Body

At the edge of the mass grave beyond Fall-Wild-Goose Town lived Old Shoe-Granny Tian, who had spent her life making shoes for the dead—fine stitches, true lasts, so the wearer's feet would not ache in the underworld. Yet the townsfolk shunned her behind her back, for one pair of red embroidered shoes had passed through her hands, the only living-person's shoes she had ever failed to send into the grave.

Those shoes were made for Willow Wan Niang, only daughter of the Willow family east of town, promised at her coming-of-age to the Shen family across the river as a bride to ward off illness. Three days before the wedding she took a sudden fever and died on the bridal bed, her wedding veil never lifted. The Willows, loath to let her go wanting, commissioned Granny Tian to hurry a pair of red embroidered shoes for the burial—said she, incomplete even in her wedding clothes, would be a bride never formally wed, and wronged.

The uppers were Hangzhou silk, embroidered with twin lotuses, the openings strung with rice-pearls, the seams Granny Tian's signature "key-fret lockstitch," smelling of aged camphor and incense. But the Willows changed their mind, fearing red was unlucky, and laid Wan Niang to rest in plain white burial shoes. The red pair Granny Tian could not bring herself to burn, and tucked them at the bottom of her chest.

The following spring, strange things began. First the magistrate's eldest son heard, nights, the soft patter of footsteps in the hall, like a woman in padded slippers walking circles around his bed. At dawn the red shoes stood before his bed, toes pointed at him, the pearls still dewed from the night. Within half a month the young man went down to the river for fish and never came up.

Then Old Sun's mother at the tofu shop heard the same footsteps; in the morning the shoes lay by her pillow, their soles caked with grave-mound mud. She had been ailing, and did not survive that spring. The town lay awake, lighting lamps at the faintest sound.

The people whispered the shoes were "choosing." The peddler Qian Sanbao believed in nothing of the sort. He walked the night roads trading goods, had seen much, and had a hard mouth. That night he crossed the grave ridge with his carrying-pole; the moon was a sickly white, and suddenly, on the path ahead, a pair of red embroidered shoes was walking by itself—empty inside, step by step, not fast, yet always keeping a few paces ahead of him, as if leading the way.

Sanbao steeled himself, hooked the shoes up with his pole, and dropped them into his basket. The moment they were in, they went still, even their camphor scent faded. He knocked at Granny Tian's door in the small hours and flung the shoes on the table. "You know this thing, old woman?"

Granny Tian went white at the sight. She told the truth: Wan Niang had gone in white burial shoes, the wedding pair never on her feet. Her soul, arriving yonder with the wrong shoes, could not walk steady, and came nightly home to seek her own. The shoes knew their owner—Wan Niang's foot. Each night they walked to a bedside to "view a match" for her: to see whose foot fit, that they might take that person to be the bride she never became.

"How do we break it?" Sanbao asked.

"Return the shoes to her. Open the coffin, put them on her feet; once she knows her shoes, she will seek no living soul."

Sanbao borrowed a spade and followed Granny Tian to the Willow grave. The coffin had rotted at one corner; Granny Tian herself laced the red shoes onto those bones—Sanbao glimpsed, beside the feet, a few rice-pearls scattered, fallen from the red pair—pressed the grave earth down, burned three sticks of incense, and muttered her rite. Dawn was breaking when they returned; Sanbao fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.

That night, no footsteps sounded in the town.

Sanbao married two years later. The bride came from a neighboring village; on the day she stepped from the sedan the whole town crowded to gawk. Sanbao lifted the veil and bent to change her into her threshold shoes—and his heart gave a lurch: her feet, neither large nor small, were exactly the size of those red embroidered shoes, down to the little mole on the arch.

He said nothing. Only thereafter, each time his wife slipped off her shoes, he could not help but look at those feet, planted safe on his own floor, with never a third shoe appearing in the cabinet.

The Midnight Record: a wedding shoe knows its owner, and knows nothing of life or death. Wan Niang, in the end, did not wait in vain.