91 Dead
He left again soon enough, not able to keep on sitting still underneath the weight of all of Ming Cheng's glances.
His mother.
Xiao Ying missed his mother.
Even as she wasn't around much of the time, he still loved her and he still wanted to make her proud, but now...
He closed his eyes and stopped walking down the corridor, letting the afternoon sun shine down through the windows to illuminate the path in front of him. Where he stood, there were walls on both sides. Xiao Ying shivered.
He was dead.
His mother would have received the phone call after some of his flatmates would have identified his body to the police after the incident had been reported. She would have probably taken the trip, after her work shift, to make the journey over to the university to the morgue that he would have been placed in.
She would have lost out on the hours that she had set aside that night to sleep, spending time with her one and only dead son.
And then she would have gone back to work the next day, unable to take time off to be able to keep on living, now fretting about the issue of paying for a funeral and trying to find a company who could do the job for her as cheaply as possible with no ceremony and parade.
He was dead.
Xiao Ying kept on walking forward again, trying to understand what his mother would have been thinking as soon as she got that first phone call, informing her that her son had been involved in a traffic accident and was now dead.
Clutching at his arms and shivering from a cold that emanated from deep inside him, Xiao Ying looked down at the floor and wallowed in the guilt of not thinking about his poor, poor mother.
She would have been distraught, knowing that, on top of not being able to pay for herself, she was now mandated to pay for a funeral. She would probably have to take out a loan to do it, saddling her with even more debt, on top of her rent and utilities and food.
Xiao Ying wondered what other thing his mother would have to give up, her meals mostly comprised of out of snacks and dishes from one of the shops that she worked at, barely at home, and even when she was, not using the lights and the heating, the streetlights outside being enough to illuminate the few rooms with enough hand me down clothes from her own deceased parents to keep her warm.
Xiao Ying had even been sending her back a portion of his wage, giving her the money that he had meticulously calculated from his wage after taking out the money that he needed for the year, the savings that he would need for the deposit on the apartment that he would be renting, cheaper than his university accommodation, and the money needed for the next year.
She sent him messages of thanks back to him, heart emojis covering her messages as she sent him bits of gossip and family news along with her gratitude.
That was a simpler life.
