Midnight Records: The Paper Child
Gou the paper craftsman breaks his own rule and models a paper child on a dead boy; on the seventh night the cut paper flowers lie in a ring, and the paper sleeve sways as if to reach them.
Midnight Records: The Paper Child
Gou the Fourth was the town's paper craftsman, who fashioned paper oxen, horses, houses, and little figures for funerals. His hands were deft; the paper boys and girls he made had lively brows and eyes, as if about to speak.
He kept one rule: never model a paper figure on a living person. He would not pinch a living face — said he feared it might wake something that ought to stay away.
That twelfth month the Zhou family's youngest son died at five. They were poor and could afford little, only asking Gou to make a paper child for company. Gou saw the mother weep herself faint and, soft-hearted, broke his rule and made a paper boy, his brows and eyes after the child's living face.
Alone at night coloring it in his shop, he thought he heard the paper child laugh, like a real babe by the kang. His hand jerked and the paint spilled. He looked closely: the paper child stood as before, a smile at the corner of its mouth that he had just dotted.
He said nothing and gave the child to the Zhous.
On the seventh night, Gou passed the Zhou house and saw the paper child set before the spirit, with a few cut paper flowers scattered in a small ring, as if a child at play. When the wind moved, the paper child's sleeve swayed, as if reaching for the flowers.
Gou stood a long while. He remembered he too had had a son, lost at three, whose name he nearly forgot.
From then on, every Qingming, Gou would set a small paper lantern quietly at the road beyond the town, no name on it. The village children who passed took it for a lost toy and carried it off. No one knew it was a light lit for all the children who could not come home.