Face-Slapping14 min read
A Week, a Warehouse, and a Thousand Stitches
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I woke to sun on glass and the sharp, distant scream of brakes that never caught up.
"Watch the children," someone shouted. "Move them—now!"
"I can't!" a teacher cried. "There's a car—"
The red sports car came like a dare. I still smelled hot rubber in my dream. Then a black sedan slammed out in front of it, metal screaming; the world folded into a staccato silence. When I blinked, I was on a hospital bed, my arms wrapped, my skin a map of pain.
"You're alive," the voice said—flat, impossibly calm. "Temporary binding: one week."
"Who—?" I tried to reach for the voice, for a face, for anything that wasn't wet and heavy and wrong.
"I'm TianStar-01. Host detected. Binding initiated for seven days. Companion mode active."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "What are you—"
"Good deeds matter," it said. "You were saved. You may finish certain tasks. Complete the tasks and a new life will open in a parallel realm called the Nine Provinces."
"Parallel—what?" I laughed once, a small, watery thing. "You can't be for real."
"You can be," TianStar-01 said. "Task one: leave the hospital, rent a warehouse, bind the warehouse to your consciousness with a seal. A deposit of ten thousand has been transferred."
A message beeped on the phone someone had tied to my wrist. Ten thousand, clear as if someone dropped gold into my palms.
"Okay," I breathed. "Let's gamble."
I was Claudia Bonner then: a bright mouthed med student, or had been—someone who had learned the shape of organs and the sharp syllables of sutures. My life had been an open path until metal and misfortune folded it away. My arms were ruined; the prognosis soft as sand. I would die sooner than I wanted in the town I knew, but a voice promised one week and a door to somewhere else. The bargain sounded insane. I nodded.
"Send the first task," I told the voice, and my heart beat like it was trying to get out.
"You must rent a warehouse and be bound within. Binding method: imprint with seal."
A wooden stamp and ink appeared on the bedside tray like a conjurer's trick. In one breath I pressed the seal to the paper and the room siphoned air; for a hot, dizzy second everything rebalanced. When the white of the world cleared, I was standing in a place that wasn't the hospital: a warehouse that opened into a wild, impossible little farm with a brook that spouted water in controlled fountains, irrigating rows of neat plots.
"I can plant food," I whispered. "I can—"
"TianStar-01: Task complete. New task: spend one million yuan within three days."
"One million?" My laugh broke. "That's not a task. That's arson."
"You have resources. Spend."
I had spent lifetimes budgeting for student loans, not for survival in a fantasy I didn't understand. But the system had given me money, and momentum felt better than waiting.
"Fine," I said, with a stubbornness I wore like armor. "I'll spend."
I bought crates. I bought engines. I filled the warehouse with food and medicine, with warm winter quilts and jars of sugar, with boxes of tools: a thousand small things that meant survival. I bought a sewing machine, then five, then seven. I bought a dozen bicycles and ten sewing frames. I bought wells—and the parts to dig them. The system sent receipts that made the hospital bill look like pocket change. Each time the TianStar voice checked in: "Task progress?"
"Completed," I lied sometimes, and sometimes I told the truth. I spent until the numbers blurred and my accounts were empty and my phone still pinged with the system's cool encouragements: "Task two activated. Spend five million in five days."
"God," I said to no one. "Fine."
When I finally slept on my warehouse floor, the ceiling a blank that could hold any sky, I thought of the black car and the kids at the crosswalk. I thought of the woman who had raised me—my foster mother, a bruised-voiced veteran who taught me how to stay standing. I thought about what it meant to be worth something because I had been allowed to hurt, then helped.
Two days later, the ride from the hospital became a deliberate exit. I told the nurses I was leaving against orders; I pressed an EC card into a clerk's hand and asked him to stop asking.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, and I kept my eyes dry.
The warehouse became my cathedral. It had a side room with a simple bed, and the space beyond it reached into a sunlit yard, an impossible oasis in the middle of a rented industrial zone. I drank coffee and planned. I thought of those dreams that had followed me for nights: a grey village with hungry people and work that dug the marrow out of days. I didn't know why the system had given me that dream, but I kept the faces in my chest like a prayer.
When my phone pinged, the voice said, "Task three: spend one million in one day."
"Are you making fun of me?" I snapped.
"Spend."
So I did what I do when faced with impossible—organized. I drove into the city and walked through wholesale markets like a woman in a heist movie. I bought sacks and sacks of rice. I bought powdered milk, sewing thread, bolts of cotton. I paid for an entire pallet of antibiotics, for a box of scalpels, for kitchenware in sets that would feed an army. Every time a vendor blinked, I added another crate.
"You're buying a lot," a manager said, hands fanning the invoice.
"That's the point," I said.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because I'm stupid and I'm brave," I said. "Also I'm leaving my life behind."
She handed over more boxes like she was bribed by my insistence. She didn't know the half of it.
By the time I hit the end of that fevered spree, my warehouse was a small city of goods. There were rows of quilts, stacks of canned meat, towers of fertilizer, heaps of bottles of disinfectant. I had set aside a room: shelves for medicine, a cabinet for bandages, a corner for a tiny medical kit. Some of the items made me clench: jars of antiseptic meant to save a child's broken leg. Money had become a resource, not a measure of worth.
When the TianStar told me I had completed the week's tasks and a portal would open, I expected fireworks. I expected a vanishing or a ribbon. Instead I woke on a night chilled by the kind of wind that comes from older places and found myself in the skin of another woman.
"My name," the system informed me, "is now yours by proxy."
I looked into a cracked mirror set on a wooden table in a ramshackle house. The face that stared back had my cheekbones but a worn softness. Her name would be used now in this place: Claudia Bonner remained me; the body I inhabited belonged here, in the Nine Provinces. Around me things smelled of woodsmoke and river mud. Outside, someone called, "Grandpa, come eat!"
The life I stepped into was smaller in coin but louder in song. There were two bedrooms in the house and one small child who watched me with eyes like questions: Easton Leone, three and sharp as a new twig.
"Are you my aunt?" he asked the second night I woke.
"Yes," I said, and I meant it.
Easton—his laugh clogged the harshness of my hospital nights. He was a skinny thing at first, blankets thin, clothes patched. He had been called many names in the months before I arrived: not hungry, not healthy. People had shrugged. That would change.
"How long will you stay?" he asked one night as I tucked him into a still-soft bed.
"Long enough to make stew," I promised. "Long enough to teach you to read the clouds."
He beamed like someone had told the sun to reign over him alone.
"Do you want to leave with me?" I asked him one afternoon when the courtyard smelled of wood ash.
Easton nodded, sharp as a child's honesty. "Yes. I want to live with you forever."
"If forever is too much," I said, "we'll take it one day at a time. I've got a world of resources in a warehouse. We'll make this a house, not a room."
We had to move fast. The village demands were blunt: a notice from the higher-ups said everyone had to serve and be sent to rural projects, and some officials rewarded obedience and punished defiance. I learned the truth of power here—an economy of favors, half-legal trades, and rumor. That is why I kept the warehouse secret. That is why, when voices suggested I wouldn't last, I had no patience for it.
"You're not allowed a child," a woman once said to me, lounging in the yard.
"And who made you the law?" I asked, and the slap of my palm to her cheek surprised us both.
The woman was Rosa Oliveira—curt, coarse, married into the family where Easton had been raised. She favored a loud manner and a mean tongue and had the habit of shaping ignorance into ordinance.
"You hit me!" she shrieked.
"I did," I said. "You hurt a child. I won't have it."
That was the first of many times that the thorny tendrils of village life caught at my skirts. I had been gentle when I could, fierce when I must. I found allies: Grayson Dennis, the team leader who smelled faintly of coal and had a laugh that softened; Irene Cooper, the woman with a throat made for gossip and hands made for hospitality; Nathan Evans and Keith Gauthier, lads with practical hands who helped move wood; Genevieve Cash, who took to loom and spinning wheel like a bird to sky.
We cleared my small field. I learned to swing a sickle and to mend a fence; I taught Easton how to string the small beads his cousin used to pretend they were fish. The warehouse's magic made winter manageable; the sewing machines made clothing. We set up a small workshop and a plan.
"Claudia," Grayson said one evening as frost edged the yard, "what you want to do about cloth? You have more than currency—you have knowledge."
"I want to make fabric," I said. "Real cotton, woven by hands here. We make it, we sell it to the town, we bring goods in, we distribute benefits to the village. It becomes a shared thing."
"You're dreaming," someone said.
"Dreams are often very loud where I come from," I told them. "Help me make loud things useful."
We began with one bale of cotton I had smuggled in inside the warehouse's space. We cleaned it, carded it, spun yarn, and set up a primitive loom. Genevieve proved to be a born master; her fingers made the thread sing. We recruited women, men, neighbors. We paid in grain and in wages. We promised honest accounting. People came.
It wasn't all gratitude. A woman I had never warmed to—one who returned from the city many times and threw her arrogance like a cloak—confronted me in the courtyard as we prepared to start the first dye vats.
"You're playing at wealth," she sneered. "You'll ruin the village with city tricks."
"Is it stealing to keep your people fed?" I asked.
"You picked your people," she snarled. "You chose your crew."
"It is my right to choose competence over chaos," I said. "If you wish to be considered, learn the work. Otherwise move aside."
She spat, and the crowd grew uncomfortable. She left, but the seed of discontent was planted.
And then came the public shaming that would, in every corner of the valley, become a day they replayed like a cautionary tale.
We had been invited to a harvest gathering at the communal shed—those events where the town ate, the elders spoke, and everyone kept warm by gossip. It was the same place where I had brought Easton to meet Grayson and where I had called neighbors to look at the first bolt of our cotton cloth.
Rosa Oliveira appeared at the edge of the crowd, lips primed with a rumor she had been practicing. Her face carried that insolence that thinks the world owes it balance.
"You shouldn't have taken that child," she said loudly, when she stepped into my light. "You have no right. You are a city woman, a stranger, you live like you're above us. This house will bring trouble."
"You're the one who beat him," I said. "Where were you when he was skinny and pale?"
She clicked her tongue. "That's not true. I have witnesses."
I had Easton by the hand. I had Grayson and Irene in the crowd. I had the seamstresses and the men who hauled timber. The afternoon seemed to tighten like a wire.
"Say it then," Rosa said, loud, looking for allies.
"I will," I said. "Easton, tell them what you remember."
The little boy held my hand like a pledge and said, in a voice that was small and startling: "She pushed me to sweep and called me a thief. She hid my food. She—" his voice broke "—she said I was worth nothing."
There was a collective sound: the village inhaled. Rosa's face was the first color to shift. Where she had been loud and certain, she blinked.
"No, that's not—" she began.
"What's not?" I asked, and I let my voice be calm like the edge of a blade. "Rosa, did you withhold his food?"
"I—" she spluttered. "I fed him when I fed him. I was worried."
"About what? That he'd take your daughter's share?" I asked. "Tell the truth. Or don't."
She stepped back. "You can't talk to me that way," she said, scanning the crowd for rescue.
I had prepared for this. I called out names. "Grayson, you who once saw the scraps cut; Irene, you who bought the milk for the boy; Nathan, tell them how I found the boy's clothes."
"She took the apples down by the shed," Irene said softly. "I didn't think—"
"She told me to give the boy sugar, but then kept the box," said a woman from the back. "I thought it was small, but now that I hear—"
The murmurs coalesced. Witnesses surfaced like frogs in a pond. Rosa's mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. For a beat, she wore the expression of someone who had always acted like a king but hadn't expected anyone to notice.
"Turn on your phone, everyone," I said quietly.
Someone did. Others did. A dozen phones up like small lit lanterns. Not for video this time—this was older: the town had a ledger kept by Grayson, notes taken down by teachers and neighbors. People started to testify: the tiny theft of food, the thump of a hand, the hiding of shoes. The evidence stacked like plates.
Rosa's smile collapsed. Her shoulders trembled. She had gone from smug to flustered to desperate inside the span of my breath.
"No!" she cried suddenly. "No! You can't—these are lies—"
"They are not lies," Irene said. "We were ashamed to speak. She threatened us if we told."
"What do you want?" Rosa hissed. "You can't take away my family!"
"This isn't about taking anything," I said. "It's about who protects a child."
The crowd leaned in. The voices rose.
"Rosa," Grayson said, "we are a village. We take care of our own. If a neighbor takes, we complain. If a neighbor beats, we judge. You are told to be better."
Rosa's face unglued. The old arrogance cracked into raw terror. She tried to deny. "You're lying! You're all lying! He cried because he saw the cat! He—"
"Enough." I stepped forward. "You will make amends. You will stand in front of these people and apologize."
"Apologize? For what?" she spat.
"For taking an orphan's scraps," I said. "For calling him worthless. For scaring a child into thinking he's nothing."
The crowd watched. Rosa's eyes darted for any sign of a rescuer. There was none. The moment she'd expected—some patriarch to defend her—did not come. She looked small under the sky, a woman who had full certainty until the world told her she was not.
"Get on your knees," I told her.
There was a gasp. The word was ugly and old. Kneeling had a meaning in this land; but shame had another, and sometimes it was necessary.
She refused.
"Do it," I said. "Do it and say it in front of them."
Rosa spat again, then dropped to her knees as if gravity had given up being polite. Her hands dug into straw. For the first time she was small in a public place.
"Please—" she began, voice raw. "Please—"
"Apologize," I said. "Name what you did."
She swallowed. "I—I'm sorry—I'm sorry I—" The words were brittle at first, then unspooled. "I'm sorry I hid his food. I'm sorry I punished him. I'm sorry I called him a thief and a beggar. I'm sorry I made him afraid."
The crowd watched as she went from defiance to confession. Her voice shook into denial one last time—"I'm not like that!"—and then into collapse. She started to cry in a way that wasn't theatrical, but honest: the sound of someone realizing she'd been small and mean and had to live with the shape of what she'd done.
"Do you beg?" I asked.
She looked up at me, eyes rimmed red and furious and frightened. "Please," she said. "Please, I beg you. Don't take his life away."
There was a silence like the inhale before rain.
"This isn't about vengeance," I said. "This is about learning."
Rosa's pleas became a spectacle. Some people shook their heads; others filmed. Phones buzzed, then the village square filled with a herd of recording lights. Suddenly we were no longer only ourselves; we were a story.
"Get up," I told Rosa. "Get up and help. She lifted herself like someone who had learned to carry more than her share."
She staggered and turned to Easton. The child looked at her as if measuring the rawness of this moment. Easton said, in a whisper only for her ear, "Will you be better?"
"I will," she said, and no one trusted the words—but she said them.
The crowd reacted in fractured ways. Some clapped slowly, as if applause could stitch what had been torn; others whispered; a few scoffed. People recorded on phones and older women wiped their eyes, some with pity, many with the satisfaction of a community correcting itself. Grayson put a hand on my shoulder, quiet.
Afterwards, when people drifted back to their lives, the village had a new rhythm. Rosa worked that week in the fields that bordered my new house. She fetched water for the newborn we cared for and fed soup to children she had once scorned. The punishment was not spectacle alone; it rippled into service. She would never again be the petty queen who hid food. That, to me, counted.
After that day our cloth workshops expanded. Orders came from the town supply office. We processed the cotton into bolts of cloth, into shirts, into quilts. I signed ledgers and balanced accounts that felt like prayers. The TianStar was a quiet voice now, giving prompts and ticking away the days of my borrowed life. Easton grew rounder under my care. Genevieve's looms sang like friends.
We created a system: a co-op with clear accounting. Grayson secured the little documents that let us sell as a village-run cooperative. We re-routed money into seed sales, into a small library for children, into a community well. For the first time the adults I had seen in my recurring dreams—the ones with cheeks hollowed by hunger—had a way to change.
There were other storms. In a winter the sky heaved and threw snow like a thrown cloth, roofs sagged, and a small house fell inward. We dug out an old couple, their faces pinched with cold. We built them a new shelter together; Easton gave them the warmest scarf from our store. Another day a fever spread and my old hospital knowledge stitched a sick man back to life. People began to lean on me as I had longed to be leaned upon.
"Why did you help us?" Easton asked once, his small hand curled in mine as we emptied a crate of thread.
"Because I remember being helped," I said. "And because I was given a second chance."
"You miss your old home?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "But this is my work now. My life now is like a woven thing—threads from everywhere stitched together."
The TianStar time kept ticking. The system had promised that after my week of tasks, it would send me across, and my new life would begin; here, in the Nine Provinces, my days stretched with the careful expansion of looms and wells. The TianStar's seven days had become an open-ended contract. I had been given a warehouse, a voice, money, and one week—then a life that unfolded in the shape of repair and devotion.
Months passed—no, that old phrase is a lazy scaffold; let me show it, not sum it. One morning a caravan came with orders. "Claudia Bonner," the town manager said, eyes flicking first to me then to the bolts of cloth "—your cloth sells good in town. The mayor asked if you can supply three thousand pieces for factory workers."
"Yes," I said. "We can. We will."
"How fast?" she asked.
"As fast as our hands can move," I said, and my team laughed. "Faster than they think."
We shipped the cloth and the men who had called me a strange city woman now called me by name with a tone that had become fond. We taught seamstresses to cut, to mark, to pattern; we planted a small orchard behind the house; we nailed a small wooden sign over our shop: CO-OP WEAVERS.
When the time came for me to think of endgames—a thought the TianStar hammered with its mechanical punctuality—I made a choice. I could go back to my other body, to the hospital and the life that had been cut by a wheel and a mistake; or I could accept this skin and this country and this small child's laughter as my true second.
One night I lay beside Easton, his breath soft against the pillow. I thought of the seal I had stamped the first day and the warehouse I had clasped like a promise. I thought of the woman on her knees and of the cloth that warmed so many.
The TianStar chimed. "Seven days elapsed. Binding terminated."
I had been given a week, then a string of many more, then the right to choose.
"I choose this," I told the empty room. "Not because I'm punished or because I'm afraid, but because I have work and a child and more to be."
If the system heard choice—not a program but a heart—it did not say. It fell silent like a machine that had done its job. The only answer I received was the hiss of the stove and the even breathing of the child I had found and kept.
In the end I did not take a tidy exit. I wound a small brass clock I found in the warehouse—the one that had been left in my first fevered spends—and set it on my shelf. "Tick," it said, soft. "Tock." The sound threaded through the room like a reminder.
"Time," I told Easton the next morning, as we set a bowl of porridge before him, "is a thing we make and spend and stitch up. When people ask why you look at me like I'm the whole world, tell them this: we build lives, not by accident, but by how we place the thread."
He shoved a spoon of porridge into his mouth, eyes wide. "Will you teach me to sew?"
"Yes," I said. "And to read maps and fix roofs and bake bread. And when you are old enough, I will show you the clock and say, 'Wind this. Every day start with a little click.'"
Years later, long after my scar had become a thin line on my arm, children in the village would run past the workshop, some with cloth tucked under their arms, some with a debt to repay with work. They would glance up at the little brass clock in my window and remember the day the woman in the town square made a woman kneel and made a village speak.
"Claudia," Easton would say, handing me a pair of mittens he had sewn, "we're stitched."
"Yes," I would answer. "We are stitched—like everything else that matters."
The End
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