Rebirth14 min read
A Little Buddha, a Hidden Spring, and the Year the Fields Changed
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The river smelled like cold iron that evening. I knew it because the adult in me—who had lived under fluorescent office lights and commuter trains—recognized it in a childish body. I tasted river water and panic, and then a stranger's arms.
"Get her up! Hurry!" someone shouted.
A broad-shouldered man pulled me from the current and set me on the riverbank. My lungs forgot how to work for a beat; then they remembered. I hacked and coughed and opened my eyes to a ring of faces and lamp-lighting that belonged to another time.
"Who did this?" a woman cried. "My girl—my little girl!"
"I'm okay," I whispered, though my voice came out thin as a reed. My head throbbed like a cracked bell. The crowd shoved, fingers pointed, a thousand small judgments landing on me. Someone wiped my hair with a rag. The man who had saved me—Ashby Daugherty—stood back, wet hair plastered to his forehead, watching.
"You all right, kid?" he asked. His voice had a grain I did not expect: friendliness wrapped in worry. He smelled like river mud and boiled tea.
"I—" I didn't know which "I" to use. The six-year-old body I looked out from had a name and a family. The twenty-three-year-old life I had left in another world had been burned down to one hard memory: deadlines, fluorescent light, and then silence. Now, folded inside this child's skin, I had two sets of memories tangled like fishing line.
"That's Jen Cordova," the woman said, and came forward with bigger arms than I expected from someone who had called herself "Aunt." She swept me up and smothered me in kisses and tears. "My child, don't you scare me like that."
"You're crying," I choked. The woman—my mother in this life—laughed wetly.
"Of course I'm crying. You nearly drowned."
I let the warm press of her body hold me. For someone who had been an orphan in my past life, all this felt like a miracle and a trap at once. "I won't be any trouble," I promised silently. "I'll take care of this family."
At home the house smelled of wet straw and boiled greens and something like safety. The other small people who lived here—the brothers—arrived filthy and silent, faces lit with relief. Earl Cole, the oldest, had a steady jaw and the kind of hands that knew how to fix things. Colby Dean, the middle brother, talked less but smiled like he kept a secret. Koji Guerin, the youngest of the three and barely older than me in this life, tussled my hair and said I was brave.
"She's freezing. Get her a hot bath," Gemma Bonilla said briskly, her voice a kitchen orders-and-affection thing. She was my mother now, and every touch and sound told me she would move mountains for us.
I had been Jen Cordova in another world—thirty hours ago, a corporate drone who ate vending-machine lunches and died at a desk from too much work. Then nothing. Then this: a carved jade Buddha on a string at my throat sparkled and hummed like it had its own heartbeat. The child's hands that brushed it felt for a moment like a stranger's. I wanted to scream with joy and clutch the new life and the old life both at once.
Later, wrapped in layers and looking tiny in a too-big bed, I let the adult thoughts rise and plan. This was the seventies—different flags, different leaders, but the same planet. Families worked with callused hands, and the rhythm of days was sun, soil, and chores. My head spun with calendar dates and hints of history. If the broad outlines of time were similar to the world I remembered, then the small differences might be opportunities. I tasted hope like a secret.
When the jade Buddha pulsed in the dark—pale, steady—I thought it was my imagination. I pressed my palm to it and heard a sound like rain in a clay jar.
"What's that?" Earl hissed outside the curtain when he heard the faint click.
"Nothing. Go to sleep," I muttered, and then touched the jade again. The room rippled like a pond under a tossed pebble. The air folded. I thought of the bed beneath me; I thought of the yard outside; and I let myself be thought into the place the pendant wanted me to be.
The space inside the jade was small and odd as a teacup: not bigger than a room, dim and cool. A single spring breathed in the center of dust and stones. It shimmered with steam that smelled faintly of cinnamon and clean cotton. When I cupped my hand and drank, warmth wound through my limbs like silk thread.
A voice—no, not a voice; a clear caption of thought—arrived in my head: [Spirit Spring: Accelerates plant growth. Heals surface wounds. Beautifies. Can be stored and carried in small vessels. Space access toggled by thought.]
"Okay," I said aloud, laughing at myself. "A cheat code? Great."
I tested it. I plucked a piece of cloth from the bed and thought of carrying it in. The cloth vanished and reappeared in the spring room. When I took my hand away, I was back in the bed smelling of boiled cabbage and soap. The jade hummed against my throat like approval.
"This could change everything," I whispered to the dark. I thought about the family ledger in my head: a father with a bad leg, a mother bearing burdens, three hungry mouths to feed. If the spring healed wounds and coaxed crops to grow—if I could take water and pour it on seeds—maybe we could stop living hand-to-mouth.
In those early days I learned the rules: the spring made one drop every half hour if I willed it. Anything planted in the space grew quickly; pulled things would regrow if the root was left. I could keep goods in the space. I could become, with great care, someone with leverage.
"Don't tell anyone about the jade," I told myself more often than anyone else. Secrets like that were dangerous. People would plan to take it. People would try to use it to buy influence. I tucked the chain beneath my shirt and kept my palms as empty as promises.
"Where did you get a pendant like that?" Colby asked one evening when I showed him a tiny, bright leaf pulled from my palm.
"My necklace," I said, watching the leaf glint in the firelight. "It was a gift."
He whistled. "That's no ordinary trinket."
Earl studied it with the calm of someone who had lifted a broken wheel and seen how it turned. "Whatever it is, it seems to be good for us," he said.
"Just...be careful," Gemma said. "Some folk—some folk will want what we have."
Out in the village the rumor mill had its own heat. Brianna Myers, a loud woman with palms too quick for her own good and a tongue that could sharpen a scythe, saw everything through the lens of how she could make someone else small. Her daughter, Armani Saleh, had the same proud tilt and spent afternoons looking at other people with the appetite of somebody who wanted more than she had. The first time I met them in a dispute, Brianna's nostrils flared like a hen's.
"She's making a scene," Brianna told the circle in front of the pump. "My child wouldn't do those things. They're the kind who stir up trouble."
"Who pushed you?" my memory asked. The river came back in flashes: a childish shove, a slip, a laugh. I named Armani in my head and felt my chest tighten.
"She fell," Brianna said smoothly when my mother asked. "Kids play. Misunderstandings happen."
The village had rules nobody wrote down: respect the elders, keep your hands off your neighbor's grain, and never make a scandal that would cost your family work-points. But this was a small place where grudges counted like crops. Brianna was well-connected—the village head, Omar Wilson, was her relation by marriage. When she complained of offense, people listened.
"Let the village council decide," Omar said the next day when a crowd came to the gate. His manner was slow as mud and his beard made him look older than he was. "Make a statement, both sides write a note. We'll settle it quiet."
"Quiet?" Gemma's eyes flashed. "My girl nearly drowned. Which version of 'quiet' saves a child's lungs?"
In the days that followed, little poisons poured through the village. Brianna told sob stories about being insulted. People took sides. My family huddled, and I watched the ledger in my head: the division of fields, the news about coming land allocations, the way someone like Brianna might try to get herself a head-start. The more I listened, the more I realized the stakes weren't only pride. Land reform—if it happened soon—would divide the village's fields into private plots. Whoever already had claim to land would be at an advantage. Someone who could influence the village head could steer those plots under their own name first.
That night I touched the jade and thought of those arid, rocky lots up behind our house—land the village called "wasteland." If the village stuck them to our name, we would get those acres and be shut out of the future distributions. Brianna had motive.
"This won't stand," Earl said when we told him the story. "If they give us scrub up the hill, we'll work until we drop and still not feed six mouths."
"Then don't let them," I told him. "If we can make the ground produce better—if the spring speeds things up—we might be able to show other people there's another way. Let them see us get strong."
"If they find out you've been doing magic, they might burn down the house," Colby said dryly. He'd been the one to sneak into the school office, hear the teacher mutter about government changes, and bring it like a secret folded in his pocket. "Or worse," he added.
"I know," I said. "That's why we have to be clever."
We began small. I would take a drop of spring-water and mix it with a bowl of well-water at night, and quietly sow an extra seed in the space. In the morning, a sprout would be almost a small plant. I left the root in the space. When people went to bed, I would pull up a head of cabbage or a purple eggplant and plant the root back in the hole here at home like a magic trick. It was less magic than engineering if you thought of it as a hack. I kept a ledger: one note for the spring's drops, one for the seedlings, one for what went to food and what was secret.
"Where did you get that cabbage?" my mother asked at supper one night, eyes shining. The greens were sweeter than any we'd had.
"Just a gift from the fields," I said. I tasted pride like sugar.
People noticed. "The Cordova child brings luck," somebody whispered. Brianna's lips curled one afternoon like a cat about to pounce.
"Such luck," she said sweetly in public. "Maybe Jen is hiding something."
"Mind your tongues," Gemma said softly. "We've earned every bite."
The trouble came fast. At a village meeting meant to discuss land allocation, Brianna stood up, voice high as a bell. "My neighbor," she said, and pointed at Gemma. "She ruined my girl's reputation. She lied to the village leaders. She tries to get privileges by lies."
"You accuse me?" Gemma stood so quickly her chair scraped. "You—"
"Quiet!" Omar interjected, palms up like a man trying to keep two chickens from fighting. "This is the council. Both sides explain."
Brianna's performance was clinical: anguish, then righteous scorning. People nodded. She spoke and called me cunning and dangerous like an accusation embroidered with poison.
"She says I fell on my own," I heard my younger self say to the circle later, small and clear. "But I remember being pushed. Someone pushed me."
"Who?" the village repeated.
"Armani Saleh," I answered. My voice did not shake.
Brianna's face went from smug to small in a breath. "That's a child's word," she scoffed. "They make up stories to make others suffer."
"You'll take this to the village head and we'll decide," Omar said, and the village head's eyes flicked to me not with cruelty but with calculation. He had a position to keep.
The day the village head visited our house to "comfort" us, he tried to hand Gemma two eggs and a quiet smile as if loose egg money could fix everything.
"These are for the child," Omar said. "Don't make trouble."
"I want the truth," I said aloud. The courage that came out of me was not only six-year-old bravado. It had the backbone of my old life, where I had flung apologies like coins and never asked for what I deserved. "If you have proof that someone pushed me, take it. If you are handing out because of cousinship, take it back. We want land like everyone else."
"Enough," Omar said, and left with a slow, annoyed bow.
Two weeks passed and the spring did what it could. Roots grew in secret. We kept the food inside the space and pulled it out when mouths grew hungry. The boys went to school and stitched their lessons into their sleeves and minds so they'd be ready for changes. I learned how to plant seeds with a child's hands and an adult's patience.
But Brianna grew louder. Gossip is a slow-burning fire. Her daughter, proud and cruel, began to be seen not as the one who might have pushed me but as a child prone to accident. People changed with the currents of rumor. Then something else happened that shifted the whole village.
It was harvest day for one trial bed—a small patch behind our house where I'd planted five cabbage roots inside the space and transplanted them as whole heads the night before. In the morning they shone like green moons. I walked the patch with Earl and Colby, breathing in the sweet, clear smell of health.
"Look," said Earl, voice low.
"Those came up alive," Colby added. "And early."
"People will notice," I said, and my heart thudded like a beetle's wings.
"Let them notice," Earl said. "If people see we can feed ourselves, they'll stop letting the likes of Brianna own everything."
We brought one cabbage to market and kept the rest for ourselves. People tasted it and closed their eyes. "What witchcraft is this?" someone muttered. "Where did that come from?"
Brianna's face crumpled like old paper. Her voice raised in another petty claim, but this time the crowd had eaten our cabbage. They began to ask questions. Where did the vegetables come from? How did six mouths go from empty to full? When one old woman bragged that she had seen me put my hands on the ground and pull a whole head of cabbage from a place that had only roots yesterday, the murmur grew louder. People looked at her like she had handed them proof.
"Show us where you planted," someone demanded finally.
I felt the room tilt. If I refused, suspicion would deepen. If I revealed the jade, everyone could come and take it. "No," I said, and then I thought and added, "not yet. But I can show you the cabbage fields."
They came to our yard and saw the green, and then they went further behind the house where Brianna's dirt patches lay rock-hard. Her husband's family had been sitting on minnows of favoritism for years. Their mouths shaped a bitter word.
Brianna pushed into the circle, face flushed. "They're hoarding," she cried. "They're false, and they're stealing from the village."
"You're the one who tried to take our fields," Earl said, voice steady and high. "You came and told lies to the head. You said we'd get the wasteland. We did not ask for it. We told the head we'd refuse the barren land."
"What proof do you have?" Brianna screamed. "You think you can say anything and the village will bow?"
A man from the back—the teacher, Aaron Blair—finally stepped forward. He had sat on committees and heard the talk in the schoolroom. He cleared his throat.
"I heard talk in the teachers' room," Aaron said. "Words of land reform. I heard talk that someone was using connection to push an early allotment. I heard that Brianna's husband was at the meeting. These things are not secret."
Faces turned like a wave. Brianna's mouth opened and closed. People began shouting.
"Enough!" Omar tried to roar but it was like trying to hold the sea in a bucket. The villagers had tasted something that smelled like fairness—crops grown, bellies filled—and they were no longer willing to swallow a narrative.
I looked at Brianna then. She had been bright with malice before. Now she stood small and cornered, the circle of neighbors towering like a crowd at a trial. No one had a camera, but every face was witness.
"You're a liar," an old woman spat. "You'd sell your soul for a better sack of rice."
"How could you—" Brianna hissed. Her voice went high and thin. "I did nothing wrong!"
"You used your cousin's office to claim land people need," Omar said, finally finding his voice. "If that's true, we ought to reverse any such allocations. We should have a public reckoning."
"Public," the villagers repeated, eager and wild now.
In this county square of mud and stubborn will, justice would not be codified in paper that day. It would be given with words and humiliation, with social exile and the slow, certain unfastening of reputation.
"Write what you saw," someone said, and soon a group had formed to write statements. I, who had once written memos and survival emails in an office world, found my hand steady as I told the villagers exactly who had pushed me into the river. The old woman who had seen the act the day before signed. So did Colby, so did Koji. The teacher added his recollection that Brianna had bragged in private of already being in line for good allotments.
Brianna's face changed a dozen times. First there was insolence, then anger, then disbelief. I watched it happen like watching ice melt. "You're lying," she wailed at first. Then, faster, "No—no—" Denial cracked into anger, and anger into pleading. "Please, I can fix this. I'll apologize."
Her voice climbed the ladder of humiliation quickly. Her neighbors saw the seams. They saw how little she had to offer besides loud words. They also—most important—saw the growing piles of our cabbage and the steady trade of seeds and sprouts that began to move through hands like hope.
"You're forgiven if you change," Gemma said quietly, and it felt like mercy. "But not if you hide your wrongs."
"Change how?" Brianna scoffed. "Give them my field?"
"Start by apologizing," someone suggested. "Publicly. And all your lies—tell us every one."
Brianna swallowed and did as the village told her. She stood on the step of the square, and in front of everyone she apologized. She named the things she'd said that were not true and admitted she had tried to use a relation to gain advantage. Her daughter cried at the side. The man who had been close to power in the village—Omar's relation—looked sick. People shifted. They did not clap; they did not spit. They judged. They weighed.
"It will not be easy," Omar said after Brianna's apology, his tone softer but still official. "We will reverse promotions that were made in favor of relatives. We will ensure the land distribution is open and fair. And you, Brianna—your public standing will be...rearranged. People will no longer trust a word from your mouth without proof."
The villagers murmured. That is punishment in a place where a good name pays for grain: public distrust, a slow fall from being the village center of gossip, a cut-off from favors. Brianna's face crumpled finally into rawness.
"Please," she said, on her knees as if she were bargaining for life. "Please, I—I'll do anything. Don't make me a pariah."
Around her, the crowd had emotion enough to break her down. Some crossed arms in cold approval of the punishment. Others looked weary at the necessity of spectacle. A few children watched with hungry eyes, learning the edges of justice as villagers did what lawbooks could not: they judged who should be trusted.
"When trust disappears," Earl said quietly to me that night, "the hunger goes with it. We didn't want this. But we didn't want to be cheated either."
I touched the jade at my throat and felt, for a moment, like a conductor of small, improbable changes. The spring's water made cabbage sweeter, made cuts heal faster, made our father's leg mend a little quicker. It could not make truth obey us. It could not make a sore conscience sit still. But it could give our family a chance.
"Tomorrow," I said, lying awake under a thatch of straw and thinking of seeds, "we plant more."
"And we'll teach," Colby said. "We won't hide it. We'll show people how to work smarter."
We began, then, not with secrets but with lessons. The spring still fed our hidden store, but we started bringing plants to the common table and showing neighbors how to prepare seed, how to protect roots, how to make compost that smelled like the world turning. People learned. Others tried to take advantage. Some gave up fast; most stayed and argued and then returned to the field.
Brianna's punishment was not carved in stone. It was social and slow and just: revoked favors, public apologies, a staring fall in prestige. She could still plant; she could still live; but she could no longer move the village like a shadow. Her daughter, Armani, came to our gate one morning months later and held out a muddy hand.
"I'm sorry," Armani said with a little girl's voice that had felt too proud for too long. "My mother..." She didn't finish. Her leg had scars. She had learned pain the hard way.
"Then help us in the fields, not in the rumors," I told her. "Work. Learn. Keep your hands clean."
Armani's eyes puddled with a shame no one had taught her before.
Days ripened into a strange, honest busy. People began to take turns tending plots. The village head, humbled by the way rumor had nearly rerouted a whole future, had to accept that fairness produced more grain than favoritism ever would. The teacher wrote notes and helped the small boys and girls plant rows in school. Old women who had been quiet began to trade seed-saving tricks at the well. A slow revolution went on like the turning of a mill: one good thing at a time.
At night I would go into the jade-space, empty my palm of a drop or two, and think of where and how to use it without making the village dependent. The spring's water could heal, but it could make people lazy if used like a handout. I dimmed myself to the role of steward: give people tools, teach them, and keep one hand hidden for emergencies. This balance—between secrecy and sharing—became the real trick.
"Do you ever miss your other life?" Koji asked me once, as we sat on the doorstep while the moon polished the fields silver.
"Sometimes," I said. "But not the dying part. I miss the city coffee sometimes, and my old grey sweater."
"Better here," Koji said simply. "Here your hands learn things."
And when the village finally had its day of counting and dividing, the results were not perfect. People who had been greedy still had things. People who had been patient had earned their spots. We got a little plot near the house that would have once been called "wasteland." We called it "hope" and tended it like a child.
My jade still hummed, and sometimes, late when the moon was thin, I would press my palm to the spring and feel it drip once and promise. I would close my eyes and remember the rush of a river and the heat of an office too-familiar to call home and be grateful for the ache of small hands planting seeds.
"One day," I whispered to the spring, "I will plant enough that no one in this village goes hungry. We'll trade seeds like stories. We'll hold each other up."
And sometimes, if I listened hard in the dark, the jade replied with a tiny pulse and the promise of one small drop, like a bell saying, Keep going.
The End
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