edited by Hal Y. Zhang
Content note (click for details)
Body horror, self-harm, references to sexual assaultThe half moon is low in the sky, a heavy sampan in a river of stars. Across the river, a woman works a treadle loom, weaving together silken threads of mist and cloud with wefts of starlight that glimmer like jewels on the brocade.
Right foot press, swish, left foot press, swish. A wedding veil for her sister, she weaves. A new robe for the Jade Emperor to celebrate the birth of his first grandson, she weaves. And a tiny robe for that newborn child, she weaves. Garment after garment, the loom shafts swing back and forth, groaning like wooden oars beating through an endless sea.
Her fingers sweep the soft layer of cloud cotton she has woven into the child’s robe—to not chafe his delicate skin, she thinks. She wonders how she knows such a thing, but she does not dwell on it. She does not pause in her work, for something tells her that to stop is to vanish, to be swallowed by the moon or smothered by the vastness.
Her name is Zhinü, the weaver maiden, though she does not remember it.
***
It’s not the loneliness that bothers her, she realizes, but the not knowing of whether she is alone. The night is clear, the sky is dark, and the stars in the river burn like a thousand thousand watchful eyes.
Has she always thought of them as eyes? She shivers, a sudden chill washing over her. She pulls her shawl, the one spun from sunsets and the warm southerly wind, closer around her shoulders. She works the loom, each sweep of the shafts an attempt to forget.
More garments for the child. Between the misty threads, her tears fall like eggs into a woven nest. What is she trying to forget? She steps on the treadle, and the eggs crack open. A flock of birds scatters across the brocade. What is she trying to remember?
A distant humming catches the woman’s attention, and her feet still on the treadles. The loom falls silent, and she waits, heart nearly crashing through her chest, for the darkness to erase her. Instead, in the silence she remembers, and she remembers why she had forgotten, for the remembrance is worse than vanishing.
Slowly, she stands and glides towards the river. The woman examines her reflection amidst the drowning stars. It is a familiar image, this illusion, though it is not hers. It does not belong to her, just as the river, the sun, and the moon do not belong to her.
Yet with one look, it had become his. She remembers now: the jade-green lake, the garments her sisters had tossed ashore before they’d dove in, the lowing of the oxen, the glint of a predator’s eyes, and…the feathers, the black feathers that pierced her flesh and poured into her throat like ink.
She remembers now: It is the seventh night of the seventh moon, and soon, he will arrive. Swiftly, she glides back to her loom. She retrieves a pair of shears, cold and heavy, its edges made sharp by the storm-brushed crags of icy mountains. Carefully, with the nimble fingers of a weaver, she begins to cut. One long straight tear along her inner thigh, up the bumpy hills of her knee, then down the slope of her calf. It is a shallow cut, and she hardly flinches. Her mind is elsewhere: the soft skin of a newborn.
For the children, he said. For the children, they said. She had sat stone-faced, while he wept and pleaded before the heavenly court. When she refused to reconcile, he changed his tune. He had seen her hold shears to her own wrists, he said. She was unwell, an unfit mother for their children. Unfit, dangerous, they whispered. Besides, she had two children with him, had she really been unwilling? He played his tune, and the heavenly court, like the birds, listened.
The humming in the distance becomes a buzzing. She shudders at the birds—scavengers and opportunists waiting for a glimmer of exposed, vulnerable flesh.
Of course they had listened to him. She might have belonged to the heavens, and he the earth, but he was still a man.
She removes the skin from one leg, then the other, peeling back the pale layers as though she were merely separating the skin and flesh of a peach. She dips the purifying blade into her palm, pierces through the fate line, and etches her sorrows along the life line. She traces the outlines of her fingers, the shears shimmering silver and crimson, and the skin comes off her hand like a silk glove. She works her way in, towards the soft crests of her breasts and the valleys below, stripping herself bare, barer than she’d ever been, until no skin remains.
She stretches her skin across the loom and walks the treadles once again. She pulls threads of red gems from her exposed veins and winds them around spools of starlight. With skin as warp and blood as weft, she weaves.
The buzzing becomes a whirring and finally a violent storm of wings. A mass of black feathers, darker than the night sky, appears across the river of stars and blots out the moon. Borne on the backs of the corvids is a figure, eyes hungry with desire.
Zhinü removes the finished brocade from the loom and slips into her new skin. Standing on the edge of the river, she catches a glimpse of her reflection. She is: a shattered porcelain vase, its cracks aglow with the light of dying stars; a volcanic crater, its surface pulsing with streams of molten rock. She is pieces, she is whole; the skin that was his, she has made her own. She smiles, sickle-like, and waits for her lover to behold her new visage.
© 2025 by Lilia Zhang
969 words
Author’s Note:
I have always found the Chinese folktale “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl” to be an absurd story rife with misogynistic assumptions. A man steals a woman’s clothes, sees her undressed, then requests that she marry him, and somehow it’s a love story. In fact, it is the central folktale of the Qixi Festival, a Chinese festival celebrating romantic love. In my retelling, I rip the seams from that original folktale and weave it a new skin of horror that reveals its inherent ugliness.
The original story (of which there are several variations) goes something like this:
Seven fairy sisters came down to the mortal realm one day. They were bathing in a jade-green lake when a cowherd, drawn by the sound of tinkling laughter and mischievous splashing, came and stole their discarded garments. Unable to return to the heavenly realm without their clothes, the fairy sisters elected their youngest, the weaver maiden, to bargain with him. The cowherd returned the sisters’ robes, but because he had seen the weaver maiden unclothed, he requested that she become his wife. Zhinü agreed, and they raised two children together in the mortal realm. Eventually, the forbidden affair was discovered by the heavens. Enraged by the impropriety, Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, dipped her golden hairpin in the heat of the sun and slashed a wide river in the sky, separating the two lovers forever. Now, the weaver maiden sits at her loom on one side, while the cowherd weeps with their children on the other. Only once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, when all the magpies of the world form a bridge across the heavens, are the lovers allowed to reunite for one night.
Lilia Zhang (she/her) is a storyteller and lover of all things animal- and brain-related. She has a degree in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University and a tendency to write character backstories longer than the actual stories. She likes to write about animals, women, the earth, and the burdens bequeathed to all of the above. Her work is published in Nightmare Magazine, Uncharted Magazine, and Luna Station Quarterly, among others. If she could have one superpower, she would choose shapeshifting—that, or the ability to write while she’s sleeping. Find her and her pups on Instagram @itslalalilia.
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