Face-Slapping13 min read
Dawn at the Orphanage: A Watch, a Chain, and the Last Dance
ButterPicks14 views
I remember the first time Director Giuseppe Crawford smiled at me. He stood at the head of the dining hall like a shepherd, pale-suited, gentle-voiced, his smile making everyone younger and smaller, his praise like sunlight.
"I have always wanted the best for you children," he would say, patting hair, handing out the small gifts that marked birthday years. "You are my family."
Everyone called him "Director." Some kids called him "Director Dad." I called him the man who taught me to pronounce "grace" and "dignity" and who made us hold our forks the right way. I, Annabelle Choi, had been at the Aster Hill Home so long I couldn't name a life before it.
Keilani Owens left three months ago in a bustle of tissue-paper smiles. "They've found me a good family," she whispered to me the night before she left, hands folded as if praying. We hugged on the dormitory steps, and she pressed a cold finger into my palm long enough to promise we'd write.
Yet the night I found her, she was chained to a metal ring and hollow-eyed.
"You left a door unlocked," I said to the cold metal, not knowing what else to say. My hands trembled on the rusted knob.
"Annabelle? Is that you?" Keilani's voice was thin, far away. It shouldn't have been human; she looked like someone the hospital had given up on. Her dress was white once; now it had the gray scent of old rooms and bad nights. Her stomach was large, round like someone had stored a secret under her ribs.
"Keilani!" I pushed through and she lunged for me, pulling me toward her but the chain yanked her back with a clank. Her eyes had gone flat.
"Don't—" she sobbed. "Don't call the Director. He'll—"
A man's voice came down the corridor, soft and casual. "Ah. The door was unlocked. Shame. One should be careful, my children."
Giuseppe Crawford's smile disappeared in a second. It became something close to a grin carved by knives. "You look so good on that chain," he said to Keilani. "It suits you, honestly."
"You're a monster," Keilani spat. "You sold us."
He puffed. "Sell? I gave you futures. I fed you, I taught you." He walked around the room, hands behind his back like a man admiring an orchard. "Some clients have particular tastes, Keilani. We supply what the market desires."
I remember covering my mouth so hard I tasted iron. "Market," I breathed.
He laughed, a sound that didn't match his face. "Oh, don't be melodramatic. You're an asset. That's all."
I crawled into the wardrobe because Keilani shoved me there. I could see through the slat the way he undid his tie and the way men could change their faces to something that wasn't for children to know.
"Keilani," I mouthed through the wardrobe's crack, "what happened? You were supposed to go to a good home."
"It was a home," she whispered back, the word as brittle as dried leaves. "A house of rich tastes. They 'kept' me. They paid. Director said he was helping." Her breath left a small cloud in the dark.
Outside, his voice gave orders with a velvet edge. "Keep her comfortable enough to please the client. If she's damaged, we fix her. If she gets pregnant, we keep it secret until it's... manageable."
I had always accepted the orphanage's rules. Boys and girls were trained separately, "for their own good." We were told not to fall in love; it was the kind of rule that was explained in gentle lectures that left no room to ask why.
When I darted out after the man left with a car smell, Keilani pushed me from the shadows and whispered a plan. "Hide. Don’t tell him you saw me. Gather information."
"Tell someone!" I insisted.
"No," she hissed. "He has friends. He has papers. He blackmails. He... he is the one who sends the photos."
Her words knit together the small strangenesses we'd all felt over the years: the odd selection of who was chosen for adoptions, the people who visited that always wore the same watch, the way the Director would cough when a certain child's score didn't look promising.
We began to map the lie.
"You believe me?" Keilani asked that first night, voice a ghost.
"I believe you," I said.
That was when everything started breaking.
"Who did this to you?" I demanded the next day when I had finally freed her enough for her to tell me a story that tasted of old bruises.
"It wasn't only buyers," Keilani said. "They pick us, they feed us, make us pretty. Then when we disappoint them, they send us back... or worse. Director Giuseppe keeps records. Profiles. Prices."
Down in the basement, she had watched the people who came and the faces of those who came—rich men who didn't look at eyes, only at the white of a neck or the length of a calf. "They take things. They never take anything but what they can sell."
"Why were you brought back?" I asked.
"Because one man said I had been... tainted. He was displeased." She touched her belly like it was both a life and a wound. "He paid, then said he had been given the wrong thing."
"He said that?" I barked. "Him? The Director?"
Keilani nodded, the motion a small, exhausted thing. "He needed a punishment."
I tried to see if the teachers knew. Margot Bacon—Margot was always poised, a woman who taught us to place our hands like swans, to make our heads look noble. I had once thought of her as a second mother.
"Margot," I tried a hundred times in a hundred different ways, "they lied about Keilani."
"What do you mean, Annabelle?" she would say, tilting her head, and I would see her smile sag just enough to worry me. People who have kept secrets for a long time learned to smile without moving the eyes.
The orphanage's rules began to look more like teeth.
We discovered small things together. Hugo Larsson—the boy with the shock of wind-tousled hair who could make a coin disappear and pull a laugh from anyone—started watching, too. He had always been the sort to prank and leap, but under his pranks there was a sense of steadiness that kept coming back.
"Annabelle," Hugo said one evening while we sat under the old oak, "you couldn't have been the only one. The Director keeps lists, right? Records. Where?"
"In his office," I said. "He goes through papers sometimes in the evening."
"And the guards?"
"Two of them. Emmett tends to joke, Henry keeps his face like a closed book. Emmett laughs too easily."
Hugo smirked. "Then let's stir the pot. A good illusion requires misdirection. We make noise where it matters."
We plotted like children do when they think a grown-up game is possible to win: with borrowed courage and a faith so simple it acts like armor. We had a plan to get help—call the police from the village shop, a place with a red phone I had once seen through the bus window. I bartered my watch for those ten minutes on a payphone. It was the watch Giuseppe had gifted me when I turned fifteen: a neat little thing with a red face. That watch would become my lifeline.
"Don't be ridiculous," some kids sneered when we told them. "Giuseppe would never—"
"—Be a seller? He'd never do that?" Hugo finished. He looked at me like the truth was already lodged in his throat. "Then we have work to do."
We moved in small stages. Hugo studied the guards' rounds. He learned the timing of the trash truck. He slipped a laxative into the stew for Emmett to deliver to the guardroom—an old joke, but tonight we needed bodies to move differently. The guard left his post to find absolution in the latrine. Henry stayed close, always close, but a plan can become momentum if enough people breathe with it.
We fed Emmett, watched him stagger to the latrine, and then, when Emmett doubled over, we took the keys. The keys were small, brass, heavy with a hundred doors. My fingers closed around them like a promise.
"Annabelle—go!" Hugo hissed. "Call. Now."
I ran. My watch felt like a heart.
The number took. Someone at the other end said the right thing. "This is the county police. Where are you?"
"There's a man—Director Giuseppe Crawford—he's trafficking children—" My voice was thin as thread but I tied it into tight knots. "We are at Aster Hill Home, the old road, the east gate... Please—"
They said they'd dispatch; a voice said it would take time. They asked for a name. I gave them ours and then—because I had seen deception in a face that used to smile—I added, "We cannot trust the people inside. They will lie."
When I got back, the dining hall was already preparing for the reveal we forced. Hugo had told the others it would be a feast, that the Director would charm the city men, that it would be the night to show gratitude. It was a trap in the kindest sense.
I clutched the keys. We moved like a current toward the kitchen, toward the teacher's offices. The plan was ugly and simple: feed the staff something that would lay them low without killing them, then lock the doors and drag them into the open. We would pull off their masks.
Dinner started and plates were pushed. Hugo gave a grin and ate with everyone. I sat at the far end watching. Margot, warm as ever in her silk scarf, sat next to the Director. He lifted a glass and spoke like a man who had not once done anything ugly.
"These children are my life," he said, tone like a sermon. "I thank everyone who helps me."
A portion was set aside; I had watched Hugo create a diversion and replace spoons, and in the hour when laughter rose like steam, the spices did their work.
"It’s working," Hugo mouthed later, when the smiles began to thin into something else. "Be ready."
The first person to slump was Henry, the thinner guard. He crashed into the table with a metallic clang. Someone laughed, thinking it a joke. Then Emmett's face went green. Then Margot's hand went to her mouth with a sudden weakness not befitting a teacher.
"What's wrong?" Laura Teixeira demanded, standing—the girl who had once been sharp with me, who now wore the bravado of someone trying to be brave. She had been a voice for the Director; now, seeing the fear, she moved like a woman half made of shame and half made of steel.
The chaos was the misdirection. People were moving where we wanted them to move. Hugo was like a conductor. Over the clamor we moved. A small group seized the injured guards, tied them. Another pried open the office with a stolen key. I went straight to the Director’s inner room.
Inside it smelled like lemon and paper. Files stacked like a confession. Photos. Airline tickets. Names and prices. Notes in a steady, small hand—"preferred client," "white hair, blue eyes," "condition: young and unblemished."
My hand shook so violently I could hardly read.
"These are his receipts," I whispered, and then I was not whispering anymore. "These prove he sold us."
We burst into the courtyard with the files like flags. The Director had been paced against the wall, face flushed with early panic that he tried to hide with practiced gentleness.
"You children should not be doing this," he said. His voice still tried to soothe, but the edges were frayed.
"How many times did you sell us?" I asked. "How many times did you sell lives like objects?"
The siren in the distance made a new kind of sound for me—the sound that signaled adults breaking through deception. People gathered. The guards were out cold. Food lay in bowls. We held up the documents and the photographs like a verdict.
"These are mine," Giuseppe sneered suddenly, his composure gone. "You don't understand economics. You don't understand survival. I built Aster Hill. I fed you. I housed you."
"Then why the chains below?" Keilani cried. "Why my child—"
"That child will not be lost to me," he interrupted fiercely. "You'll not make me beg."
We handed the files to the first officers to arrive. Nearby, a local news crew pulled up—someone had called. The courtyard filled with neighbors, with shocked-town faces and the bright, curious phones of strangers. The public had come for a spectacle.
What followed next—the punishment—was neither short nor kind to a man who had imagined himself untouchable.
The public unveiling of Giuseppe Crawford was not merely arrest. It was a stripping of stage props and social masks in front of a gathering that had been swept from complacency into fury.
"Name?" the lead officer said. He acted as if he had been waiting. "Giuseppe Crawford. You are under arrest for human trafficking and multiple counts of abduction and exploitation."
Giuseppe's smug smile thinned. "You are mistaken. There are... there are misunderstandings," he began.
"Misunderstandings?" a woman from the village shouted. "How many children did you sell?"
"You won't shame me with your words!" he spat, but his voice cracked under the chorus of the crowd. Phones flashed. The first officer read the charges aloud like a sermon of law. People leaned forward as if clasping the air could stop history from happening.
Then it began—those who had believed him, and those who had been harmed, took their turns.
Hugo, who had fallen with a bullet in his chest earlier when things had collapsed into gunfire, lay off to the side in an ambulance tent. I held his hand and had seen the cruelty physically. Keilani, hair still braided badly, yet with bright eyes, stepped forward.
"You put chains on my sister," she said, never taking her eyes from him. "You promised futures and delivered cages."
Her voice unrolled across the space. A small murmur became a roar. "You told us you built a family," an old woman said, pointing at Giuseppe with a thumb like a weapon. "You built a slaughterhouse."
Giuseppe shifted, airing a sudden paranoia. He tried to explain, then to beg; then to yell. His reactions changed in clear steps—first the surprised pity he had often feigned, then a quivering fury at being discovered, then an attempt to smear those who'd accused him, then an implosion.
"You're lying, you're all liars!" he screamed when a former adoptive client—an elegant man who had once signed documents at Giuseppe’s desk—came forward, palms open, and threw documents on the ground: receipts, transfers, ledger pages addressed to offshore accounts. "You were complicit too," the client said, the voice flat as a verdict. "I thought I was buying beauty. I was buying misery."
The crowd around us listened like judges. "You fed us! You clothed us!" someone cried, and others echoed. "You made us perform! You taught us to smile and say thank you!"
"How many children did you send?" a reporter asked, microphone pushed toward his beet-red face. He hemmed and hawed, but photographs pinned next to his name—faces of children—told more than he could have.
His demeanor collapsed. "I never wanted—" he began, but the words made no sense in the drizzle of outrage. People condemned him out loud. Some filmed. Some applauded. Some spat. Some covered their children's ears.
The spectacle hardened into a punishment the law would enforce: Giuseppe was paraded in uniformed cuffs through the courtyard. A reporter read aloud price lists and transactions. Citizens who had once sat politely in his fundraising dinners told their stories of being lied to. People brought forward keepsakes: toys, dresses, notes, things the Director had kept as trophies. Each item became a small coffin for his lies.
I watched Giuseppe's face change: first the calm con artist, then the self-righteous father, then the enraged beast, then the pleading man who tried to bargain for legacy. "Arrest me," he begged at one point, "but remember—I've given you what you could not have gotten on your own."
"You gave us cages," Keilani answered. "You gave us a price."
It wasn't just legal punishment. The public's judgment was worse to him than sentences could be: people spat at him, neighbors recorded his pleas and uploaded them. An old woman slapped his face with the flat of her hand, right there, in public, and someone laughed and someone sobbed. Children he had once coaxed into smiles now hissed at him like small, righteous vipers.
At the station later, under fluorescent light, they booked him. He went from suavely composed to a man who had no allies left in moments—his carefully curated network revealed as bribed escorts, excuse-makers, and those too ashamed to testify. The village bartered gossip into testimony; we handed his secrets to those who could transform them into evidence.
Inside the courtroom weeks later—a punishment made public in the true legal sense—every count was read with the same slow, mechanical grace. The prosecutors played the files that had been found in his office: ledger pages, airline manifests, messages with code words. Witness after witness told the story. Parents of children who had vanished years before came forward. The camera crews packed the gallery.
When the judge finally read the sentence, Giuseppe's reaction was an arc of the soul collapsing. He had expected clever escape—money bought doors. But the exposure had been complete. The judge's gavel sounded like a final chord on a ruined instrument.
"You're convicted of human trafficking and complicity in abduction," the judge announced. "You are hereby sentenced to twenty-five years."
Giuseppe's face flushed, then whitened. He looked toward the crowd of survivors and for a moment tried to make his expression one of apology, of bewildered repentance. Then he lunged into denial, then accusation—then another slow crumple.
"Please," he sobbed at one point in court, voice cracking, "I did it for them."
"For who?" a mother shouted. "Not for the girls you sold. For your wallet."
The audience hissed. Prosecutors pressed on. The sentence was not simply a legal number; it was the community reclaiming every grief he'd turned into profit.
After the guilty verdict, people lined up. Some spat in his direction. Some told their stories again into microphones. Others walked by in silence, the weight of what had been done heavy in their steps. A child—one of the younger students who had once seen him as a sun—threw a fistful of dirt at him and then covered his face and ran away. That small act was the purest of revenge and the truest testimony.
His punishment was public, varied, and tailored: legal condemnation, social humiliation, exposure, and the knowledge that the children he had sold were now seen as people with names and faces, not entries on a ledger. Giuseppe's final public unraveling was complete; he had moved from father to predator and then, under the eyes of the community, to a man whose name would be a cautionary tale.
We left the courthouse with Hugo's wound stitched and his smile faded but proud. He had given everything. I had given my watch. Keilani had given her voice. The rest of us had given one another courage.
After the case, there were months of work: police investigations following the leads we had uncovered, nights of interviews and testimonies, prosecutions that followed the paper trail Giuseppe had foolishly kept. Henry and Emmett received terms; other adult accomplices were arrested. The orphanage's legacy was dismantled, slowly and painfully, with boxes of files hauled out into the public light.
In the slow aftermath, we were placed in a shelter. The world was both larger and more frightening than Aster Hill had been; at least now it was a world that knew our names.
Four months after the dawn that changed everything, a small cry announced something new in a hospital room: Keilani's daughter—small, fierce. The nurse placed the baby on Keilani's chest and Keilani's face rearranged itself into something like a sunrise. "She is healthy," the nurse said, smiling. "A strong girl."
Keilani looked at me and managed a laugh that was both broken and brave. "She will know dawn," she whispered. "Not chains."
We named her the kind of name that felt like promise—one that fit a child who had been carried through darkness to be born into sunrise; in our house, we called her "Dawn's Hope" in jokes and private vows. The legal work went on, but so did our small acts: I taught the baby how to clap. We planted cherry saplings in a garden and called them our witnesses.
On the morning the papers published the full account with photographs and receipts, the village gathered and read the names. We each said the names out loud, the names of those who had been commodified. Saying a name becomes a spell; it makes a person. When the list ended, there was a hollow in the air where fear had been, and it filled with something slightly incandescent.
One night, after most of the court business had calmed, I sat by the small pond near the shelter. I took my red watch out and wound it slowly. The small gearwork ticked, an ordinary sound that had been the first thing I'd given to save us.
I whispered to the watch. "You were a small thing, but you were mine."
Across the pond, Keilani hummed a lullaby to her sleeping daughter. The world felt fragile and enormous at once. Hugo's laughter remained as a memory in my chest, and some nights I still felt the echo of his pranks like light on water.
And in the mornings I wake to watch the east turn from coal to gold, and I think of the welded metal ring in the basement, the chain that once bit into Keilani's ankle. I imagine it rusting away under sun and rain.
At dawn, I wind the red watch and listen for the seconds, and each tick is a small victory. It is the sound of time given back to us and the sound of a piece of me that once stood in a wardrobe and watched evil be revealed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —