When the last copy of Little Jasmine at the publisher’s warehouse was pulped, the color bled out from our world. My ruby red cheongsam and my husband’s officer’s uniform dampened into gray.

“Is this the end?” My American husband steadied himself against the wooden doors. His white skin looked even more pale in monochrome. In the final chapters, he had worn his officer’s uniform, to remind me of his country’s authority over my city.

I hoped it was the end. I glared at the noose in the far corner. At the end of the book, I killed myself when he returned with his new, more age-appropriate American wife. I, his eighteen year old bride in Shanghai, have died in front of readers over a hundred thousand times in the past forty years.

* * *

When my husband’s second wife arrived with him, the writer described her loveliness to the point of obsession. She was everything I was not; tall, wealthy, white. But she never spoke. The moment we went out of print, she became flat and unmoving.

I never knew if she wanted to raise my son. Did she plan to raise him on hamburgers instead of dumplings?

When fewer than three people read the entire book in a year, our six-months-old son tipped over like a forgotten doll. I never learned his first words.

Because they only appeared at the end, my baby and the second wife were the first to disappear.

My husband of the final chapters blew away, autumn leaves caught in the wind.

* * *

Tides and the readers’ tastes changed gradually. Readers stopped reading earlier and earlier. Some never reach my death. My neck was never broken, my dress never soiled.

American Literature students placed yellow post-it notes when my husband disappeared for the middle chapters.

Why can’t she go with him when he goes back to California?

Coward! When my husband sent his friend to tell me that he had remarried, my declarations of love, which I have recited two hundred thousand times, brought tears to his friend’s eyes. He swallowed his message, delaying my heartbreak.

Teenage readers didn’t even bother to witness my husband’s return. They stopped when they learned my husband was twice my age. Students skimmed the summary they found online or watched the movie.

The newspapers wrote that the “naturally Chinese” actress who played me carried the film. I started to look like her with more viewings.

* * *

I tried to comfort myself. I am not the mother who dies in childbirth at the beginning of the fairy tales, or the woman ravaged in the first chapters so our hero will avenge her mistreatment in his own story. My suffering was on every page.

Thirteen years ago, someone wrote a fanfic of me and my maid. It got more reads than the book did that year.

Bless that writer.

It has since fallen into obscurity but it granted me comfort and reciprocated love that the original text did not.

* * *

My body returned to the swollen, heavily pregnant stage of Chapters Three and Four. I ached for my maid more than my child.

My maid whispered in my ear, “We’re nearly free.” Her breath warmed my unbroken neck. My skin erupted in goosebumps.

I hugged her. She felt hollow, collapsing. “I will miss you.” The writer had only written her as someone for me to talk to while my husband was gone, someone I could pour my hopes and dreams into but she had none of her own.

She turned her watery eyes to me. “Stay with me until I go. Maybe we will be reborn into the same book.”

I was not sure of the rules. I hoped to never return to any pages. They hardly wrote disposable women anymore, but what if I was the unlucky character?

“I will find you,” I promised her anyway. Perhaps she will be a middle-aged wife, battling off suitors with elaborate games to test their strength, wit, and kindness until her true love returns.

In a house full of maids.

* * *

Finally, my abdomen collapsed into slimness and my husband reappeared, taking my maid’s place beside me. He was the adoring officer of Chapters One and Two. The home he had brought for me began falling apart. The roof dissolved into clouds. His legs started to become transparent, the pale pattern of the bedspread appearing underneath. He grasped my hand and stared at me, imploring, as if I could stop this.

Despite my tragic end, I spoke the most lines. I expected to be the last character standing, but I certainly was not the God-Writer.

“I love you.” He pressed his dry lips to mine. My nose flattened under his. His hand was entangled in my hair as if he could take me with him.

The paper signs from our wedding in Chapter Two fell like cigarette ash.

Then my husband was gone.

Finally, the last out of print book was destroyed, a casualty of a flooded basement.

No more broken hearts from unkept promises. No more turning myself into a grotesque mobile above my blindfolded child.

No more.

* * *

Ⓒ Wen Wen Yang

Originally published in Apex, May 2024. Reprinted here by permission of the author.