Rebirth17 min read
A Mall in My Pocket, a Village at My Feet
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I woke up because a shoe hit my face.
"I thought I was going to die from a shoe," I told the empty air, and then laughed like a fool because laughing was less terrifying than crying.
My name is Caroline Rashid. At twenty-eight I ate cheap food in a quiet mall after a long day of work, and then a high heel—huge as a meteor—came down and everything went black. When I opened my eyes again, I was under a patchy quilt on a wooden plank bed, in a room with wind whistling through cracks. The wallpaper was gone; the light came from a window with no glass. The date in my head was wrong and right at the same time: 1960. Fifteen years old. My body was thin as a pencil.
"Grandma?" I croaked, testing a voice I didn't expect to own.
Elisabetta Avery pushed the door open and peered in. "You alright, child?" her voice was the same as in the stories I had kept in my heart—soft and full of worry. She hugged me the way a grandmother hugs someone who has been away too long. I felt the world tilt and then hold.
I remembered everything. The city mall, the convenience of an app, the 996 grind, the waiting-for-nothing nights. I also remembered novels—too many, and stupidly, I had wished for anything but the life I had. "A system," I whispered to myself and then grinned. Because my hand moved and there, steaming and warm in my palm, appeared a round white bun—hot, fragrant, impossible.
"Caroline!" Elisabetta gasped, but in a way that was half amazement, half fear.
"Don't shout," I whispered back and stuffed the bun under my shirt like a thief. "I'm fine. I just fell."
My body was fifteen. My memories were thirty years old. I had a second chance and a terrible hunger. My real luck wasn't the bun. It was the space.
You might think I say "space" in a poet's way. No. When I closed my eyes and thought, "Go to the mall," my mind slid through a seam and I stood in the bright basement of a modern shopping center. Row after row of appliances, boxes of canned food, rows of identical sneakers—everything pristine, everything mine if I dared to take it out to the world that remembered nothing of iPhones or microwaves.
"Don't call it magic," I told myself, but the grin would not die. "Call it the mall."
Elisabetta fanned me with her handkerchief. "You shouldn't be getting up, child. The team will put the gong off if you labor while you are dizzy."
It didn't matter. I had something heaving in my pockets: responsibility. My mother—Lea Bailey—worked every day. My little brother Austin Chapman pulled weeds like a small man. My father, Cedar Davis, drank and lost night's worth of luck to cards. The family I loved had been small and stubborn and poor, and I had been gone to a life that had left a debt inside me like a hollow tooth. Now, with a mall in my head and a fifteen-year-old body, I could change things.
"I'll rest," I lied. I slipped my hand under the bed, reached into the seam of the world and pulled out a flashlight that still had new batteries. It felt wrong and wonderful to hide modern objects under the eaves of a roof that had no ceiling light.
"You keep that quiet, Caroline," Elisabetta said. "This age—these years—are hard. People watch. People speak."
"They'll speak anyway," I said.
Outside, the big bowl of public food—communal dining—still had its rules. We ate at the team hall by the minute with a whistle and a rotation. I learned the rhythm: wake at dawn, breakfast, work, lunch with the gong, work, dinner, sleep. My modern hands adapted to scythes and baskets. My modern brains mapped old-time logic. The mall inside me mapped another route: I could enter it and exit it and bring back parcels nobody would notice if I wrapped them in old cloth and hid them below the cotton quilt.
"Caroline, when you come to the shop, tell Sister Leticia hello," my mother said one evening when I was finally confessing a sliver of the new reality—dizzy, and hungry enough that my teeth ached. "Sister Leticia keeps a pot of chili and jokes like a river. She'll give you an extra bowl if you smile."
"Okay," I promised. I was learning to play the small games that kept people comfortable around me. There would be time for bigger games later.
The mall allowed me small mercies at first—tin cans, sugar, polished spoons, an electric rice cooker with a dent I could explain by saying I'd found it abandoned. I kept the big stuff locked in the space's basement—the phones were useless without signal, the televisions blinked in the wrong channel—but the little things mattered. A pound of flour here. A packet of powdered milk there. A jar of instant coffee I used only to barter for a pair of shoes for Austin.
"This is theft," my conscience would whisper. "You're stealing."
"This is survival," I answered aloud, and the emptier voice inside me agreed. The stolen goods were secret and small, wrapped and passed like contraband across a river. I learned to cook chicken with banana leaves to mask any smell. We ate in secret, in the sliced-down darkness of a root cellar we built with Desmond Kennedy—my grandfather—and a handful of men who believed in quiet.
"Your hands are clever, child," Desmond said once, his fingers smelling of tobacco and kindness. "We don't have much, but you take care."
"I will," I vowed. The promise didn't feel like a script. It felt like an oath.
Days folded into a rhythm: work, borrow, hide, feed. I sent biscuits to the little ones. I left wrapped bars of chocolate for two-year-old Nicole Johansen because her laugh made me see the color I had missed. I sold some things at the black market—quiet, just enough. Imogen Collier, the woman who ran the quiet corner of town where goods circulated like quiet rumors, became the first adult besides my grandmother to smile directly at me.
"You're good at carrying loads," she said, her fingers counting notes she had no right to hold in front of me. "You could run a stall if you wanted."
"Not yet," I said. "Maybe later."
Life was too vivid to slow. I taught Austin to tie knots that would hold a basket full of kindling. I learned to sew a shirt less visible, to hide chocolate in a pocket stitched within a pocket. The mall in my head hummed like a moth. I pulled needed things out and then quite often I pulled out something no one expected: a packet of powdered infant milk, a can of sardines, a razor blade for my grandmother's arthritic shaving of wood. Each time I came back, I told myself: little adjustments. Little repairs.
"You changed, girl," said Jessalyn Ricci, my aunt, one night when she came by after work. "You used to never smile. Now your eyes go like lights."
"I like my eyes," I answered, and she laughed like a woman who had known the world needed laughing.
But not everything was calm. Cedar Davis—my father—kept reaching for the thin line of permission and then stepping over it. We ate less because he spent nights with men who smelled of smoke and old promises. He was dangerous and small at once; his courage was brutal when he had drunk, cowardly when others watched. If I had been heartless and modern, I would have left. But the people I loved were here and hungry and I had a mall in my pocket.
"He's useless," I told my mother once, but it was more out loud so other people would hear than anything else. "He's a gambler."
"He's your father," Lea said simply. "And sometimes a person is the only father they have."
"He sleeps with other people's fire," I said, and the words were sharper than I wanted. The truth sang like a blade. My mother looked away.
The spark that changed everything started small: a chicken. I brought back a small miracle—one of those wild birds that somehow had traveled from the dark of the mall's frozen counter and, by the way the world wobbles in my favor, hit a boulder outside and fell dead as luck. We used the whole bird and hid the bones in the cellar. We ate in secret, and for nights our mouths remembered meat.
"Who caught this?" a neighbor asked when the smells escaped the ground a little and people remarked.
I lied. "We found them," I said. "Lucky day for us."
"Not everyone gets lucky," my grandmother said later, after the children had licked their lips clean. "We mustn't make a habit."
We didn't think it would be a habit. We thought it would be a warmth. But old patterns break slowly.
Cedar Davis took the warmth like a hand takes bread. He gave it to his mother—Gillian Kiselev—who came from the other valley, thin-voiced, determined that no charity would be refused if she thought it owed to her blood. Gillian came one evening and sat on our steps and smiled like an old sun.
"Your daughter," she said to Lea, "she is a dog of luck. Your son gave me a little meat. I thought to ask for more. Your home is generous."
Lea's smile froze. "It was only enough for children."
Gillian's fingers were like claws in a child's story. "I ask as a mother. Give to my son the comforts for my house."
"It's ours," I heard myself say, worse than a child and better than a blade. "We are poor. You are asking for what will make us hungry."
"You're a thief then," Gillian said before I could do anything but brace.
"Don't make trouble," Cedar said, his voice half drunk and half sly. "A debt is a debt."
We sat under the same roof and pretended to be quiet. The world is patient with pretenders, but gossip travels like a river in summer.
And then Cedar Davis did a thing so small it became monstrous: he took a chicken we had been saving. He wrapped it in cloth and carried it to Gillian. She smiled the smile of a woman who believed a wind of entitlement blew just for her.
"You gave it back?" My aunt hissed when the truth reached the table.
"What else is he good for?" Jessalyn said to me in the room where we hid the remaining provisions. "He can't even hide his own cowardice."
"You don't understand," I whispered. "If you want to shame him, it must be done right. Public. People watch. People will remember."
Gillian kept visiting. She kept demanding. Cedar kept answering. The neighbors started to notice that our family's pots were small but our shame seemed larger. I watched my mother grow smaller as if the cards had been given to her and she had to play them without her hands. I could have taken the mall and bought us separation papers, new clothes, a new name. I had to choose between buying us quiet and buying truth.
The truth I chose, because the story in my bones needed justice.
We had neighbors who loved spectacle. When we told them the story—that Cedar had delivered our chicken to Gillian as if it were an offering—they gasped. Rumors learn mouths quickly.
"This is an old injustice," said Desmond Kennedy, and the men listened. "A man who humiliates his household in public must answer in public. It will teach the young to not act like predators."
"It will also set us to talk," Lea said coldly. "If we do this, there is no turning back."
"We'll do it in the square," Desmond said. "Where the threshing happens. Where the women line up. Where the whole team is called by the gong."
"Do you know how loud the gong sounds?" Aunt Jessalyn asked with an edge. "Do you know how much shame can break a man's head?"
"I do," Desmond said. "We do it anyway."
I wanted to be silent. My modern mind craved quiet. But I also wanted to see a man stop taking without giving. I wanted my mother to stop looking like a piece of furniture in her own house. So I agreed to the plan that rose like a tide.
On the day, the sun was flat and bright. The whole lane walked itself into the square. The big men who handled grain and accounts—Keith Carpenter, the team leader—in his plain shirt, stood with a face like iron. The women lined up with children on their hips. The children looked at their elders with a special curiosity reserved for when the world rearranges itself.
Cedar Davis walked in last because the man who has to be shamed always arrives late, hoping the crowd will have thinned. He stopped when he saw the circle, when he heard the hum of three rows of voices like a bee hive.
"What's this for?" he muttered. His voice gave a baring away.
"It's for you, Cedar," I said. I kept my hands folded. I let my chest be what it had been: not a list of grievances, but a ledger. "You took something from us."
"What are you saying?" Cedar's face turned from pale to red so fast his neck shook. He looked small, like a child pulled from the river. "I don't understand."
"You took our chicken and gave it to Gillian," I said. "You told her we had given it. You made a gift of meat because you thought you would win favor. You humiliated your household in front of your mother."
"You—" Cedar tried to swallow his shame, but the people were there. The square had its rules: the accused hears the accusations; the accused answers before the line of people. There is no sudden privacy.
Gillian stood at the edge, chin high, the picture of entitlement. "It is family," she said. "I asked and he gave. What is wrong with that?"
Desmond stepped forward and set his hand on Cedar's shoulder with a weight that did not crush, only informed. "If you are so poor of heart that you give away your family's portion, then you are not the head of the house. You are a man who shirks. Today we decide whether you will continue to be part of our household."
A woman shouted, "Shame him!"
Another voice: "Do it proper. We will not have men taking girls' rings and someone else's bread."
Cedar puffed like a deflating bladder. "You all overreact," he protested. "It's one chicken."
"A chicken in a season of hunger is not one chicken," I said. "It is a promise. It is the difference between a night of sleep that soaks the belly and one that rattles with hunger. You did not keep that promise."
"Caroline—" my mother tried to step forward, but I placed a hand on her wrist.
"No," I told her, not cruelly. "Let the truth happen."
Gillian smirked. "He's a good son. He does as he pleases. If your household cannot look after its own, why make noise?"
The first sound of the punishment was not loud. Keith Carpenter read aloud a ledger of trust: times Cedar had come home drunk; times he had gambled away the ration coupons; times he had left the kids without boots; times he had promised and then given nothing. The list was quiet, meticulous, legal. It was small and devastating.
Cedar sputtered denials like a man flinging dry leaves. "You lie! I didn't—"
"Stop," said Desmond. His voice was quiet, like a rope. "Stand where you are."
The crowd watched like watching rain. The punishment was not a beating. We were not cruel—this is not a revenge tale. The punishment was a stripping of consent. For two long hours we read his deeds for the village, and every neighbor who had suffered from a man like him—men who took more than they gave—came forward with witness. There were tears. There was anger. There were wails as if a bell in each throat had been struck.
Cedar's face moved through stages: smirk, surprise, denial, then a scrub of fear, then the awful slump of being seen. He tried bargaining. "If I give them grain—if I give them money—" his voice trembled.
"Not enough," said Keith. "Not now."
"You will leave the house," Desmond pronounced. "You will give up any claim to household provisions. If you return, you will return as a guest. If you besmirch them again, you will be named to the team and asked to do the hardest works until you learn the price of taking from those who keep you."
"You're making an example," Cedar said, clutching at words like a drowning man. "You're crucifying me for everyone to see!"
"Yes," I said. "Because men like you need to be seen."
Gillian tried to rage then—"Who are you to tell me what to do? He is my son!"—and a hundred women echoed: "Your son stole our season."
They took his gambling coupons and tore them in front of him. They took less than he needed and gave it to the household that had been robbed. They put a list on the wall for him: the hours he would work to make up the social debt; the tasks he must do to be restored. The crowd named him publicly; they put his name under the watch of the team; they marked the path of his exit.
"Beg forgiveness," a woman told him. "Beg forgiveness in front of your mother and your neighbors. Tell us you will never do this again."
"Do you mean it?" I asked, leaning forward. "Do you mean it today, while so many of us are looking at you?"
He knelt then, suddenly, and the sound of his collapse was hollow. He shouted denials at the start, then his voice folded into pleading. "I didn't—I'll change—I'll stop—"
He begged. He cried. He turned red and then pale and then wet-faced. The people around him shifted. Some were angry; some were moved; some spat and called him an idiot, others pressed their palms to their mouths in sympathy. The voices rose in a chorus that felt like a storm.
"Tell her," I said, pointing to Gillian. "Tell her to take no more."
He turned to her. "Mama," he said. "I will not take again."
Gillian's nostrils flared, then she spoke like a woman who had been stripped of illusions: "If you do this again, I choose dignity," she said. "I want no more charity that wounds another family."
They signed a statement—men, women, old—binding him to a public penance. They did not lock him in stocks. They did not beat him. They did something worse for a man used to secrets: they dismantled his license to take. The villagers watched him shrink in the public air, his friends recording his fall by their silence. Children who had watched this spectacle learned lines: there is shame in theft; there is resistance in telling.
Cedar stumbled home then, and people watched him as if they had witnessed a comet. He would not be the same man. He could not be.
Gillian's face changed. She had wanted food; she had found a structure of shame that refused her appetite. She left, not with her head high, but with a burning look that was not for us to interpret.
That public punishment echoed for weeks. People used his name as a lesson—children would shout it when they stole fruit; older men would cite the event in cautionary tales. Cedar's attempt at humiliation was reversed. He would not do it again because the road back from that public unmasking was cold and long.
Justice in a small place is a communal fabric. Once pulled, it reveals the stitches. We had pulled one stain out, and the cloth showed its pattern. Our household slept that night with the roar of voices in our ears, voices that had watched and soothed and condemned. It was ugly and it was true.
The days after were quieter. Cedar did not come home the same. He came with his head lower, and the nights of cards petered into silence. He had been punished in the square, in the place where all things are measured, and that was the worst of the world for a coward: he was now watched.
"I didn't want to humiliate him," I told my grandmother once, when the taste of victory felt odd in my mouth. "But he kept humiliating us."
"He had to learn," she said simply. "People have to see what greed does."
While the public punishment knitted the village into a slow caution, the rest of my life unspooled in the strange mesh of two eras. I held a small business in secret: trading jars of malt milk for schoolbooks, giving a spool of thread to a neighbor in exchange for a chicken bone the children could gnaw. I kept my mall to myself and used it like a warm secret—like a fire under a frozen river.
There was a man who kept walking into my life in small, patient steps. His name was Caspian Roth, a young teacher sent to the fields—one of the urban youngsters who had come to help and stayed. He looked like someone sun softened at the corners: not handsome by fashion, but steady, like a line of rail that runs true.
"You shouldn't go alone to the mountain," he told me once when I went to gather wood. "It's not safe."
"I can handle mice," I said. "Wild pigs are harder."
He laughed. "You're braver than you let on."
We began to walk together sometimes, picking things that either happened to fall in our favor or that we could coax out of the ground. He was quiet but not shut; patient, not bored. He read the way the wind moved through the grass and used phrases like "we'll see" when the seasons made plans neither of us had considered.
"What will you do," he asked one evening as we sat on the threshing floor, "when the city calls you again? Or when you finish school?"
I chewed a piece of dried bread. "I'll see what keeps me," I said. "Right now I am building a small life. I don't like the word 'settle.' I like the word 'choose.'"
"Will you choose me?" he asked in that stupid, nervous way men do when they risk being honest.
We had tea—small, hot cups that left fingerprints on our palms. I held out my hand, and he took it. "We'll do a trial period," I joked, because some deals needed terms. He said, "I'll take whatever time you give me."
And so we were careful, the two of us, like new seeds. We gave small proofs: a bowl of rice, a borrowed sweater, a hand at dawn. His family came once: a stern man with a softer woman by his side. They brought gifts that fit into no mall or root cellar: a watch that ticked like the measured heart of a machine, a Mayer of class I could not own and did not have to. I gave them our best: a braced honesty and a cooked dish that did not require tickets.
Meanwhile the world outside tightened. The black market grew cautious; men who once traded flour for favors now looked over shoulders. My mall felt smaller sometimes because the things I wanted to move could not move in the fear. I learned to be patient. I learned to love the small: a child's laugh, the pattern a tooth leaves in soup, the way Caspian's hand fit in mine when we walked the long road home.
There were other dramas. A woman named Bridget Crowley—sharp and unashamed—started carrying on with my father, and for a while she was the louder bird in Cedar's life. She seemed to think she had rights because she had taken what a man offered. When Cedar left with her, I thought the house might breathe, but he came back and his old habits returned until the square taught them both a lesson.
Bridget would later get what public eyes dish out when a different thread came loose: she tried to profit from the same gossip that had raised her up. But that story deserves a day and a stage of its own.
I also made myself dangerous in ordinary ways. I taught Austin how to use the little gifts from the mall to mend a trouser, to barter, to plan. I fed the small ones with the softest things—canned milk in winter—and I taught them songs that belonged to city buses and modern children's programs, odd melodies that made the little ones stare like they had seen something angelic. It was my tenderness to them that stitched me to the future.
The years moved. I learned the rhythms of a village that lived by seasons and the streetlights of a modern heart inside me. I taught myself to not brag about the mall because people became greedy when told of treasure. Some nights I dreamed of an elevator and of fluorescent advertising, and then I woke and took a freshly brewed cup of tea to my grandmother. Her face, with its thin stars of smile, reminded me of my true wealth.
Caspian and I kept our small contract in the shape of favors and modest promises. We called it "trial," but the word tasted hopeful. The village let us be. They were most content when hearts made proper offerings and no one stole another's bowl.
There were terrible days too. Once a rumor spread about me—someone said I had taken a chicken without paying, then spread that I had refused the team; that I had cheated on the ration. The rumor was nothing and everything. My name swam in the mouths of those quick to judge. I found the woman who had started it and said one honest thing:
"Let the truth be true," I told her. "You may speak, but the truth is heavier than your rumor. It will sink your words if you set it in place."
She did not like my answer. She was the type to eat gossip like sugar. But the truth did what truth does: after the first shock, it settled, and people forgot the rumor because it had no body.
That is how I kept living: small truths, small lies, and a mall that hummed under my skin like a secret engine. The village learned to lean on me for small miracles: a bandage, an extra bowl, a sugar crumb when the winter was too long. The mall was my heart's lever, but I used it gently.
"Are you happy?" Caspian asked once, in the middle of a rainy night when the same years had passed and I had grown into a woman who had returned to a girl. He asked like a man who had seen too many things and still believed in asking.
"I am," I said. "I am alive. I get to fix things now."
He kissed my forehead then, very softly, like a policeman planting a pin on a map. The village slept. The mall rested.
Years later, when the world changed outside in ways both monstrous and fine, I kept the mall and kept my secrets. I used its strange presence to bend small things toward those I loved and to pull cold winters into warm mornings. I learned to cook for joy and to keep my people's shame out of the square. I watched men like Cedar learn a new shape of humanity, not because I sought revenge but because life gives lessons in harsh places.
People always ask me if I ever went back to the late twenty-first-century life I came from—to the office, the apps, the city traffic. I always smile. "No," I tell them. "I traded a mall of things for a world of people. You can have all the screens and all the noise. I keep what matters."
People think I'm heroic when I say it. I'm not. I'm practical. I used what I had and I kept my hand honest. In the end my story is not about a mall in a pocket or a shoe that hit my face. It is about how a girl decided to use a second chance to feed a family, to correct a man who would take what he pleased, and to give herself the chance to be loved. The rest falls into small pieces: bread, laughter, a watch given by a man who found his way back to decency.
"Caroline," Caspian said once, reading my face, "what is the one thing you will always keep from that mall?"
I thought of the white bun that first appeared when I believed for the first time that chance could be mine. "The bun," I said. "And the watch, and a little tin of coffee that tastes like a city. But mostly a habit: to carry what I can back to home, not forward to myself."
He put his hand on mine. "Then don't forget to let the space be a place, and not just a pocket," he whispered.
"I won't," I promised.
And I kept the promise. I kept the mall for the village and for the small circle of people who made a life with me. I kept the shame of one man in the square as an example. I kept Caspian's hand. I kept everything I could carry.
That is my story. It begins with a falling shoe in a mall, and it becomes a life that is human. If you look closely at the little things I left behind—the tin of coffee, the chicken bone in a quiet jar, a cheap watch that still ticks—you will find a laugh, a small theft, a big repair, and a girl who chose to take care.
The End
— Thank you for reading —