The Paper Horse

In the town lived a paper-artisan named Qi, called Old Qi by all. He had fashioned paper figures and paper horses his whole life; his hand was so fine that the horses he made had a live look in the eye, as if about to lift a hoof.

That autumn the Shen family's daughter-in-law died in childbirth, leaving a daughter not yet a month old. The Shens were poor and could not afford a real horse for the funeral, so they asked Old Qi to make a paper one, that the young woman might not suffer on the road. Old Qi spent three days on a date-red paper horse, its mane wound from true hemp, a yellow "soul-guiding" talisman pasted beneath the hooves.

On the day of burial the horse was burned at the grave. As the fire took it, the horse first collapsed, then a wisp of blue smoke rose and slowly shaped itself into the shadow of a horse, four hooves treading the smoke, its body half light, half dark. The young woman's soul drifted out of the grave, not knowing the way, turning in place. The paper horse lowered its head and let her clutch the mane and mount.

It carried her westward. The road was not a human road; on either side grew no crops, only a grey-white mist. They walked and paused, and came at last to a river of black water, on whose bank stood a crooked bridge, and beyond the bridge nothing could be seen. By the water someone kept a stall and offered a bowl of broth, saying: drink, and cross.

The young woman clung to the horse's neck and would not dismount. She said: "My child is barely a month old — I must look back at her once."

The paper horse did not move. It had been fashioned to guide a soul, and to bring her to the river was its charge fulfilled; whether she drank was not its affair. Yet it felt the one on its back trembling hard, and the warmth through its paper body seemed, strangely, to make it warm. It turned its head and gazed back along the road, into that grey mist — and in that gaze it saw the Shen's drafty thatch hut, and in it the wailing infant.

It did not hurry her. It stood, and let her look her fill.

In the end she did dismount, took the bowl, and drank it down. When she looked up, the light was gone from her eyes and she no longer knew the horse. Dully she went onto the bridge, step by step, to where the mist ended, and was seen no more.

The paper horse stood a moment on the bank, then slowly faded and became a heap of paper ash, swept by the wind into the black water.

Old Qi, making horses afterward, always felt something amiss. The paper horses he made kept their necks tilted slightly, as if looking back. He corrected them, and the next one was the same. He sighed and let it be.

Some say the horse remembers that one look.