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A quiet night

文：曾國平

It was an ordinary evening, with nothing special to make you remember it a few days later. All of a sudden I heard a strange sound, a novel combination of screaming and slamming. Living in a city forces you to ignore any weird nuance you can hear, be it a cat calling for food, a door fiercely closed, or someone's murmur from an unknown source. So I paid no attention to it, just as you would not search through the house for a missing rubber band.

Not exceed ten minutes I noticed there was a siren crying from afar, and it came closer and closer. An ambulance, with its bright white outlook and flashing lights, entered into our estate. Besides a movie star, ambulance is the thing you have known and got familiar for your whole life but seldom have a chance to actually see it right before you. I looked out of the window and realized what I had heard ten minutes ago was made by someone who was already dead.

A suicide. I could also see correspondents rushing from all directions in full speed to take pictures, though I could hardly figure out how was it possible for them to come to the scene in such a pinch of time. People from the ambulance, or I should call them ambulance men, held their stretcher and ran. The scene was covered by a few bushes from the view of my window, so I could see no blood or dead body or anything you could link to a suicide. For another ten minutes the body was removed and the ambulance was gone, while there was only a policeman staying to see if there was anything that he could help. There was nothing but silence.

I looked out from the window later to find out if there were still people hanging around there. There was none, and with everything remained the same: the same plants covering the ground, the same commuting residents returning home, and the same lights making a shadow for each tree. Half an hour ago here was a termination of a live, a live anonymous to none of us except a few, and this event did make a fuss for a little while. A feeling of absurdity came to me when I thought about the sudden disappearance of this man, and also the tranquility that was left behind. It reminds me of a line from a poem written by a local poet, "On the stage of life, everybody gets a moment of sparkle".