A Weasel Asked Me to Grant Its Title, So I Dreamed of Calling Her Mom

This story is entirely fictional. When I was eight, I ran into a weasel spirit seeking a heavenly title at the local earth god shrine. She asked if she looked more like a human or a god. Feverish and confused, I said, “You look like my mom.” By the laws of karma, a word spoken in earnest cannot be taken back. The weasel spirit took human form and named me Huang Weihua, with the nickname Xiaoxiao. She named herself Huang Shulan. And so, a three-hundred-year-old spirit and an eight-year-old orphan became the most absurd mother and son in the world. She had to raise me for ten years to repay the karma of gaining human form. But she didn't know how to be human, let alone how to be a mother. She couldn't start a fire, cook, sew clothes, or make small talk with the neighbors. She crouched by the stove and struck five matches before getting a fire going. She pricked her hand three times while sewing a padded jacket. When she went to trade for food at the tofu shop, people looked her up and down. It took her three days to learn to say the word “Mom” properly. From a wild creature crouching in the snow and begging for a heavenly title, she learned to become a woman crouching by the stove to make porridge. The path she had to cultivate wasn't in some remote mountain. It was right here, in the human world. The woman next door, Sister-in-law Ma, taught her how to smile at people. Old Liu at the village entrance taught her how to repair the roof. The woman at the tofu shop taught her how to cook porridge without burning it. As she learned to live among people, she also protected me. When a gang of thugs cornered me in an alley, their home was plagued by weasels the next day, and their chickens and ducks all died. When I came first in my exams, she bought me a fountain pen in town. A peddler overcharged her by fifty cents, and that night he dreamed a yellow shadow chased him down three streets. She never hurt anyone. She only made the people who bullied me “have a nightmare.”