Face-Slapping17 min read
"I Almost Killed Us Twice" — Reborn, I Took Back My Life
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"Hands off me."
My knuckles slammed into a pair of rough palms, and a man's arms tightened around my waist like iron.
"Ow—" I hissed, then froze.
"Elizabeth?" A voice I had memorized in the marrow stopped me.
My fingers slipped. I cupped his face with both hands.
"Ely? Ely Finch—"
He blinked as if woken from a bad sleep. "You called me a name I like."
Tears slid out of me without permission. "You died. I died. I blew the car up and—"
His thumb wiped my cheek, gentle as a prayer. "Shh. I'm here."
I pressed my forehead to his, and the world tilted back into me. Before the seat belt, before smoke, before pain, something else had happened: I had opened my eyes in a room that smelled of lamp oil and wood smoke, in a house hung with red paper and paper calendars.
"Explain," I said, my voice a broken wire.
He laughed, low and unbelieving. "Explain what? You punching me awake, or you crying like you haven't slept in a year?"
"Both." I pulled away. "I remembered burning to death. I remembered pulling the cord. I remembered Song Iliana—"
"Ely's hands went tight at the name. "Iliana?"
"Iliana Figueroa," I said. "She set me up. I died trying to make sure she did, too."
He swore softly, and then—so strangely human—he sounded like he had been asleep for ten years and had just been told something precious. "You came back," he said.
"I think so."
He sat me down on his lap as if I might float away, and for the first time I let myself breathe without holding the air like a held grenade.
"I thought I failed," I whispered.
"Not anymore." He kissed the corner of my eye. "You came back. We'll fix it."
I told him everything I could remember: the city, the car, the blast. I told him the things a body remembers in the bones—the last lazy ache, the salt of my own blood. I told him the book I had read before it happened: a book where Iliana went to the city, rose, and left ruined people in her wake. I told him I had read my own end and survived to tell the first chapter again.
He listened like a man guarding a fragile thing.
"Okay," Ely said when I finished. "First thing tomorrow, you go tell my mother. Second, you sleep. Third, I will never let Iliana touch you again."
"Promise?" I asked.
"Promise." He lifted one finger like an oath.
I almost laughed. "You said you promised."
He leaned in and bit my lower lip with a grin so soft it was a bruise. "I did."
We slept in a house that smelled of old wood and fields. When the lamp was lit and the room leaned into the dim, I found the small pocket of calm that comes after raw terror. My body remembered this room in a way it did not remember the hospital or the blast.
The next morning dawned with rooster screams and chilly light. Ely rose before me, dressed in a plain work jacket, and his shoulders filled his clothes like a promise.
"Don't get up," he said. "I already made porridge."
"You are impossible," I told him, but I sat up and let him fuss. He had the way of a man who would hold you down by coaxing rather than force.
We ate slow. And then, in the kitchen light, I did something only I could do.
"I have things," I said.
He blinked. "Like?"
"Stuff from the future." I didn't laugh. "Small things. A radio. A flashlight. A book I read when I was twenty-eight. A meter to test things."
He raised his eyebrows. "Show me."
At first I only brought out a single boiled egg, nearly steaming in my hand. He looked at it like I'd unsheathed a moon.
"You... how?"
"It comes with me," I said. "From the other life."
He didn't look shocked. Ely Finch didn't show much shock. He showed concern, then calculation. "That's dangerous. Where did you hide them?"
"Here." I pulled an old trunk and opened a space that had no seam, and my things emptied into the room like small, impossible stars.
He watched my hands, the way my fingers moved when I created a thing out of thin air. His eyes softened into that look men have when they see someone they've loved long enough to know the edges of.
"You trust me?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He kissed me then, a real kiss that asked nothing and promised everything. It was the kind of kiss that sends a line of fire through the ribs and leaves the heart knowing its place.
After breakfast, we walked to the small house's yard where red paper still clung to the walls. Ely's mother, Paula Bush, sat with a basket of yarn, gossiping with the neighbors. Bernabe Foster, the village foreman, was already out by the gate.
"Elizabeth," Bernabe said when he saw me. He did not smile. He never smiled at me unless he had to. "We need to talk about the food station this week."
"Of course," I said. "I want to sign up."
When my hand touched the record book on the foreman's desk, I felt the tilt of the village sway. To be in charge of points, to sign names, to hold paper—that small authority could bend things toward safety faster than any heirloom.
"You're sure about that?" Bernabe asked. He tested me with a look that tried to measure a future with a single glance.
"I am sure," I said.
"I'll make the motion at the meeting," he told Ely. "This will be a test of fairness."
Ely nodded like a soldier. He was a young man who had returned from the army to hard day labor and a broader temper to protect what he loved. He loved like a man who would fight with his palms. He loved like a man who took his vows simply and earned them constantly.
I read the "book" I had found before I died more than once. It was a rough thing, a story where Iliana Figueroa used her city polish to climb and leave other lives burned behind her. In that story I had reacted in the only way I knew: I had burned her. In this life I had to be smarter. I had to keep the man I loved.
"Listen," I told Ely that night, after the meeting made me the record keeper and the win at the food contest had already whispered across the fields. "Iliana's part is the same as the book—she draws people to her like honey. She's not just a girl with a favor. She has what I think of as a spring. It feeds her people. We need to find out how she makes her edge, and we need to watch."
"You mean take her on?" Ely asked, and his jaw set.
"No." My voice was urgent. "Not with fists. With facts. With proof. With our own little laws."
That was the plan. The first face-slap came sooner than we imagined.
The county long table stood on the open lot under a bad sky. The contest was simple: same ingredients, different hands. Everyone ate, then they voted in secret. We were six cooks, two men, four women. Iliana strutted in with her city scarf and a dozen friends who looked like they'd swallowed wine. She smiled like a threat.
"Everyone take your bibs," Bernabe said. "Nobody brings anything that isn't on the table."
Iliana's smile did not fade. "I brought a sachet," she said lightly, "my aunt uses it. It will make it nicer. Everyone will love it."
"Everything on the table is for everyone," Ely said. He'd been put in charge of checks. He looked like a man who had been given the wrong weapon—the way he carried the authority made it solid and immediate.
Iliana's friends coughed. "Suit yourself," she said, and she peeled her eyes toward me like a moth looking for light. I met her look with a quiet smile that didn't belong to the scared woman in the city book I had read. I had a breath of time.
When the cooks bowed into their boxes and steamed rose from pans and stoves, I did a small trick. I had noticed Iliana's sachet when she handed it to her friend; the smell was sweet, like sugar with something floral. When she was not watching, I swapped it for an empty bottle from my pocket that I had prepared, and placed the real sachet beneath the stage—where a searching hand would find it later.
"Elizabeth, are you using city spice?" one of Iliana's friends hissed far away.
"I used what was on the table," I said softly. "It is fair."
The votes came in. I watched as plates were carried across, smelled the garlic, the smoke, the simple sturdy things that made village food beloved. In the end, a number called out that made the crowd odd with surprise.
"Seven. One hundred and seven votes."
"Who is seven?" Bernabe called.
They called the number, and the stage opened onto my face. People cheered in a way that made the day sharp and bright. Iliana's mouth went thin.
After the victory, I did another quiet thing. I let the empty sachet disappear from my apron, and in the dark a voice whispered that Iliana would have to answer for something she had not meant to lose.
The second face-slap was larger.
A week later a boy named Julian—thin as a reed and nervy as a feral bird—sprinted into the yard carrying a rumor like a live coal. "They took my dad's watch. Someone in the town sent it home with a parcel and now it's gone," he cried.
"It was a watch?" Bernabe asked.
"A pocket watch, with a black-and-white photo inside," Julian said. "My household sent it to my cousin to fix a thing in the city. Now it's gone."
Iliana's family had been seen carrying parcels earlier. Iliana shrugged and said it was a mistake. "Sometimes things fall between shipments," she said. "You should be more careful."
Her shrug did not sit with me. I had had a watch once—two lives ago, Ely had given me a cheap traveler’s watch the color of a stolen moon. I had loved watches like a foolish child loves clocks: they mark the world in beats you can count.
The missing watch became the hinge for a new truth. That same day, Iliana's mother called home. "A pocket watch went into the bundle," she said. "We found two when we unpacked. One is not mine. We will return it."
It took the wind out of Iliana's sails. She smiled stiffly. I kept my lips tight.
The next day Iliana was on the village platform, her voice sweet and measured: "I am not a thief. If anyone thinks—"
"You sent a watch back with your son's parcel," Bernabe said suddenly. "We have a witness."
Iliana's face blanched. "That is nonsense." She tried to laugh it away. "I mean, who would accuse me?"
"In public, at the meeting, you said you were worried about what the future would be like," I said quietly. "You told a few of us you had ties in the city who would help. You told us you would 'take care' of problems. You said you'd like a man of rank. You said you looked forward to the day the town owed you a favor."
Her mouth was a small line.
"You lied to a child's family," I said. "You took what wasn't yours."
A hush fell like a curtain. Iliana spluttered and tried to spin the story into a pity play. "I didn't know—"
"You didn't check?" Bernabe asked.
"It was in the parcel." Iliana's voice grew small like a trapped bird. "I didn't—"
"Stop," Ely said. He stepped forward with that soldier's calm, the same calm that had stopped boys from falling into trouble in the past. "If it was a mistake, we will fix it. But if it's deliberate, we will not tolerate it."
Someone in the crowd—Julian's mother—pulled out the watch, clutching it like a rescued thing. "This was my husband's," she said. "It had a photo of his brother inside. He thought it lost forever."
Iliana's smile cracked and fell flat. She tried to claim it had been an accident, that items had gotten mixed, that she had meant no harm. But the argument caught cold in her mouth. People shifted uncomfortably. Her friends scattered. The watch slid back into the hands of the rightful owner. The crowd's warmth for Iliana cooled into a wary frost.
Iliana's social lift stalled. She leaned on other people like a hungered animal. She made two reckless moves after that, each smaller than the last. Each time, I had a small defense: a witness, a question, a sharp piece of paper. I was the quiet woman who had come back from a fire, and I kept records of everything. The more I recorded, the less slippery Iliana could be.
There was a darker turn to the story that nearly broke the village: a boy named Jonah—bright, awkward—was found collapsed in the apple grove. He had eaten a bun and gone altered, violent, and then sick. We rushed him to the little clinic where Jasper Kim, the only trained medic for miles, worked in a room that smelled of iodine and lamp oil.
"What did he eat?" Jasper asked, removing his glasses and looking small in his white coat.
"Just a bun," the boy's friends said.
"Who gave it to him?"
"He says—" a girl's voice broke. "He says it was handmade."
He clung to the words like a lifeline. "Made by a girl?" Jasper asked.
"Yes. Original thought—" someone whispered.
The man's voice in the corner—Mr. Lin—had been angrier than his face warranted. "My boy would never lay a hand—"
"Jet," Ely said. "Stop. Who saw what."
A group of them came forward, and a pattern appeared like the faint beginning of a bruise. A family—Lin—had been trying to lift itself by any means. They had, with money and pressure, cultivated allies to lie. They had an agenda: push Iliana's enemies into disfavor by making them suspects. It was a nasty little plot; petty, old, and self-made.
"Did you give him anything?" Bernabe asked the elder.
"No," Lin said. He shifted like a man who had swallowed a stone.
The truth came out like a knife. Original papers, a map, a witness who could not be bought. The Lin family had sold their honor for a shot at promotion, and when the village turncoat was exposed, it wasn't only Lin who lost face. The network of favors that had propped up Iliana's social rise was unraveling.
I watched it all, and something sour in my chest eased. The book I'd read had prepared me for this: once you learn the rules of a game, you can change the game.
At night in the small steel plant room that Cole Santoro had lent us electricity for, I tested the sachet Iliana had used. The machine I invented from an old junked analyzer hummed like a living thing. It spat results in numbers that made me quiet.
"There is a compound in here," I told Ely. "It looks biological and mineral at once. It acts on cells—on tears in tissue, on protein structure. It would make wounds knit faster, it would improve flavor, and it might be addictive, not in the way of drugs for the mind, but food that feels more like home."
Ely pressed his knuckles against my shoulder. "Sounds dangerous."
"It is," I said. "It will make people love anything you put in front of them. It will be the easiest way to own a town if you control who eats it."
He nodded like a man folding bad paper into clean. "So we find where Iliana gets it."
We did. Iliana had a source—something like a spring, like the book said. Not a literal spring, but a source of rare plants and a secret line to someone in the city who saw assets in small places. Iliana had pockets of power because of that source. She was rising, even now.
"What do we do?" Ely asked.
"Keep watch," I said. "Gather proof. Use the law. Don't burn anything. Let the town watch the sun set on her schemes by their own votes."
We turned the steel plant into a small lab. I taught Ely to check metals and read gauges. He taught me how to hold a shovel with a soldier's grip. We built things that made life easier: a gear to fix the old water pump, a simple switch to light the kitchen in a storm. People came by to watch and to ask advice. Our small inventions became ways to help the village—dirt that became trust.
Iliana tried to strike back. She asked friends to spread rumors. She tried to move the youth to her side with promises of letters to the city. She tried to undermine me at the meetings. Each time, she hit a record I had kept or a friend we had made.
"You're playing a long game," Ely told me once, fingers threaded in mine as we sat on the edge of the well, the sky cold and spotless above us.
"I don't have a choice," I said. "If I try to burn her like before, I will be the one who loses him."
He pulled me close and burned that look into me—something soft and fierce. "We will do it—slow and right."
Months passed. People watched us grow a small machine shop from rust and faith. We fixed the seed grinder to grind straighter. We refurbished a discarded motor to pump water faster. We wrote names in the logbook with a steady, careful hand. Each little thing made us richer in a way coins could not buy: trust.
Iliana's powerful relatives tried to bribe the foreman. A town councilman in the city called and wanted to "help" Iliana, which was a word that tasted of oil and closed doors. We held firm.
It broke on a day that smelled of metal and rain.
Iliana had been stepping higher. She had begun to use small miracles from the sachet to fatten a reputation fast. She had a friend in the city who handled shipments and helped her move things through. She thought she could buy a quick victory by having some goods appear at a festival—rare sugar, spices, preserves. The town would fall in love again.
"I don't like this," Bernabe said, watching the crates stacked near the square.
"Neither do I," Ely said. His jaw was a hard line.
The crates opened and packets were handed out. Everyone ate. Their faces smoothed. People hugged and let their guard relax.
"Stop the distribution," I said.
It was too late to stop the food they'd eaten. But we could stop the lie.
We had already had the sachet tested. The compound inside—what I named u-active molecules—was a real agent. It hadn't been illegal per se, but it was a manipulative additive that could be passed off as a rare spice. The city contact had been selling it as a miracle. People liked miracles. Iliana had sold them.
"Ely, tell them to bring the next sack to the square," I said.
He nodded and stepped out, his hands carrying the weight of a man who knew how to stand.
At the square, I held the microphone Bernabe pushed into my hand. I'm not a public speaker by nature, but a woman who had died feeds audacity.
"Everyone," I said. "I want to talk about something important."
"You again," Iliana said, her voice dripping like sugar.
"Listen." I drew out the assesment I had made in the steel plant. I explained, simple and calm, what the sachet did, how the u-active molecules worked in food, how it changed taste and craving. I showed the test results. I showed the chain of delivery that led to Iliana's friend in the city.
"You're accusing me of poisoning?" Iliana laughed a short, brittle laugh.
"Not poisoning," I said. "But making people dependent on a taste you control. You sold that."
Ely's voice cut in sharp. "We can prove it. We will take this to the county office. If you've been trading in something that changes a village's food supply for favors, it is a matter for officials."
Iliana's face whitened, and her friends looked away. She had misread the town; she'd thought Newness and glitter would blind them. But the town had farmers and bakers who cared more for their seed than for the shine of a scarf.
The officials came. Paperwork was done. Iliana's shipment was stopped. Her city contact denied anything, but the trail was there, small and greasy with good prints. People who had taken a little bag from Iliana were forced to hand their packers over.
The final face-slap came at the hearing.
"Ely," Bernabe said quietly in the county room. "Read the list."
He read the list of names who had benefited from Iliana's supply. Each name had a ledger entry, a sack number, and a testimony. Iliana's smile withered like paper in a rainstorm.
"You used favors to climb," I said. "You used taste to make people forget their own lives."
"That is not true," Iliana said, and then her voice broke. "I only wanted to help."
"By making us hunger for what you sell?" I asked.
"People liked it!" she cried. "They would have loved me either way!"
"No," I said. "You fed a need you created. You made people owe you a craving."
When they called for sentence, the county decided: Iliana's shipments were suspended. Her city contact lost permits for a period. Iliana lost the special position on the youth group's committee. The town told her to leave the food station to the people who cooked with plain hands and honest salt.
"You're being harsh," someone said.
"It's a rule for everyone," Bernabe said. "Not too harsh. Not too soft. But fair."
Iliana walked away, not with ashes but with nothing. She had been the sort of enemy who had not expected to be stopped because she'd been used to buying silence. She had never purchased the respect that farmers give each other, the slow work of shared labor. She learned the hard way that a town's memory is longer than a season.
Months later the county verdict on the Lin matter made the town safe enough to breathe again. Lin Senior admitted planting evidence for a promotion and was taken away. Original and Jonah had truth restored. The town's gossip buckets emptied. People resumed the small rituals of their lives.
During all of this, Ely and I leaned together. He came to the mineral room and helped me solder wires. He brought me wild rabbits from a hill and asked for nothing more than a kiss and a laugh. At night he drilled with an old neighbor who taught him control and focus, until his hands moved like he was part machine and muscle together. I gave him books from the trunk, and he taught me how to sharpen an edge on metal.
One evening I took the black-and-white watch—the one Julian's family returned—and I engraved his old initials on the inner lid. I placed it on our table like a talisman. "This is proof that things can be returned," I said. Ely frowned.
"I don't need proof," he said. "I have you."
"Still," I said, "some things mean more when they're shown."
He shook his head. "You can't mark our life with a thing."
"I already did," I said.
He kissed me in the doorway, then walked away to check the pump. The lamp lit his silhouette and made it seem like he belonged to some old poem.
People started to come to our shop for help. They asked us to repair a plow, to fix a pump, to join the logbook and sign for a seed allocation. I made sure the books were honest. I kept receipts and the names of all who received anything. If anyone tried to cut a corner, they found our ledger there like a mirror.
Word of our little steel plant repair shop reached the county. A man in a coat came from the city and walked into the yard like a man who weighed things. He watched us grind gears and then sat with us over tea.
"You have mechanical sense," he said. "There are factories that would pay for this thinking."
I smiled and thought of the days we had sat on the edge of the well and planned nothing and everything. "We will stay," I said. "We like here."
He nodded. "Keep your ledger. Keep your measure. If you ever want to share your method, you will be welcome."
It felt like permission I didn't need.
Spring moved to summer, and the village rewarded those who had helped rather than taken. We were given space in the cooper's shed and more scrap metal. People began to call me by my name not with fear but with trust. "Elizabeth records this," they'd say, leaving the paper in my hand like a favor.
Iliana found new work, city-side, but without the power she'd been used to. She was careful now. She never looked our way unless she had to. There were days she passed my window and could not meet my eyes.
One night, late, I sat on the porch and wound the pocket watch. It's a small practice that grounds me. It ticks like a small honest heart. Ely came up behind me, pressed into my back, and bent to kiss my hair.
"You kept busy today," he said.
"I kept records," I said. "We kept people safe."
"That's nothing. You kept us safe." He put both hands on the watch. "You kept me."
I closed my eyes and felt the moment like a slow drink. Love didn't undo the past, but it stitched new days into the ragged seam.
"There's more to do," I said.
"Always," he answered.
We had used the law, the ledger, and small machines to catch a woman whose rise had been bought with taste. We had exposed bribery and lies and the way a small town could be sold in small bites. We had not burned anyone. We had not become the thing we feared. We had slipped net and gone on living. That was the perfect kind of revenge: not the scream and the ash, but the slow, undeniable disarming of power until it was only itself.
"Promise me one thing," I said, winding the watch.
He looked at the tiny hands. "Ask."
"Promise you will not try to be a hero alone."
Ely smiled that soldier's smile—quiet, accepted. "I promise."
The watch wound down and then ticked again. The tick was small and fierce and told me a secret I had always known when I held Ely's hand in the dark: sometimes the bravest thing is to be present for someone you love.
A year later we held a meeting under a sky that had learned to keep its storms. The youth group had new leaders who wanted to learn fairness, and the county came to train us in simple rules. Iliana attended some gatherings, her hair pulled into a careful knot. Once, she came to the door of our little shop and left a biscuit. I didn't go out. Ely left the biscuit on the table by the watch and printed his name on the ledger.
Bernabe came to check on our books.
"You're doing a good job," he said.
"We are doing a good job," I corrected. "All of us."
He nodded. "Which one would you like to be called next? Foreman? Recorder?"
"Just Elizabeth," I said.
He grunted like a man pleased.
That night we walked the field. The stars were a confession above us. Ely wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.
"Do you ever think about the other life?" he asked me.
"Every day," I said. "Sometimes I dream I'm burning. Sometimes I'm driving a car and I smell gasoline. Sometimes—" I stopped.
"Sometimes what?"
"Sometimes I dream of a future where the machine I built is stronger than the men who would use it for harm. A place where people eat and don't have to owe favors for taste."
He looked at me like he had always wanted to look. "We will build that place," he promised.
"And the watch?" I asked.
He took the watch from his coat and wound it. "It keeps time for us."
We walked on. The field bent under the moon like a patient thing. The watch ticked a steady hand, a small proof of everything we'd done. Iliana's face-clasp had been met with a community that had learned to write the truth and to keep it. The Lins had been handled by the law. The town had found its balance again.
Under the orchard, I pressed my forehead to Ely's chest. He smelled of soap and iron and sleep.
"We saved each other twice," I said.
He smiled that crooked way that folded his eyes and made him look younger. "You saved us."
I laughed softly. "And you promised not to be a hero alone."
He kissed me quick and sure. "I promised."
The pocket watch ticked in my pocket like a little answered prayer. It had been returned, and we'd kept it in a place of honor. It was proof that things could be restored, not as they were, but as they needed to be.
We settled into the small daily things—letters, repairs, keeping the books neat. People asked for our help with small problems and liked the way we worked. The record book became a kind of law of care. We never let anyone manhandle the ledger. We kept it like a map. When arguments rose, we went to the book and the names and the dates and the receipts. People calmed.
Years later I would teach a young woman how to read a simple gauge at the plant and tell her why honesty mattered more than the best spice. The girl would go on to fix things in towns beyond our valley, and she would remember the woman who wound a watch and kept a ledger.
When the summer finally came heavy and slow, we sat by the porch and watched the sun go down. "You're still thinking of the book?" Ely asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "But the book isn't the future. The people are. The ledger is the future."
He kissed my forehead. "And our life is the watch. Wind it. Keep it steady."
I wound the watch. The small hands spun and then found their quiet route.
We had the sort of ending that grew from small, careful things: a signed ledger, a returned pocket watch, a fixed pump, a repaired machine, a town that learned to keep its own secrets less like weapons and more like things to be mended.
"Elizabeth," Ely said, soft as a bed. "We'll be all right."
I watched the watch tick and then wound it one more time.
"Yes," I said. "We will be."
The End
— Thank you for reading —