The Ancient Wisdom: The Story of Head Snatcher from My Grandmother

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Professor 
Creative Writing
30 March 2022
The Ancient Wisdom
We sat around fire lit using dried Yumi stick-that is the term Chinese, in Northeast China, refer to corn cobs. The kind of fire corn cobs produce is unparalleled. It burns better than coal, or so I thought. The fire area around the fireplace is bare - no covering of any form apart from the soil earth provides. There are no seats, no mats, and nothing to sit on, apart from the soil earth naturally provides. I would like to imagine such a fireplace experience in the United States—sitting around the fire for more than two hours without going to the washrooms and without surfing the internet. Won’t that be a boring life? But I tell you, the fireplace sessions go for more than two hours without anybody moving an inch. There were no phones or watches at that time, but that does not explain the locked attention.
A certified grandmother, sixty-five years and above, took the speaker’s position, sitting closest to the fire producing a cloud of smoke. I still wonder today how the grandmother and the people around the fire are not choked by the smoke or felt the heat from the fire. The fireplace meeting endured the absence of mobile phones, watches, or radios. I lied about the radios. They were around but only owned by the fathers who never allowed girls or women to listen to them. The radios did not have the FM band and only listened to BBC and VOA news over the medium bands. Men were called to gather around one village or family radio, listen to the news, and disperse after the news, where the radio is switched off and dry cells removed and stored for the next session. I never asked myself why women were treated as inferior to men until I moved to the US when I was 20.
“I want to share with you a story of an ancient animal who attacked people at night only, and no one ever saw how it looks because it is canning and only appears when it is sure it will succeed in catching its prey,” the grandma began. All the twenty girls, I included, were quiet and ears all ready for a horror story. Can you imagine waiting for a story of an unknown animal whose targets never survived to tell what the animals looked like? “My grandma told me that her grandmother told her about the story long ago when they were teenage girls like you,” the grandma continued. That chain of “told me she was told by her grandma” stories never made us doubt the story because the grandma was certified, and everything she said was authentic. “She is the voice of generations” was the answer everyone gave when asked about the authenticity of the stories.
“This animal was called the head snatcher because all it did was ‘snatch’ the head, run away with it, eat the brain and leave the skull,” the grandma answered a question from one of us who asked the name of the animal. All of us were scared, especially because the storytelling was at night, at 10 pm to be exact. But somehow, we felt safe because we all spent the night at the grandma’s single room, grass-thatched, round hut. We spread skins from animals like cows, goats, and sheep slaughtered for various occasions. T...