Family Banquet Snapshot

    In the drawer of my nightstand, an old wooden table with faded crimson, tranquilly lies a snapshot of one of my so many family banquets in 2014. My ex-girlfriend standing in only one white sock decorated with bright red dots, my flannelled grandma, and me, in azure jeans and brown sweat shirt are leaning against each other, showing the warmth and intimacy of this little group of people.
    My ex-girlfriend, a 19-year-old ambitious Chinese adolescent with bobbed hair, a lot of acne, and long lashes, dumped me on July, 25th, 2014. That afternoon, as gloomy as this one I am now facing, we had a solemn, serious, decorous argument in her house about “who’s gonna lick whom first.” She, after deeply frustrated and humiliated by me, grabbed an air gun (the kind you have to fill with condensed carbon dioxide to provide sufficient momentum) and fired consecutively seven times at my torso (the marks are still there). Running out of bullets, she tossed the gun at me. I dodged; the gun hit the kitchen window behind me and cracked it.
    After this incident, which she later described as “immature behavior and consequential unexpected exasperation,” we broke up. Now she does not possess even the farthest and darkest dells and hollows of my heart at all.
    I still remember the day of July, 22nd, 2014, when we first met under the umbra of the evil night, she and I confided to each other the vistas of our futures, blueprints of our life. I want to be a doctor, saving people’s lives from diseases, dragging them back from the claws of death, while she, according to what I heard that night, was far more ambitious and determined. She wanted to be a weapon designer, dedicated to the enhancement of the efficiency and power of killing machines. At that moment, we fell in love with each other, clumsily, dizzily, and painfully. That night, out of eyeshot under the cover of shadow and silence, we kissed and caressed and moaned. Alas, the sweetness of tasting the bitter, the attempt to the prohibited, may I feel you one more time!
    My grandma, a superstitious yet photogenic old woman with pale white hair, used to have three children. The oldest one, if still alive, would have been my uncle. He drowned in a lake; his body was found three days after this freak accident, and had already swelled into a giant balloon. My grandma, still an attractive young lady at the time, wept for six hours continuously without a lull until she passed out due to dehydration. After that, she developed a phobia of lakes as well as any other accumulation of water. When I was young, she would oft warn me: “If you play by the lake, you will run into lake monsters. They are always hiding beneath the inky water. Once caught, you will be disassembled and as a result become a part of their sumptuous dinner.”
    Except for the lake monster part, I had a rather debonair childhood: friendly cousins, loving parents, illustrated children's literature, and mountain vistas. I also had a dog, who was kicked to death by my vexed father after it urinated on his television. My mother, a loving and easy-going apron-wearing pot-scrubber, who unfortunately witnessed this tragedy, banned my father from having any pet since that moment.