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The Washerwoman was not crafted lovingly so much as idly daydreamed by her creator.
He started by asking himself the usual questions: How old was she? How tall? How muscular, slim, or fat? What did her face look like? What did she do? Why?
But no clear answers ever came. She was an amorphous and indecisive idea.
The Washerwoman's creator didn't have much experience with parents, really.
Isn't it enough that she loved him? her creator thought. Isn't it enough that she chose to love him even though she knew how it would end?
Her creator was not often kind to his creations—for, after all, to him they were mere fantasy. Limbs could be ripped off in fantasies; homes razed to the ground. People stunted. Others nourished.
Fantasies were communal things, once published.
In that way, they were alive.
Such is the nature of art. Of the human experience.
If there exists a writer, if there exists a reader, if there exists a sentiment...
So the Washerwoman was hung in this juxtaposition of unreality. Words on a page. Never fleshed out, as it were.
Let us imagine, for an instant, that every story in living memory has given birth to a dimension perfectly tangible. Real and sentient and necessary to those who exist within it.
Let us imagine, for an instant, that free will exists. At the very least, that there's some sort of scale which tallies the degrees of decision between mortals and their Gods.
Then, let's say, once upon a time there was a girl born under heavy rain. She had four older brothers and two elderly parents; each one of them a servant. As she grew, she was all thin brown hair and thin brown eyes and strafed brown skin. She was on the starving side of comely. Her face was very square, very handsome.
She did not come by love easy. She came by it desperate. She came by it grim-amused.
When she was five, the brother two years her senior died of a summer illness which spread throughout the estate. She survived. Her mother did not. When she was seven, the brother eight years her senior shoved her up a tree and played distraction for a demonic beast. She never saw him again. When she was thirteen, the brother five years her senior fell in love above his station. When she was fifteen, she found the tragic couple's brutalized remains in the woods out back. When she was sixteen, her father sickened, and the brother three years her senior (the cultivator who rarely sent letters, who seemed embarrassed by them) stopped.
Stopped writing.
Stopped visiting.
Stopped.
By the time she was seventeen, her father was dead, and that summer illness which had taken root in her when she was just a girl sank curious branches into her lungs.
By the time she was nineteen, she was a mother.
Luo Binghe the fishermen called him. He was dirty and small. He fought for every scrap he had. He ate his own fleas. His language was little and vulgar.
She says to him—Hello.
He snarls at her.
She says to him—My name is Yi Jiyu. (For it is, whether or not her creator knows it.)
He bears his teeth. Several times on their way home, he bites her. Digs his maw to blood, nearly to bone. She doesn't mind. She had known it would be hard, because all children are hard.
Worthy. Yes, worthy, every last one. But hard, too.
She'd always wanted a little brother.
She'd always wanted someone who would outlive her.
Two years later, Luo Binghe is clean, is almost respectable. She has taught him how to lie. She has taught him how to smile.
He calls her Mama, and clings to her, and tells her every truth he owns. She tells him stories for sleeping, for waking, for lunch. She does not sing, because she is not the type.
Everyday, the ache in her knuckles grows worse. At the end of each third breath, her lungs clatter and roll away from her like rotted twigs.
She had not quite meant to be a parent. She had not quite meant to love Luo Binghe like this.
Enormously.
She thinks of her brother, the only one left.
She thinks of the Burial Mistress. A Xian Shu disciple she met when she was fifteen, before Enhong and Xiao Yan's love story came to its wretched end. Her dimples. Her soaring heart. The endless heat of her. How she whispered sweet promises and took nine pieces of Jiyu's heart up that mountain when she left.
But it was Jiyu who had made her leave.
First, when she found Enhong and Xiao Yan's bodies, because she finally seemed to have proof that all those old folk's whispers about a lowly mortal servant seducing an esteemed cultivator were true, and what could she do but believe them?
But the Burial Mistress came back.
Second, when it had been months since Songhan wrote, and she came to the sinking realization that Baba would die without another glimpse of Songhan's stupid fucking face.
But the Burial Mistress came back.
Third, when Baba was dead. —If you return, Jiyu had said, this lowly servant will treat you as a stranger.
—Do not call yourself a servant.
—Then. This lowly servant shall treat you as a Master.
—Jiyu...
—No.
This time, the Burial Mistress did not come back.
The Burial Mistress' promises could not belong to anything in this house except maybe the air.
And Yi Jiyu was dying.
The Burial Mistress, who was immortal, knew nothing of that. Understood nothing of it.
Jiyu was going to die.
Oh, cavernous heavens, what would this world do to her son when she was dead?
Mercy, she begged, and saved what little she could. Mercy, she begged, and dangled a Jade Guanyin from his throat. Mercy, she begged, even when she realized the jade was counterfeit and the Gods might not be listening. Mercy, as the rotted twigs that were her lungs clattered farther and farther away.
She hoped she'd taught her son something of the word, but there was no way to tell.
—This lowly one is selfish.
—No, Mama.
—Your Mama drove others away because she was dying, then she stole you because she was lonely. Now Binghe will be lonely, instead. Isn't that a little too unfair?
—I'm glad. If I have Mama because she was selfish, then I'm glad. Mama should be selfish more often.
—...Is this a hint? Does my Little River still want me to go fishing for a new sibling?
—No, Mama.
—Tsk. Mama should be selfish, huh? Hmmm, does Binghe remember the first thing I taught him to cook?
—Mn.
—Wanna go steal from our stingy old Masters, baobei?
—Yes!
(Yi Jiyu does not mean to die before he gets back. She really doesn't.)