1. Blood

When God looked down at his people enslaved by the Egyptians, he sent forth his prophet Moses and demanded that his people be freed. When Pharaoh, blinded by his arrogance, refused the demand, God sent forth ten great plagues to Egypt. And so, human blood ran through the once clear rivers, marking the beginning of great suffering. 

You were born in a rundown hospital, surrounded by plastic and iron. You were born in the ashes of the Cultural Revolution. You were born in a rural Chinese village recovering from an era of war, famine, and revolts. Therefore, you grew up to love the tranquility of nature, love the apple tree hidden among a forest entwined by rivers. You were a wild boy. You scraped your knees and hands, and your blood dribbled into the rivers, but you did not care. You ran free among nature.

The rivers enveloped you in their soft embrace, unlike the hands of your mother, which often pushed you away when you cried in hunger. Not because she didn't love you, but because your home often lacked food. The rivers cradled you and fed you fishes and frogs and bugs. You cradled the sting of your mother's despairing tears when you scrawled useless words across homework papers. You cradled the envy of your father as you clawed at tree trunks and waltzed along the riverbank while he withered under the strain of poverty and alcoholism. 

Most of all, you cradled the superiority of your brother. Your brother, who stood at the top of his class. Your brother, who swept through classics like HongLongMen and XiYouJi while you struggled to read a single sentence. Your brother, who did not require the comfort of the wilderness.

Sometimes, you observed your apple tree in silence and felt the temptation of freedom, of abandoning your family forever to live among the woods. You wanted to run free forever along the rivers and chew up the fruits of freedom and watch your family fade away in the distance. It was a sinful, terrible thought, and you punched and clawed and kicked against it in wild abandonment. You feared the tears of your brother if he were to watch you consume the flesh of the apples and waltz away into the unknown, leaving him behind.

You bled more often now, not from running in the wild, but from the fists of your father. The rivers tried their best to nurse your wounds. Your mother began to cry more. Your brother ran with you to hide in the wild more often. As you watched him hastily scramble away from home every time father began to drink, you wondered whether it was a sign for worse things to come.

2. Frogs

Hungry frogs crawled out of the rivers and over every inch of the land. Moses set forth to converse with the Pharaoh and warned him: "More suffering shall fall upon your kingdom."

Pharaoh, aloof and proud, rebuked his warnings, and greater tragedies flowed into Egypt.

You and your brother would spend afternoons swimming in the rivers and frolicking within the forest. You both would build traps out of scraps and catch fishes and frogs and other creatures. Still, more often than not, you both ended up empty-handed with mud soaking your clothes and fresh scraps covering your legs. There never was enough food stocked up at home, therefore, the unfortunate creatures that you and your brother caught sometimes ended up roasting over a fire then going into both your stomachs. 

Even at night, neither of you wanted to go home. By the bite of age and poverty, by the suffocation of time and work, your father wasted himself on alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. Neither of you wanted to see him drinking on the couch and weeping at his own sorrows. 

When your brother began to attend school, when the whispers of talent and intelligence poured in from teachers, he was pulled away from the rivers to submerge himself within the waters of boundless knowledge. You stayed beside the rivers and threw rocks at frogs atop your apple tree, and waited in starved silence for your brother to come back. The rivers enveloped you in their comfort. The fruits of the apple tree peeked at you among the leaves, and you felt the craving for freedom rise up. You brushed your fingers against the fruits and bit down the temptatious thoughts of escape and freedom. 

You gazed down at the rivers and saw bulbous frogs tangled within plastic and tin cans. Weeks passed, and more corpses of frogs began floating down the rivers, their mouths choked full with garbage. It seemed that you were not the only starving creature in the rivers. You ended up with an empty stomach for several days, and you wondered whether worse was to come.

3. Lice

Lice crawled into homes and burrowed into delicate skin, tearing down the foundation of families. 

Every inch of your house was covered with dust, mud, corpses of dead bugs, flakes, and bits of faded gray paint. Your bed teemed with tiny, bloodthirsty creatures. With his scarred hands, your father tried to give the house a good clean-up several times but gave up each time.

"This home is cursed and plagued." He mumbled. 

You could almost feel the bugs dig through your scalp and chew up your brain. Your hands shook at the prospect of English lessons and long texts, and your brain fizzled and burned at the jumble of numbers scrawled across pages. Your brother, with his soft, pristine bed—you occasionally saw mother superstitiously wash his bedsheets like a worshiper cradling the robes of her lord—parted complicated equations and sentences like a prophet parting the red sea. You ripped apples off the apple tree, restraining yourself from sinking your teeth into flesh by tossing them into the rivers. You hungered for freedom, but you could not abandon your brother. You could not run free while he remained trapped with your parents and a crumbling home.

"He's the one. My clever and beautiful boy. He's going to get us out of this." You heard your mother whisper. "I'll give him everything if I have to." 

"You mean them," Father replied gruffly, and there was a short silence.

Mother bowed her head, and tears were glittering in her eyes. "Of course, my husband." You could see the lie slither out of her mouth and burrow into your father. With a tired smile, she began to pick up your brother's bedsheets to wash yet again.

4. Wild Animals

Animals trampled the land, wild and enraged and crazed. And Moses said to Pharaoh, "Much worse is to come if you do not abandon your cruel ways." 

Pharaoh rebuked him once more, and Moses felt a surge of rage, then a sorrowful resignation. 

You traced your fingers across the pages, and you couldn't make out a single word. Your brother swung his legs back and forth, carelessly kicking his feet against the worn bark of the apple tree.

"I don't understand this." You murmured. You felt a sharp sting in your eyes and realized you wanted to cry.

He gave you a frown. "Come on, this book is from middle school. You're a year from graduating."

You did not answer. 

"You're joking with me, aren't you?" Your brother's eyes narrowed. "I mean, you can't be that much of an idiot."

Idiot. You straightened up and shoved him off the tree branch. He landed with a whimper and began sniffling, and you climbed up higher to nest among the thick leaves. He was always the soft, emotional one. Perhaps his texts and equations afforded him the luxury of delicate, complex thoughts. The hoofbeats of wild animals trampled through your mind, and your chest ached. Your arms shook as you heaved yourself up onto another branch, your face turned pale gray, and the red veins beneath your skin began to throb. You wondered if worse things were to come if you could not read or write as well as your brother. You wondered whether beasts of poverty and labor would one day tear you apart if you could not learn the foreign ideas in your textbooks and elevate yourself to a higher position in society. 

5. Pestilence

Moses gazed down at Egypt and saw that the great pestilence had taken away all livestock. A famine had descended upon the people of Egypt, causing fathers and sons to rage against one another in desperation.

"Of course, you can't understand." Your father snarled. 

You flipped the pages of the textbook, observing the charred holes you printed with cigarette butts. 

"You're nearly an adult, and you still can't read at middle school level!" With a slap, you felt a trickle of blood run across your lips. Your father twisted away from you and glared out of the window. 

"I paid for your tuition this year because I wanted to give you a chance." He hissed, and there was a slight tremor in her voice. "Turns out, you just don't give a sh*t. You can forget about school and start earning money to support this family. You have plagued our home for long enough."

You felt as though he had run a pair of rusty scissors through your heart. You looked at your mother. She smiled tiredly.

"My son, you have to understand. You aren't studying hard, and well, we have to pay for your brother's tuition and save up for him to go to college…."

What about me? You wanted to scream at her. What will I do? Where will I go?

"The money's better off spent on your brother than you," Father added gruffly. Mother almost nodded her head in agreement but then gave you a frightened look and immediately went still. 

With a glare, you flung the textbook against your father's chest and marched out of the room. 

6. Boils

Painful boils erupted all over people's bodies, and Moses sat in his home at night and felt despair blossom within his heart.

You were burning up. You were on fire. Your body ached and twisted and snapped into two. You were tired, and it was four in the morning, and you hadn't finished your work, and you didn't want to get fired again. The textbooks you no longer read ever since you dropped out seemed to be a faraway dream—a dream for the beautiful and the intelligent. The shine of cracked mirrors reflected your face rubbed with black eyebags, and you felt the sudden urge to scream. 

The wobbling texts scrawled across your notebooks began to buzz and shake like newborn insects fluttering their wings. Numbers echoed through your mind, tied up into unsolvable paradoxes, and you craved the security and peace of the rivers. However, you dared not venture into their embrace in fear of consuming the fruits of temptation growing near their banks and running off free into the night, leaving your brother behind.

7. Hail

Flaming hail ran from the sky and crushed many people. Destruction and chaos reigned. Moses said to Pharaoh, "Abandon your ways now or face far more terrible retributions from God."

Pharaoh raged and screamed and ordered him to leave his palace.

"My son is going off to college. Can you believe it? Can you?" Your mother whispered at you fervently. She had been in a state of maddening euphoria since the test results came back. Your brother, going off to some big, fancy, overpriced University. You, the high school dropout, the freak, the idiot, the mistake, rotting at home. You could see it in the tremble of her fingers, the reddening of her eyes, the glow of her aging face that she did not care to think about you at all. It was just your brother, your brother, your brother. The money he could make, such a good, smart, handsome boy, he would be the stepping stone for her to climb out of her miserable existence. 

And you? The foil to his glory.

"Good for him." That was all you could say. It was true despite your harsh tone. No matter how sharp and biting your thoughts might be, you could never conjure up a sliver of hatred against your brother. However, as you stared into the eyes of your mother, filled with love for one son and not for another, you felt a sense of worthlessness jab at your heart.

You could envision your future clearly. Long hours at the convenience store, picking up after rowdy teenagers. Four in the morning, unscrewing nails in dirty sheds. 

"I got fired again. I'll be out searching for a job tomorrow." You mustered up. Mother ignored you.

"I always knew this day would come." She continued, "My son, all grown up…. I must send prayers to Goddess Guanyin for her love and mercy. She has brought me a miracle." She let out a cheery laugh, then suddenly seemed to have fully registered your presence.

"It's a shame." The joyous wrinkle of your mother's lips trembled. "I mean, we have no choice. You weren't happy at school, were you? And you were struggling to read and write too. It was the best that your brother went, and you stayed home with us and worked." 

"I want to study, too." That was all you could say.

"Oh, my son…." Mother raised her hands towards you, and tears poured down her face, and you knew that once her delicate fingertips touched your shoulders, once she pulled you into her warm embrace, you would succumb to her. You would agree to her every word and act. You sat still in fear as her hands stretched towards you like the ever-consuming flames, coming to burn you up like wood to fuel a warm future that you will have no part in.

"Hey, where'd all the happy cheers go?" Father stumbled into the room, clutching a half-empty bottle of beer. "I thought we were supposed to be celebrating. I sure was." Then, he jabbed a finger at your chest. "And you better pucker up and smile because you don't have anything else to give to this family. At least that brother of yours is going off somewhere, while you can't even read sh*t for your life."

"You kicked me out of school!" It was so much easier to scream and rage at your father than your mother.

"My husband, my son, I think -"

"You think they'll want a freak anyway?" Suddenly, there were faint tears in father’s eyes as well. "A nobody, a sh*thead idiot that can't even read normally? You think those rich folks at that college will want this," his fingers dug into your skin, "Not that?" He jabbed another finger at your brother outside the window. 

You looked at your mother pleadingly. She did not rebuke the words of your father. "Son, it was for the good of this family-"

Your father interrupted with a loud sigh. "I never went to college either. I turned out fine." You looked at his soiled clothes, the second or third-hand books stacked behind him that he could never read better than you could, the tears sliding out of his bloodshot eyes, and you sneered. 

I'm nothing like you, you wanted to scream. Instead, you stood. You took no care of your brother looking in with furrowed eyebrows through the window, your mother with her flaming embrace and too many tears, your father who was nothing like you. You walked out of the room and to the rivers.

Where your tree was, there was only a stump left. Apples were scattered across the ground. You stood still for a moment, and then, laughter tore out of the edges of your lips. You strode away from the stump, then stormed back and sent a kick at it. Your foot snagged on a root protruding out of the ground, and you saw the world lurch around you. Suddenly, you were sprawled out on the ground, your arms curled around your head, and warm blood splashed across your face. You wiped it off with your sleeves and saw that an apple had rolled in front of you. 

You picked it up. It was brown and blotted and covered with tiny insects, but it smelled like spring and freedom. You put it into your pocket. 

You heard the rush of the rivers bid you farewell.

Eventually, night veiled your trembling form. You returned to your family and sat down at the dinner table. Your father counted notes from a worn envelope in his hands, and you knew he was mourning the cost of food for the upcoming month, mourning money that won't be spent on his drinking habit. Your mother nursed her hand, where she had once again drawn blood with her rusty scissors and worn glasses. Your brother passed out on the table with graphite and ink smeared across his fingertips.

Your mother screamed at your bloodied face, then roughly pulled you into an embrace. You could hear murmurs of pleas and sorry and forgive me as her trembling hands roamed all over your body. Your father slumped in his chair and dared not look at you. Your brother remained at rest. Suddenly, you felt a great longing for the gentle caress of the rivers.

You were innocent of this despair in your home. Yet, you waited for your sentencing from your family, sending you off to your execution. Sentencing you for your selfishness. For your desire for an education when you can learn nothing from it. For your stupidity. For your existence. You didn't hear words of blame and distrust, but you felt them curl around your body, sharp fangs rubbing against your skin, slowly entwining you within the darkness before swallowing you whole. In a sense, you heard them clear as the church bells, clear as the thundering voice from heaven as God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. 

"Sorry. Been too tough on you." Father said after a while, and he did not accuse you. However, when his hands touched your face as he leaned close to survey your injuries, you could feel the sting of sharp nails against tender flesh, and you heard his accusation. Your hand had a tight grip on the apple in your pocket as he bandaged you.

"Here, have my dinner." Mother pushed her plate towards you, and you knew that food was slowly dwindling, and money was burning up, and you could trace the claw marks of starvation stretching across her cheeks. When her smile wobbled as you refused to take a single bite of food, you heard her accusation, laced with the guilty love of a mother and the pain of a desperate woman. Even the luxury of a warm dinner did not tempt you more than the apple within your pocket, and you quickly left the dinner table. 

It was at night when your brother walked into your room, inquiring about your injury, that you heard your final verdict. You looked at your brother, at his thick glasses, his fingertips rubbed raw and black, his eyebags dug deep into his face so akin to your own from his hours of studies. There was a startling revelation, a terrible discovery, a sudden burst of light that brought forth reawakening before your eyes. You couldn't read or write properly. You trembled at the sight of math and science. You were a high school dropout, an idiot who couldn't keep a job for more than a week, a beast that preferred the company of rivers and trees over people.

Your guilt was proven. You are selfish. You are stupid. You have spat upon your existence. You craved education and knowledge and then wasted it. 

"They are right." You stated. You walked away from him. Then you slowly turned around to face him once more. 

"You better do well at college." You commanded. 

"I didn't mean to make you mad-"

"I'm done." You shot him a bitter smile. "I'm getting the hell out of here. I don't care about mother and father, but you need to go to college. Get a good job. Earn good money but don't spend all of it on them, or I'll kick your teeth in, you get it?"

"And you?" The question came out as a fearful murmur. "What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?" 

"Tell father to stop being a deadbeat and to get a job." You picked up your old school bag and shoved a couple of shirts into it. You didn't care to pick up any sentimental objects. You couldn't carry the rivers with you or bring the apple tree along. "Tell mother—Tell mother I understand her, but I just can't stand to stay near her anymore." You paused, then gently brushed a hand against his shoulder. "Go to college. Live a good life."

You paused and waited for a plea for you to stay, a fear-wrangled meltdown, or even a tantrum. 

Your brother only nodded. "Stay safe." His eyes were scarlet, and he refused to look at your face. You waited a little longer, and he began to twitch uncomfortably, his arms trembling and his face frozen and pale. You felt a sharp twist in your heart and some form of incredulous anger suddenly seized your body. You abruptly yanked up your bag and slung it over your shoulder, then muttered a quick "goodbye" before you slammed open the windows and leaped out of your home.

You ran. You thought you heard a faint cry echo behind you, then frantic footsteps, then a hard thump followed by silence. Surely, if you let yourself escape, if you abandon everything and everyone, no worse things were to come. Surely, you will be free from poverty, from pain, from despair.

You pulled the apple out of your pocket and took a large bite from it.

8. Locusts

Locusts scattered across the land and consumed all of the crops. Moses abandoned his home to stroll through the streets of Egypt. He shed tears for the suffering of the people and the ache within his heart.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

You gagged yourself in a public bathroom and threw up everything in your stomach. The aftertaste of apples in your mouth felt bitter and rancid. You missed home. No, you missed him. You missed your brother. You left him, all alone, with your father and mother and your crumbling home. 

You ran home in the morning. Your brother cried when he saw you attempt to silently climb into his bedroom through the open window. 

"Don't leave again, please. Don't leave." He begged. 

"Okay." You whispered after a long silence. "Okay. I won't leave you."

9. Darkness

Darkness covered the land. And Moses heard the words of God once more promising liberation, and he gazed upon the adoring faces of his people and felt hope blossom once more. His despair and pain dulled, and in their place sprung a stronger love for God and for his people.

"I don't want to leave."

Your brother leaned against the stump of the apple tree. "I… Don't want to leave you. You came back for me, and I don't want to leave you with our parents." The night surrounded the both of you, but you could still see your brother by the faint light of the moon. 

"Don't be a dumbass." You nudged him. "Running away from home is a hell lot different from going to college."

For a moment, you both fell silent, and the gentle rush of the rivers engulfed your minds. Faded stars peeked at you from the sky.

"If you stay with father after I'm gone, who knows, he might-"

"You're speaking as if I'm planning to stay here." You snorted, "Again, I came back for you. Not them. I'm not hanging around those two once you're gone. I'll find a nice cave somewhere to bunker down. Meditate. Shave my head. Maybe become a monk and find the meaning of life." 

You tilted your head back and laughed, and the rush of the rivers echoed your amused chortles. However, when you turned to look at your brother, there were tears in his eyes. "Brother, I know it's my fault that you can't go to school anymore because I'm going off to college, but please, you can't waste your life. Please don't waste your life because of me."

"Hey, hey!" You grabbed his shoulders and shook him a little. "Quit the crying bullsh*t. This isn't your fault. I'm too much of an idiot for school, anyways."

"You're not." He whispered. "You're not an idiot."

"Sure I am." However, when you saw tears begin to soak through his shirt, you pulled him close and didn't let go until the quiet sobs died down. 

"You're not an idiot." He repeated the phrase like a mantra, clinging onto you. "You're not an idiot." For some reason, you began to feel a warmth throb in your chest with every repetition. In the distance, the stars started to disappear as the first rays of the sun burned through the east.

"And you're not staying here. You need to go to college."

"Well, I thought that maybe," He leaned a little closer to you, and your breath lifted a few stray hairs on his forehead. "If I stay, I can get you back to school with my college tuition."

"Now you're the idiot. No, absolutely not. Do you know that only about six or seven kids got picked out of more than a hundred of you little runts to go to college?"

"But what about you?" He jerked out of your embrace and glared at you. "What are you going to do?"

"Eh, I'll get a job somewhere." When his glare hardened, you sighed. "Listen, brother. You have this one chance to get out of this hellhole, and you better not throw it away. You have this one shot at freedom. So please," You ran a hand across the ground and found an apple half-buried in the dirt. It was whole and plump and flushed red, devoid of marks and bites. You rubbed off the dirt with your sleeves then handed it to your brother. "Be free for me."

He looked down at the apple, then back at you. 

Then, "Okay. Okay, I will." 

He took a bite. 

Golden juice ran down his chin, and he made a soft sound at the delicate taste of liberty. 

"But I will come back for you, too."

The sun rose, chasing away the darkness of the night. The scent of fresh apple juice curled around you as the ripples of the rivers hummed with a newfound strength. You gazed at your brother, and he gazed back at you with an equal tenderness as you both stepped into the unknown future.

10. Death of the firstborn

At last, Death knocked on the doors of every Egyptian family, and all firstborns fell into his grasp. And Pharaoh cried, in desperate finality: "Oh Moses, take your people away, take your people and your tragedies and be gone from this land!" 

However, when Moses and his people stood before the Red Sea, Pharaoh's heart hardened, and he took an army of millions and charged forth with a bloodthirsty cry. But then, God bestowed his blessing upon Moses, who struck the waves with his staff and parted the Red Sea before him. 

Moses declared to his people, "We shall be free, my brothers. Let us abandon the darkness and despair of Egypt and march into the light."