Don't be afraid of me. Though every child in the village is.
I understand. A straw figure standing in the back court of the shamaness's hall, dressed in faded red, its body bristling with wooden tablets that bear people's names — a storyteller could frighten a whole room to tears with that image. But hear out what this costume means, and then decide about the fear.
I am a proxy.
The one who bound me was Gao Village's last old shamaness. Her art — extinct now — was called moving misfortune: when a child lay fevered past rising, when a man met something foul on the road, she would write a birth-date tablet, pin it to my body, burn incense, chant — and invite the misfortune down out of the person and into this body of straw.
What does misfortune look like? You people cannot see it. I can. When it moves, it comes as small clots of wet smoke that burrow into my straw — a spell of cold, and then it disperses. And on the human side, the fever breaks; the foul thing leaves.
Straw men rot quickly precisely because they eat misfortune. An ordinary one lasts three years. Me, the old shamaness re-bound year after year, until the year her hands could no longer manage it. Before she died she set one last stick of incense at my feet and said: old friend, when I'm gone, if you fall apart, then fall apart — no blame. But if you find you can still stand —
"then stand in for them a while longer."
I stood. I have stood for over a hundred years. The shamaness is gone; no one renews my straw; and yet I do not rot — after a century of eating misfortune, this straw stopped being straw long ago. The village doesn't understand; they only know the old straw man of the shamaness's hall must not be touched, and at festivals the old ones still slip in to burn incense and pin fresh birth-tablets on me.
No one chants the moving-spell anymore. But so long as tablets are pinned, I receive. For a hundred years, I have been strong enough to receive.
Until recently.
The recent misfortunes are wrong.
The old ones came loose: a fever, a stumble, a patch of bad luck. Cold when they entered, but clean — and quick to disperse. What has been arriving these past months comes whole: clot after clot, black with a wet shine, and they do not disperse. They coil in my straw-core like snakes that have found a den. And before they burrow in, I can hear that they carry writing.
Each clot has a name tied to it.
Not the names on my tablets. New names, stroke by stroke, perfectly clear: the Zhangs' third boy from the east end. The widow at the mill. The schoolmaster. Living, healthy people, every one. These misfortunes were not moved off of them — they were sent toward them, and intercepted mid-road by this old proxy.
Someone is manufacturing misfortune. Working from a list. Making them one by one, and dispatching them one by one.
I have bound the black clots tight in my core, and I grow heavier by the day. These hanging sleeves of mine can no longer be raised. But I dare not fall apart — the day I do, the named things slip free and go down the list, door by door.
After the boy with the medicine basket broke the case of the altar, the old ones brought him to the shamaness's hall to burn incense. He stopped short at the back court, looked at me through all my tablets for a long while, and said: there is something pressing on it.
He can see. The child can see.
He asked me whether it was heavy.
A hundred years since the old shamaness, and no one had asked whether it was heavy.
I raised my sleeve as far as it would go. He understood. From then on, every few days, he came: following the methods in her old books, he drew the black clots out of me one at a time, and burned them. With each burning, I grew a shade lighter.
Before he left the village, he lifted out the deepest clot of all — the blackest, the heaviest. He looked once at the name tied to it, and his face changed.
He never told me whose name it was. He only sealed it alone in a talisman-pouch and hid it against his chest.
Then he asked me: Elder — since the list is written by someone's hand: you have shielded everyone all this way. Has anyone ever asked, on your behalf —
where is the hand that writes the list?
I had no answer.
So go west, child. Carry that question out into the world for me.