain outside could not drown out the wife’s desperate sighs. Looking at her young child sleeping fitfully, bearing bruises left behind by the grandmother’s carelessness and malice, the final limit of endurance within her snapped.
She could not continue living in this suffocating iron cage for another second. The years of silence had saved no one; it had only abetted the devil.
That night, under the dim, yellowish light, she placed an envelope containing the fully signed divorce papers on the table, along with the meager savings she had secretly accumulated over the years. She wanted to end it all, wanting to take her child away from this demon’s nest to find a new path for survival, even if it meant sleeping under the open sky outside.
The next morning, before the pale sunlight could pierce through the murky kitchen smoke of the poor neighborhood, the mother-in-law walked out to the living room and saw the blank white paper lying lonely on the wooden table. She slowly picked it up, reading every word in terrifying silence. Her sharp eyes swept over the lines declaring the daughter-in-law’s liberation, and then, a twisted, icy smile bloomed on her razor-thin lips.
She let out a spine-chilling roar, her veined hands suddenly tearing the divorce papers into tiny pieces fluttering down like toxic snow in mid-air. Not stopping there, she grabbed the steaming cup of tea on the table, splashing a stream of scalding hot water straight into the shocked face of the wife, then sneered with sharp, piercing sounds:
“Get out, but leave the child behind!”
