Ding Xiaoning, born in December 1993 in Daqing City, Heilongjiang Province, graduated from Tongji University with a master's degree, and now lives in Hangzhou, and is the editor of West Lake Magazine.
It thought it was human
——The creation of the short story "I Thought I Was Human"
Ding Xiaoning
One evening, I was walking downstairs in the community, and there was a corgi standing very tall, looking at the other dogs coldly, and the other dogs ran to it, or rubbed, or barked, and the corgi was always indifferent. The host said it thought it was a person.
This sentence is good, good enough to be written as a novel. After that, I began to think about how to write this dog, I want to write easily, there are many ways, such as writing science fiction, directly anthropomorphizing the dog, only adding "dog says" in front of it, "dog thinking" can be, or, the whole article is writing people, only using the dog as a symbol, embellishing in the paragraph becomes a contrast, and then rises to a metaphor, click on the topic in the key place, the end is virtual and real, a novel can always be different, but this is too easy, such an easy novel, I don't want to write.
What is a man, what a dog is, what a man wants, what a dog wants, what a man has, what a dog has. Both are living beings, some are born and some are dead, but life and death alone are not enough. I thought and thought, not only life and death, but also love, how important love is.
Loving this thing is very speculative, often suddenly bursting out at the moment of life and death, the viscosity is extremely high, and it will not disperse for a long time. So I let Li Yunshan stand on a high place, waiting to die, and on the way to death, I met Xiao Li's dog. Love this thing is very subtle, love has depth and shallowness, but this depth is not clear, love will compete with each other, one after another.
Li Yunshan is unexpectedly disabled, in human society, he is a vulnerable group, and Xiao Li, in the eyes of the weak human Li Yunshan, can be his son, in front of Xiao Li, Li Yunshan has an absolute right to speak. But after all, why let Li Yunshan always have an absolute right to speak, fortunately, Xiao Li has reached the estrus period, and everything has begun to change.
Li Yunshan ran around for the love of this dog, and he gradually found that he raised Xiao Li as a son, but Xiao Li really thought he was his son. Xiao Li refuses to communicate with the dog, only with people, he refuses the overtures of the female dog, but tries to flatter the hostess. Li Yunshan felt that all this was wrong, and when he was about to be abandoned by humans, his dog announced that he had already become a member of the human race. Maybe God existed and silently laid down rules for the world, which were originally biased toward human beings, but I didn't expect that things would be so simple.
I often have a scene in my mind - the snow has not melted for a long time, the sky is gray, the ground is only black and white, a person stands on a high place, the person's figure is blurred, this scene is like a painting, sometimes this painting will enter my dream, life is like a dream, the novel is also a dream, so at the beginning of the novel, Li Yunshan stood in this painting. Then the painting became rich, the different colors mixed together, the wind blew, the painting fell on the surface of the water, the colors faded, I salvaged these colors on the shore, and the salvage process was the process of writing. I asked myself, what am I? What is a person? What is existence? I didn't understand, so I had to continue to fish in the lake, the colors became thinner and thinner, and the scene in my mind became thicker and thicker. Those scenes became new paintings, one gust of wind blowing, another gust of wind blowing, painting after painting on the surface of the water, smudging, salvaging, reminiscing, imagining, repeating, like reincarnation.
This is how the novel is written, with my thoughts on man, on life, on certain things that remain in life, that have fallen from the cracks of time and have not yet been named. These thoughts gathered in my chest, with my breathing, they were so intimate with me that I had to write them down, often thinking that the fog in front of me was getting fainter, but finding that the end was still invisible, that I was forever so far away from what I wanted to touch, and even that the end and the beginning had long been mixed.
I grew up as a very afraid of dogs, and I forced myself to become bold in the past few years, but when I wore shoes with bare toes in the summer, I was still afraid of the dogs that came to me, and strangely, I was afraid of dogs below my knees, but I was not so afraid of bigger dogs. About three years ago, I saw a stray dog in the neighborhood, a male dog, the breed is Labrador, the fur is milky white, it rarely runs, sees people, and just walks slowly, when it is fed, it is very timid, food is placed in front of its eyes, it will instantly walk away, stand in other places for a while, and then come back to eat. Every time I walked, I would go to the lawn downstairs to take a look at it, and after a long time, it would always show its belly to me to touch. For a while, for several days I couldn't see it, I thought it had been adopted, and after a few days it reappeared, this time not slowly, but with some trepidation, and looked up at me as if it were about to cry. I haven't seen it since, and it probably died. For a long time, I stopped walking downstairs.
I often think of the dog, he loves to lie on his stomach and watch the aunts dance square dance, they wear uniform red skirts, their butts twisting and turning, I asked it, can you understand? The appearance of the dog was integrated into this novel, which was somewhat humorous, somewhat absurd, but in fact, sad.
Li Yunshan asked Xiao Li, do you think you are human? Do you think you're human?
Be human, or be a dog? It is not necessary to make a choice, and all living beings suffer.
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2022-2 Harvest Catalogue
Novel
Xuan Papaya Villa / Su Yi Gua
novelette
Beauty /Zhang Huiwen
Half-baked man / Wang Zhanhei
short story
I thought I was human/Ding Xiaoning
Kennel/Chan each
Shadow Womb / Li Hao
A sea of dust drops
Eat meat/Wang Binbin
Fiction class
What literature gives us/Yu Hua
Mountains and rivers fall asleep
Gu Dao/Wang Jianbing
Bright stars
Yu Xiang: She recognizes the direction of the Destiny Wind Banner / Xiao Hai
Uchiha New Work/Uchiha