Face-Slapping17 min read
I Almost Let Them Eat My Children — Then Isaiah Came
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I remember the taste of smoke the way some people remember a song. Smoke and river mud and the sour copper of fear. I was crouched with my son on my hip and my daughter clutched to my side when they found us, three refugees who smelled of boiled flour and too-little sleep.
"They look fresh," one of them said, licking his lips like a dog. "You could feed half a village with that pair."
"Shut up," I hissed. I held my children closer. "Please. Leave us."
"You think a woman and two kids can walk out of here?" another man said. He sharpened a blade, and it made a sound like teeth. "We'll make one roast and one stew. Enough for a week."
My son, Dawson Walter, was five. My daughter, Kelsey Fuchs, just four. They were both so small their heads fit under my chin. My dog—Edsel Kimura, who followed us like a damp shadow—growled low in his throat.
"Call your mother," the leader said. "Make her come. We can make it quick."
I thought about the drive to the old cart, the way I abandoned our wagon so someone else could live. I thought about the first flood, and the fever, and the way hunger warps a man's face. I thought about the one promise I had left: I would not let these children die if I could help it.
I drew the crossbow.
"Who are you?" the leader spat. He was large, the kind of man who thinks room is a right. I remember his face—greed, like ulcers behind his eyes. He lifted his hand as if to strike.
"Wait," I said. "One fight. If I win, you let us go. If I lose—"
"If you lose, then you and your kin feed us," he finished.
Dawson buried his face into my sleeve and whispered, "Mother, are we going to be made into meat?"
"Do not speak like that," I said, and my voice broke. He was so small. How do you explain to a child that men will speak of you like game?
The first arrow went through a man's back. He dropped like a harvest basket. The second arrow caught a forearm. The dog, Edsel Kimura, leaped and got a bite in too. Chaos is a quick thief; it steals the moment and sows panic.
The leader charged me with a sickle. I wasn't some fragile thing. Before I was a mother out in a strange year, I had trained and lifted and learned how to hit a target in a room full of moving enemies. He thought me weak because I was in a blouse and a kerchief. He thought me tender like the rest. He should not have thought that.
I pushed my son behind me, slid, struck. He fell with two cracked ribs and a surprise that turned his face white.
"Run!" I told Dawson. "Run with Edsel!"
We fled. We ran until my legs burned. We ran until the old temple bell was only a rumor. I thought I had escaped with everything that mattered.
When I got to the place where I had hidden my daughter, I found the stone empty. The food bundle untouched. The stone had been moved.
"No!" I screamed. "Kelsey! Kelsey!"
Dawson ran and barked and cried. Edsel traced the path at once and started howling toward the road. It was not long before a man on a white horse came into view. He carried a sword and a long tooth of a smile that didn't reach his eyes. He wore a narrow-brimmed hat and a quiet that felt like an iron door closing.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"I have two children," I said. "My daughter—she's gone. I hid her—"
He dismounted with the smooth motion of someone who has done many hard things and returned each time.
"Where?" he asked simply.
"He must have found her," I said. My voice was small. "If he took her—"
He didn't wait for me to finish. He had a way of moving that said he had no time for pity, only for results. He went to the stone, found the path, and followed it. A few minutes later he came back carrying my daughter in his arms, hair dusted with leaves, the kind of frightened look that makes your heart stop.
She held up a small hand. "Mama!" she said.
I clutched her until we both trembled.
"You found her." I exhaled a laugh that had no joy in it. "Who are you?"
He bowed his head only once. "My name is Isaiah Yang."
"Then thank you, Isaiah." I patted his sleeve like a foolish small thing. "Please, will you come with us? We are heading to the county. We can pay—"
"I will ride with you to the road," Isaiah said, "but not more. I have business south." There was no false courtesy in him.
We walked together and I watched how my children gravitated to him. Kelsey reached out and plucked at the hair at his chin. Isaiah let her. Dawson, usually suspicious of strangers, brightened like a lantern being lit.
"Why are you walking alone?" I asked once, between steps.
"I have nowhere to go," he said shortly. "I am from the capital, and I was going north. I kill things that need killing."
Then he grinned briefly. "I also mend my own gear."
I caught myself smiling, because there is something soothing in a man who can stitch both broken leather and broken danger. He walked us out of the woods, staying two paces ahead like a shepherd. When we met other refugees—Wang the scholar, a timid man with a soft voice and many anxieties, and a string of families—Isaiah's presence smoothed their fear like water on stone.
"Are you married?" Wang—Dell Francois—asked at lunch, too curious by far for his own peace.
"No," Isaiah said. He cleaned his knife. "I have no one I owe. I am used to the road."
"Then you are an honest man," Dell Francois said. "You have no ties."
Kelsey wiped her mouth and asked, "Will you be our uncle?"
Isaiah looked at her and his mouth softened. "Only if you let me be."
We set out the next morning. The road was a stubborn thing—hot and long and full of people who looked like the skins were sewn thinly over the bones. We patched wounds, shared bread, split water. We met a group from a village called High—Lee Fontaine’s family. We walked in a caravan, because caravans are safer than loneliness.
Everything in this life is a bargain. We gave what we had: dry bread, a bit of salt, a fold of our few coins. People thanked us with their heads and their tears. A man named Andres Morrison, a farmer by callus and by mouth, shared biscuits and told jokes. A pair of brothers, Cassius Picard and Knox Hill, were bristly but useful with an axe. Edsel Kimura, my dog, stole the hearts of the children by stealing the food of the careless.
We walked, and when the moon rose I sewed pillows from old sacks and lay awake. War and pestilence have a way of making even the city you once knew into a dream. I used to sell hairpins and scent balms back before the flood. I had a small shop and a small plan: to build a bigger shop in the county. I had a life in which numbers in an account book meant safety. Then the airplane of memory—my other life—crashed into this one and left my pockets full of strange emptiness. I am only telling you this so you know I am not naïve about men. I know greed and I have seen it.
"Did you sleep?" Isaiah asked once, sitting on a log while we cooked.
"A little," I said. "I learned things before I came here. I can make balm. I can string beads. I can keep children alive."
"Good," he said. He plucked a feather from a bundle and carved an arrow. "Then you are useful."
Which was a nicer way of saying, "You're not just a thing to be eaten."
We found good moments among the bad. Kelsey laughed when she was given a charred chestnut. Dawson caught a frog and named it Sir Leap. Isaiah taught Dawson to hold a short spear and how not to make the spear the first thing he was. It felt like the world could still hold small joys.
But the world also held hunger.
One night, in the shelter of a broken temple, men eyed our food as if it were an accusation. "That little boy is plump," one muttered as if he were reading a ledger.
I almost laughed at the absurd math of it—my small son, my breath, my entire life—reduced to a meal plan. Then I collected my courage. I drew bow in the dark until the shaft slid past the throat of a would-be thief and the man fell with a noise like a struck gong. Isaiah killed a second man on the path as they charged.
From then on, people didn't learn to touch us. I stopped counting blessings and began counting people who might be hungry enough to kill.
We reached a hollow where refugees had made a ragged camp. They welcomed us and then the trouble began. When you have others' eyes on your bread, you see how hunger can twist a heart. A family there—Andres Morrison's people among them—took pity on us. But there were others who spoke of trading a child's life for a pot of soup as if it were a common coin.
"Leave them be," Isaiah said one night, standing in the center with a sword and a look that made men remember the law of bone.
No one touched a child after that.
We were traveling toward a county called Wanting—well, I don't recall the proper names near the end. We were not heading for glory but for survival. We stopped at a stream for water. The children played; Edsel Kimura swam like a furry otter. I found a clutch of wild eggs in the brush—a small fortune—and we cooked them on the bank. The smell pulled people up like moths. They came to our fire with eyes bright.
One man, a sunken hunter, said aloud, loud enough for everyone to hear, "A child makes a stout stew."
A hush fell. I felt the old fear, but this time—this time—I had Isaiah. He folded his hands and did not speak. When he did, he did not use many words.
"If you think to harm any of these, you'll answer to me," he said. "You'll answer with your life."
They laughed, because men like this pretend danger is a story until it's true. Then they looked at him and at me and saw something else—an answer no one wanted to hear. They left, but they left with teeth clenched.
We walked. We came upon a mountain path where the rain smattered the stones, and the path narrowed and braided with roots. A bear—huge and angry—burst from the brush and charged. People scattered like rice; some screamed. Isaiah moved like a thought. He loosed arrows, he threw a blade, he ran the beast into a tree and finished it with a strike through the throat. Men I'd never seen bowed to him as if to a god.
Afterward a whole family lay on the ground and we shared the meat. The leader of that family, a man named Lee Fontaine, took us into his fold for a while. People began to call Isaiah "our protector." Children—my children—started to call him "uncle" without a trace of fear.
We slept under a cliff and I dreamed of scarves and a safe house. I dreamed of a room with shelves of my homemade things. I woke to the sound of arguments.
"That woman—is she truly one of you?" a man demanded. His voice was needle-thin. His name was Cassius Picard. He pointed at me as if I had lied.
"She is tired and she is a widow," Dell Francois said—Wang the scholar had always been careful of his words. "She made us soup."
"That soup is a provocation," Cassius said. "We fought to survive; we have a right to fairness."
The argument unfurled and then grew teeth. A group of men began to corner a child named Haoran—this child's face was round and trusting. "We can salt him for the road," one said. He was a man named Knox Hill; desperation made him cruel. I saw my face in the grain of a nearby post and I smelled the old smoke and the same hunger.
Something in me snapped.
"Leave him alone!" I screamed and I handed my son the crossbow and told him to lock the safety.
Dawson looked at me like I had decided to play god. He was only a child. I told him the one truth I had.
"You will not let them take his life," I said.
"Mother—"
"Do it."
He took aim. He would never forget the feeling of killing a grown man who was reaching for meat. That man died with a grunt like a broken log.
A silence like a sea fell. Men who had considered themselves civilized now knew the price of a child's life. They would not speak of it.
We moved again.
Later, two men from that same group tried to steal a woman's child. For them, the world had been reduced to two choices: kill or be killed. I can't tell you I felt no pity. I can only say I saw injustice and could not be a spectator.
When we arrived at a market town three days later, rumor had already moved faster than we had. People spoke of Isaiah as a hero and of me as the mother who dared to hold a bow. The town appointed a man to break disputes. His name was Canaan Li. He was the sort of ambitious villain who smiles at funerals to learn the price of a funeral meal.
Canaan saw me and saw meat, not because of the children but because I had a little coin and a pair of hands that could mend and make. He thought he could take advantage. He approached our low table in the market and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Lovely," he said. "You and your brood travel well. Perhaps you should come home with me. I have a fine house."
"Get your hand off me," I said. I did not want to fight. The whole market was crowded—men with bundles, women with babies, scribes with records. People are always within earshot of trouble.
Canaan laughed, and that laugh was the one that told me we were done being polite.
"You owe me," he said. "Help me, and I will help you."
Isaiah stepped forward. Not a step too many. Canaan sneered and shoved Isaiah, a low, hateful movement meant to humiliate.
"Mind your hands," Isaiah said.
"What will you do?" Canaan mocked. "Kill me and be a hero? You are nothing here."
Isaiah’s eyes narrowed.
"You leave her alone, or you answer for it," Isaiah said.
Canaan pushed again, this time hard. A messenger pushed through the crowd and tripped. A child cried.
I could have walked away, taken my children and those I could hide, and we would have been safer. Instead I stepped forward.
"Do it now," I said quietly.
What followed was the punishment the town would whisper about for months—something the law of the road had finally forced into daylight.
They called for a crowd. The market emptied into the square like a tide. The baker set his basket down and stood with clenched flour-smeared hands. Farmers left bundles under trees. Someone brought a bench. Word runs on wind—people came from alleys, from the weavers, from the inn where a woman had been half-drunk on stew, all of them curious for an ending.
Canaan Li stood tall in the center. His chest puffed with what he thought was authority. He had a builder's swagger and a bully's grin. He looked at me with contempt so thick it could have been cut into slabs.
"Who calls this gathering?" he demanded. He thought he was above consequence. "Do you know who I am?"
I let the town answer. It answered with murmurs—"He's a local trader." "He's known to buy favors." "He steals small sacks."
Isaiah walked to the center and pulled from his belt a piece of rope. Not a gallows rope—this is not the countryside of tidy punishments—but a rope to bind. He spoke so the market would hear.
"Canaan Li, you have been accused of plotting to abduct a woman and her children, and of threats against others," Isaiah said. He said it like he was reading a ledger. "You have a chance now to confess to the crowd and to the magistrate."
Canaan laughed then, and the laugh cracked. "You have no authority here," he spat. "You are a stray sword. You think the crowd will listen?"
"Listen," Isaiah said. "Listen and let the merchants decide.”
A woman in the crowd—Fernanda Delgado, who ran the dye stall—stepped forward. "He tried to buy my youngest son," she said. Her voice trembled, but she did not break. "He offered me cloth if I would let him take the child for 'work.'"
A miller—Fabian Stein—added, "The man stole my sack last month and blamed it on my horse." He spat and the crowd hissed.
They brought forward a tablet of accusations. A scribe—Edsel Kimura, a name I found later in a ledger—had written down details, not from cameras but from witness accounts, and the crowd grew thunderous.
Canaan's grin stopped like a clock on a cliff. The first stage of villainy—pride—began to crack.
"What proof?" he cried. He shifted, and the circle closed like a ring.
"Aren't you lucky," Isaiah said softly. "Your friends are here." He pointed to men who had been bullied by Canaan. They nodded.
Then the town began to hiss. "Shame!" shouted one of the women. "Shame on you!" called another. The merchant's apprentice—Dell Francois—held up a scrap of cloth Canaan had traded and said, "He promised me his word of honor. He gave me this, and never paid."
Canaan's face moved from pricked to pale. He went from arrogance to confusion.
"That's not true," he said. "You lie. This is lies."
"No," a voice answered from the back. It was Lee Fontaine. "I saw him. He cornered that widowed woman near the river and offered her coin. She refused and he threatened her." Lee’s voice was steady. "I was afraid and I fought with him."
The crowd snapped. People moved closer. A merchant took out a ledger with Canaan's name and turned the pages to show where Canaan had been given credit and where he had defaulted.
Canaan's tone dropped to denial. "I didn't—"
A child in the crowd who had watched the whole scene tugged at his mother's sleeve. "He tried to take a boy in the lane," the child said. "He said the boy was for work. I saw him."
Now the shock had turned to exposure. Canaan's eyebrows twitched, his mouth opened and closed like a fish. The villagers were merciless. They knew names now and had corroboration. A chorus of neighbors who had long-suffered his petty cruelties gave testimony. They could see through the man, and the crowd had power.
"He will not only be shamed," someone said. "He will pay the price."
A baker began to chant the things scorned people chant: "Take the rope! Take the rope!" Not to hang—but to bind him in public, to humiliate him into not being able to repeat his crimes.
Canaan tried to laugh again but the sound was hollow. He began to shake. "You can't do this," he said. "You don't have the right!"
"Listen to the widow," Orion—Cassius Picard—said slowly, and I saw his eyes tear just a little. "Listen to the children."
His voice slid into pleading. He began the familiar cadence of a men who has been dishonest all his life: first denial, then attack, then whimper.
"You're lying!" he howled, face reddening. "You can't prove it!"
But the proofs were all around him. The scribe's tablet, the miller's memory, the child's cry. Someone—Kelsey Fuchs, my daughter—clung to my skirts and pointed at the man. "That man was by the river," she said, as if she were reading from a child's calendar. "He made me cry."
The crowd turned like wind. The laughter had died from his mouth. He looked at Isaiah for a moment as if Elijah himself could eat his sin away. Pride transformed into disbelief. He started to look small under the weight of all those people who had been scarred by his selfishness.
Then denial, miserly and frantic, "You paid them!" he shrieked. "You bought them! It's a plot by market rivals," he sputtered, reaching for an answer. He pointed fingers with both hands and they looked ridiculous, like flapping birds.
Isaiah's voice was slow then, quiet and sure. "If you confess, we will let you go with a fine. If you refuse, we will name you. We will keep your name on a ledger and the next town will not trade with you. And if you try to harm any child again, we will take you to the magistrate."
"Canaan," he said. "There is still a chance to save your name."
Canaan's hands went to his throat. He had been a man who bought favors with coin and thought favor would always last. Now his voice cracked. "Please!" he whispered. His eyes roved the crowd as if searching for mercy.
Mercy is a currency most men spend recklessly, then demand back. Canaan knelt without being asked, then again, then his knees hit stone and the crowd's murmur changed into a third voice: scorn.
"Beg," someone said. "Beg like the thief you are."
Canaan began to beg like a man who had never begged. His penitent posture was such that you could see him shrink on the earth. "Forgive me...I was hungry...I am sorry..." he stammered. "Please!"
Around us, the market buzzed like an illness. Some people shouted for a harsher punishment. Others whispered like flies that will not leave a corpse—"He must be fined!" "He must be driven from the trade!" "Let the magistrate see him!"
Heads nodded. A woman near the stall simpered, took out thread, and began to embroider a banner that would tell the story: "HEN HOUSE THIEF, NOT TO TRADE." A scribe copied the testimony and promised to carry it to the magistrate. A few youngsters, savage with hunger and morality, spat and pushed Canaan's face in the dirt.
Canaan's voice changed from defiant to broken; then to pleading. His eyes became the eyes of a man who had misjudged the kind of town he lived in. "Please," he whispered again, "please, I will pay you back. I will not harm anyone again."
"Pay us back," the people said.
They made him stand in the middle of the square. They circled him, and one by one people told what he'd done: petty thefts, threats, offers to buy children. Men muttered "Buy the child for work" as if it were a category of commerce. The crowd repeated the stories and each repetition took some clean air from Canaan's lungs.
He fell apart. He began to apologize. "Forgive me, forgive me, I'm sorry," he said over and over. I watched his chest move as if he were learning how to breathe in public. Then, suddenly, he tried to bargain: "I'll pay!" He offered coin, then goods, then his word. Each offer was greeted by laughter and by the rustle of people turning away.
Finally, the magistrate's man—an honest-looking clerk from the next market—arrived, having heard the rumors. He took names, took the accusations down. He ordered Canaan to stand publicly, to be fined heavily and to make a public apology and to publicly pledge never to harm another child's life. He told Canaan the town would keep his name and that if a single body came forward in the next twelve months to claim abuse linked to him, the town would lock him away.
Canaan fell to his knees and begged with wet cheeks. The humiliation was complete. Men turned to murmur; women spat; someone in the back—an old washerwoman—picked up a handful of flour and threw it on his head. Children pointed and laughed. Somebody snapped a crude woodcut of the scene and sold copies that afternoon. Men would tell the story for months, and the scribe would send written word to neighboring markets. The public had made an example. The crowd roared with a complex dish of satisfaction and relief and something like moral hunger being fed.
Canaan broke. He first stared in shock, then began to deny, then collapsed. He begged for mercy and presented coin. The crowd reacted—some with tears, many with clapping, some with calls for more punishment. People photographed the humiliation with charcoal sketches and the scribe made a note: "Canaan Li, shamed publicly for attempted child abduction; bound to pay ten silver, public apology."
I watched him; I watched his knees go weak and then heard a long, slow sigh from a corner of the crowd. Some children mimicked his pleading voice. A woman took out a ribbon and tied it on my daughter's hair as if to reward the child who had made the world safer. The baker offered me a loaf as if that could be repayment for what I'd felt in my belly. Isaiah stood there like an immovable stone and I thought, for perhaps the first time since the river took our house, I felt safe enough to breathe.
That day the village changed. A gossip went to the magistrate. A ledger added a name. Canaan Li would not touch a child in that market again.
We stayed there for a week, helping mend damage, mending shoes and tempers. People told us the story as if it were a shield: a man could be shamed. A man could be corrected in public. It was not justice in books, but it was something like a small, bright fairness.
Later, when we left, the villagers pressed food and kind words into our hands. Isaiah would not take coin for his help. He took only what we could not bear to keep and tied it to our saddlebags.
We moved on, toward the county. I sold my small jars of balm at the evening market and earned coins enough for bread. Dawson chattered about being a scholar; Kelsey insisted she would only marry someone who could jump as high as a goat. Isaiah walked the road beside us, and sometimes behind us, and sometimes ahead—a constant presence that kept thieves thinking twice.
"One day you will be old enough to tell this story yourself," Isaiah said once as he adjusted the strap on Dawson's shoulder.
"I will make sure he tells it wrong," I said, because truth is heavy and a child must be allowed bright nonsense.
"But teach him to stand," Isaiah replied. "Teach him to aim when necessary and to put the bow down when possible."
I watched my son, his eyes like a small storm, practicing with a small spear Isaiah had carved for him. I watched my daughter, hair still messy, singing a stupid rhyme she would steal from the market women.
The future is a small thing you can carry in your arms. I had nothing else you couldn't lose, and I knew now that the greatest savings was not silver but the right people at your back. If you keep them close, you can survive more than hunger—you can survive fear.
We kept walking. People tried to pay us back in kindness and the road paid us back in places to sleep and strangers who liked our music and our little balm. I learned to barter my skirts and my crafts for shelter. Isaiah learned to camp without fuss. My children taught me the day was not all grief.
Sometimes, late at night, I would wake and feel the old fear come crawling up like a rodent, but then a deep, even breath would come from the direction of the edge of the fire. Isaiah would be awake, eyes on the dark. He never broke that watch.
"Why do you do this?" I had once asked him, sitting with our backs to a rock. The wind was soft and the children snoozed.
He looked at his hands and then at the road, and for the first time he told me a truth I had been too proud to ask. "I keep moving because something reminds me that people might still be saved," he said. "I keep moving because I cannot stand those who would eat children. I keep moving because someone kept me once."
I understood him then in a way that is larger than love or smaller—something that is simply human. When a person saves you and you survive, you become an account holder of debts you cannot repay. You give them back in anything you can: bread, a song, a life.
I am writing this on the road, because writing steadies me and because I want these lines to be a record. I want it written down that in a time when men called their hunger a right and when some wanted to sell a child's life for coin, there were people like Isaiah who stood and said no. And there were towns and markets who watched and judged and did the thing we call shame, and sometimes shame is the only thing that can make a bad man smaller.
We went on. We reached the county at last. I sold my little balms, and with the coins we bought a small space to sleep. People asked me about Isaiah and the children. I said what was true.
"He saved us," I said. "He saved our lives."
Isaiah stood a short distance away, hands idle. Dawson waved and ran to him, and Isaiah scooped him up like a seasoned man and laughed a short, stark laugh, which to me meant we were safe for the night.
"Mother," Dawson said into Isaiah's shirt, "when I grow up I'll be brave like you."
"Don't be foolish," Isaiah said. "Be kinder."
And he was right. Being brave is easy in books. Being kind is the harder thing. I teach my children both.
We are still on the road. I keep my balm jars wrapped in cloth. Kelsey insists on making small necklaces and gives them to the small street boys who have no shoes. I barter, I sew, I mend, I trade stories. When the market remembers Canaan Li's name, they say it like a warning. We eat the bread of that day.
If you ever stand in a market and see a man who thinks he is above shame, remember this: a single crowd can make a man small. And a single righteous man—quiet and dangerous in the right way—can make him even smaller.
For my part, I have been given a second life. I will not spend it on fear. I will buy small joys. I will teach my children the true ledger: to help, to give, to stand.
And when someone asks me who to thank, I still tell them the same name.
"Isaiah Yang," I say. "He stood with us."
The End
— Thank you for reading —