Brother Peng is my neighbor, no older than me, but everyone in the village likes to call him brother. I don't understand why. He was born soft and waxy, black and small, and he didn't have many friends since he was a child. Being close to my home, I naturally became his only small partner.
Although he is thin and small, he knows a lot. Brother Peng can fish, and the fish he catches is always fried for us by his grandmother. Adults say that small fish have too many bones and are afraid that we will get stuck, so we are forbidden this little hobby. Only Brother Peng's grandmother really understands our fun. She took out the internal organs of the caught fish, wrapped the surface of the fish with flour and fried it golden and crisp. During the dinner, the whole room echoed with the sound of hot oil wrapped in dried fish, and the aroma was overflowing and lingering for a long time. The old man moved a chair and sat in the yard enjoying the sunshine in his twilight years, while Brother Peng and I chattered and scrambled for dried fish, but most of the time, he would pretend to be "brother" to me.
I have never met Peng Ge's parents. He always said that he jumped out of a crack in the stone.
When I was a child, I was very naughty. I compete with friends who throw stones high. Unfortunately, I broke the window of Aunt Fire in the village. I tremble with fear at the thought of her big mouth. The fierce aunt hurried out of the room with a broom in her hand, and her friends dispersed in a hubbub. She pointed at us with her usual broom: "Who did it!" "I'm hiding behind Peng Ge, afraid to speak.
The fierce aunt went to his grandmother's house with Peng Ge behind her back, and her grandmother lost her new cotton shoes and used Shuang Yi needles for several nights. It was all over.
The next day, Brother Peng came to me with a swollen face. I asked him what was wrong. He just smiled neatly and said it doesn't matter. He should sincerely apologize to others.
I found out for the first time that he had been sheltering me.
? The summer when I was seven years old was the last summer before I went to school, and all the children of the same age in the village reached school age. Everyone is afraid and looking forward to school, afraid of losing their beautiful freedom, but looking forward to new schoolbags and new partners. However, Brother Peng does not have the same contradiction as us. His grandmother has little education and can't afford the extra tuition. So brother Peng is not only autumn and winter all year round. Brother Peng always grinned at him, grinning, and asked me, "Check, do you think reading and literacy can be fun?" Be a civilized person, okay? "I didn't speak, actually I don't understand. But now, I will definitely tell Brother Peng that reading and literacy is not exciting and civilized people are not good at it.
The school is far away. I only go home once a week, and I have to live on campus the rest of the time. You can't go fishing in school or pick tender sweet potatoes. All the boys in the school wear clean basketball shoes, while the white students are silly, gentle and rigid. Sometimes I wonder what Brother Peng would look like if he could wear such clean basketball shoes and such a clean white shirt. But the more I want to imagine, the harder it is to imagine that his breath is free and fragrant. This model doesn't suit him. On weekends, I put down my schoolbag and went to see Brother Peng. I miss him rolling around the pond without a coat. I miss his bright white teeth and dark skin. I miss him putting his thin arm on my shoulder to be my brother. I miss him calling me Gezi, saying that I don't look like a girl or a wild girl.
He flew to his home, but he was not at home. Later, I heard from my grandmother that he went to the field to weed the sweet potatoes. I went to see him along the mountain road, and there were many new things in my mind that I wanted to tell him. I want to tell him that the school uniform and basketball shoes are not suitable for him at all. I want to tell him that I am not a wild girl, but I am the most beautiful in our class.
But when I saw him, he was struggling to hold a hoe higher than him, shoveling and shoveling, and he ran into some weeds near the crops. He bent down and pulled them out directly by hand. At this moment, I thought of Weeding, which the teacher had just taught me. He is like the farmer's uncle with his back to the loess painted in the Chinese textbook, and I am the one who reads this text. I am so close to him, but he is like a person in a book, a person in a painting. How should I communicate with him? How should I communicate with him?
My childhood has disappeared. Every day, I have to face the homework assigned by the teacher and the increasing pressure of entering a higher school. Brother Peng's childhood has also disappeared. His childhood seems to be embedded in mine, and it's gone.
Later, we grew up one after another. The definition of growing up is not only the inability to wear sneakers and more and more troubles, but also the growing so-called cultural distance.
Later, we never met again, and he was no longer my teenager. I always feel a little soft and sad when I think of the river we crossed in front of the village together, the cicada we caught in summer and the stupid things we did.
Many years later, Brother Peng appeared in my dream. In the dream, he is not so delicate and so thin. His skin is white and tender, but his smile is still so infectious. Like a teenager in a cartoon, gentle and elegant, wearing a white shirt, like a bright lamp, call me lattice.
Peng Ge didn't come back until Peng Ge's grandmother died. Some people say that he was cheated by pyramid schemes, and some people say that he died in a foreign land, but I think he should go to a big city and be a civilized person he wants to be.
Qian Shan Wanshui, may you be well.