Rebirth13 min read
I Became the Village Nobody — Then I Found a Broken World
ButterPicks136 views
I remember the slap of the earth beneath my palms, the stupid clack of a heel against a stone, and then nothing like logic at all. One moment I was late for a night shift at a convenience store in the city; the next I woke up as the village girl everyone called "the fourth." My name here was nothing. My name here was the shoulder for everyone else to lean on. My thoughts were mine, but my body belonged to a family that would rather feed their pigs than feed a child.
"You're awake," my body—my voice—said. The voice that came out of my mouth was smaller than I felt. I looked into a cracked copper basin and saw a face thinner than I'd ever been in my life. My hands smelled of smoke and dirt. My spine remembered a lifetime of leaning over rice paddies.
"Who are you?" a tiny, weary voice asked, and it was my very modern, very sarcastic inner self answering: "I am Leia Beasley. I fell down a stone. Also, where is my hoodie."
There was a voice that wasn't mine and didn't belong to any of the villagers. It was an old, dry humor that belonged to another time. It announced itself in my head like a grumpy roommate.
"I am Jensen. I am what was left of a shard," it said, and then the space around me hummed like a glass bowl being rubbed. "You can call me Stone if you must."
"Stone," I muttered, because repeat names help when your head is splitting. "Explain."
"Fine. You were a reader of stories. I am an heirloom of a god. A shard of a small world hit by sky lightning. Pieces scattered. Some found bodies. Some found graves. You, apparently, inherited one of the pieces. If you drink the spring, we expand the space. If the fourth bleeds, the shard answers. You will have trinkets, a tiny house with five floors of treasure, and the ability to practice 'chaos root'—but do not expect miracles in a place where air itself is stingy."
"Great," I said aloud. "I fell through the universe and got a storage unit. Can I open a savings account?"
"Stop being flippant. This soul fusion is not stable unless she—this body—drinks from the spring and does the ritual. Hurry, she likes to bump her head."
She did. Everyone in that family somehow loved a slam of fate. Another girl, a village big-shot in red and gray, called out to the pigs near the mountain path. "Four, you woke, but you better move. No one waits for lazybones today."
I felt something like a bruise on my forearm: the memory of another woman, laughing as a child bent double with a basket of straw, eyes not seeing her. I understood then: I was inside someone who had been born under the weight of other people's expectations.
"Jensen, you said 'chaos root'?" I asked when I could breathe without gagging.
"Yes. You are a mixed-root. That means you get to learn faster. That also means the world's ambient breath—its spiritual energy—is thin. Your body needs to train inside this little world if you want to make anything bigger."
"Okay. Start small," I said. "Teach me to not be a door mat."
"Already teaching," Jensen said dryly. "Sit, fold your legs, recite. Five elements. Gold gives water. Water gives wood. Wood gives fire."
"You're supposed to whisper," I protested.
"You're supposed to be focused," Jensen answered. "You are not. But you have stamina. Use it."
So I used it. I studied everything hush-hush in the mountain solitude while my borrowed family went about their day as if the sun owed them chicken bones. The tiny house—our little treasure trove—was ridiculous. Top floor, five layers of books and weapons and things that would have been antiques in my old life. This was the part of the world that made my chest ache and my grin spread like wildfire.
"You will not sell the books. You will learn," Jensen went on. "You can make pills. You can train. But you must find the other shards. Some people do not die when worlds fold. They are trying to get home."
"People?" I said, looking at the ceiling where moonlight sliced through the rafters. "Like who?"
"Like Evangeline and Fernando. The two who once were your comrades. One will come."
And one did. A moonlit morning the valley smelled like cold tea and burned wood, and a woman arrived who made the air colder when she passed. She wore a thin robe like something from a stage, and she moved like water meeting a cliff. She looked at me like she had missed someone familiar.
"You are Leia?" she asked, but she didn't use a question. She used a memory.
"Who are—"
"Do not play at ignorance," she said. "I am Evangeline Wagner. We were friends where you came from. I took a piece. Do you have another?"
"My storage unit?" I asked.
She handed me a fractured, glittering pebble and for five seconds I saw a flashing field of stars and heard thunder that was not the weather.
"Keep it safe," she said. "And keep your mouth shut. We will need it to go home. For now, teach me your small tricks and I will show you some manner of dignity."
"Also, who exactly are you?" I asked.
She smiled, and even the smile had a blade.
"Someone who will take what you steal," she said, "and make it a map."
We made a bargain: I would train under her quick eyes and use the space to raise my "stamina pockets" for the family that was not my family. They were, by virtue of being the battered, the ones I aimed to protect. Evangeline stayed in a cave above, teaching the three boys she called "students" how to hold their legs like a tree and their teeth like mountain stone. The boys—Josiah Zhu and Jett Nakajima—were two more of our household; they had been dull with tiredness and alive with hope. The little brother, Cruz Tang, was the one Evangeline picked to be a disciple. He had the round, open face of someone who would fight for a smile.
"Don't sound so giddy," Evangeline told me once. "Teaching kids is heavy work. They break bones. They also break hearts."
"Good," I answered. "I prefer fixing to breaking."
The village bent and gossiped. People thrust their noses into other people's soup bowls and into talk. Kiara Clark, the village chief's daughter, was relentless in her looks. "You were awfully spry for a girl who was struck senseless," she spat one morning as she passed the straw huts.
"Terrible timing for spring allergies," I said. "You'd do well to water your own ego."
Kiara's eyebrows narrowed. She walked like someone lined up to collect a fortune. Her circle of friends followed and tittered. And so the wheel turned.
I trained when I could. The little world Jensen gave me expanded when the right rituals were done, and my muscles remembered city runs and late-night shifts in more useful ways. I taught the boys to read the few characters of "the thousand-word primer" and to use a wooden staff like an extension of calm. The village's life was the old life in a new skin: worry, harvest, and rumor. The rumors stuck to people like clay.
"Do not ask them to be decent," Evangeline said once while sharpening a blade. "Ask them to be useful."
"That's what I'm trying," I said. "Usefulness beats sympathy."
Weeks turned into seasons. I learned to make crude pills—'small cure' pills that could stop bleeding from a farmer's gash, 'mend-throat' pellets for coughs. We sold a few things, quietly, gave some away. I kept my treasures in the space and watched the world outside keep its sharp edges.
Then the wedding happened.
"Ten taels of silver," my grandmother announced with all the importance of a crown. She believed in numbers like scripture. "Ten taels, and then the boy may be married. He is strong enough. We shall take the money. Be grateful."
This was the pivot. I had watched this family hand themselves away piece by piece. Now they were bargaining over the one coin that could buy them air.
The groom's family—led by the tall, pragmatic man Dempsey Carey—came by solemnly. He was a hunter's son who didn't flatter and didn't need to. There were polite bows and the clatter of teacups. His father, the stern Ramon Bean, passed a heavy weight full of silk and said the words that the village recorded like a bell.
They had offered more than the village could have imagined.
"Ten taels?" my grandmother said, and the way her fingers fluttered told me that the money was real.
"Ten," Dempsey said quietly. "We will bring them for the bride's household."
We worked the whole morning and the whole night. The village was a violin of movement. Old men told long stories and women arranged plates that always looked the same—meat, rice, something sweet. The family that had long ignored the fourth daughter now polished the house as if a mirror could reflect new favors.
"Do not be gone," my brother Josiah begged, because he knew what this meant. "They will give it all away. Keep close. Do not let them make you small."
I had an idea. I had something the village had not seen: a shard that could show what people had done, not just say. Jensen made it pulse, and it hummed like lightning bottled in glass. I carried it to the middle of the courtyard while voices rose and fell.
"Listen," I said into the bright air, "and watch."
I did not tell them what would happen. I do not like to give the stage to cowards who hide behind smiles. I set the shard upon the stone slab and struck my hand against the cold metal rim.
"Jensen, show me every whisper in the rooms of those who called for marriage," I whispered.
The shard trembled. Light flared. And then the faces around me—the women, the men, the children—watched the truth happen. The shard projected memories like lantern smoke: my grandmother counting coins and humming over them like a moth; my sisters-in-law whispering to a neighbor about how the bride would bring a silver chest and how "it would be so easy to keep a tenth." It showed a cousin, Kendra Cook—no, Kendra was my mother; I keep her safe—arguing to pocket some of the extra food each harvest while saying she did it for the household. It showed the village's own Kiara Clark sneering as she watched my supposed fate being negotiated like a sale.
The courtyard's chatter dissolved into a thin, wet silence. People leaned forward like men who need to find a wound to see if it is theirs. Some thought the shard was a trick of light, some could not breathe because they saw what they'd already done.
"Is this—" someone began.
"This is their mouth," I said. "It is not us that is telling tales. It is their hands and their words."
It lasted a long minute, maybe five breaths. The light showed my grandmother’s fingers greedily closing on a pouch of coins that did not belong to her family and the sorting—who would get what—like kitchen knives laid out.
Then the courtyard exploded.
"She lies!" my grandmother cried, but the light did not lie. Her voice fell into a sound like a man falling down the stairs.
"Show—" someone from the groom's side tried to speak.
"Enough," Dempsey said. He had seen enough village negotiation to know when an offer was bait. He folded his hands, the way a hunter folds his bow. "If this is what you do, then take your money back."
"Back?" my grandmother sputtered. "We accepted!"
"You accepted the show of hands and not the hands themselves!" Dempsey answered. "You accepted without consulting some of your own. This is a family matter."
"Is it?" Kiara Clark laughed a laugh that tasted like soap. "Isn't it always the women of poor houses who must sell and be sold? Isn't that how you feed the pigs?"
I heard a child gasp and then someone laugh nervously like a rusted hinge. Grown men stared at my grandmother as if she had dropped a blade. Old neighbors who had nodded at me like a slow wind were suddenly sharpening their tongues into spears.
"Stop," my grandmother barked, but as she reached for the pouch that Dempsey had placed on the slab, a crowd formed. They were not near enough to touch her, but they were close enough to name her.
"All fall silent," I said. "Listen."
I pulled a spoon-sized vial from my pocket—one of my crude pills. "These are things I learned," I said. "I made pills for a fever last week and gave them to your laboring hands. I have no claim on your money. I do have a claim to fairness."
"Fairness?" she snapped, mouthing the word as if it was unfamiliar. "You little witch, what do you know of fairness?"
"You know how many times we have pretended she is a shadow and not a child? You know how many times you chose comfort over blood?" I spoke to the people then, not just to my grandmother. "Look at what you will say to your memory when you are old. Will you be proud to say you kept a girl because your hearts were gold? Or will you be proud to say you kept a coin because you could not bear the thought of less for yourself?"
The crowd shifted. For the first time I saw the faces I had never seen: the ones who tasted honesty and could not stomach false words. Someone walked forward—Isabella Collier, the apothecary—old hands, younger eyes. She had tucked away a note of all the odd things she'd seen in the village. She stood with a bundle of dried herbs in her hands.
"These are things you do," she said to my grandmother. "You trade the weak for bread, then call it mercy. You keep nothing but the noise of your palms. We watched the boy's family carry a burdensome gold box here. We watched you count and then reach. We cannot unsee."
A hiss rose. The courtyard was a pot about to boil over.
My grandmother's face, which had always been full, colour and appetite, went blank with something like someone who had been caught picking a hole in the sky. Her lip trembled. She looked at the people who ate under her roof, then at the pouch.
"You—" she began. Her voice cracked as if she were a man who had rested a heavy sack on his knees for many years and had been told to stand.
"Take it," Dempsey said. "Return what you cannot give with permission."
My grandmother's hands scrambled. She snatched the coins and then, in front of the entire courtyard, dropped to her knees. The wooden beads of the prayer chain around her neck clicked like small, cruel clocks.
"Please," she said. Her voice was not defiant; it was the voice of a woman who had lost the courage to hide.
"Beg?" Kiara hissed. "Beg for what? For forgiveness? For coin?"
My grandmother's eyes went from sharp to glass. "Please," she repeated. "I did not know I had done so wrong. Please—"
The crowd changed like the weather. At first a silence of incredulousness—"How could she do this?"—then the slow stir of a public spectacle: murmurs, whispers, a woman pulling a shawl up to hide her smile while the neighbor took a coin and recorded the scene with charcoal on a scrap of paper as a memory. They had no cameras, but they had mouths and hands and gossip that could be sharper than any tool.
"Stand," I said to my grandmother, simply because letting any soul kneel for greed without facing the gaze of the world would not end it. She stood. Her knees ground at the wood; the air smelled of old rice and sudden shame.
"Do you deny that you planned to keep the silver?" I asked, and it felt like a trial but without lawyers.
"No," she said at last. "I thought—"
"You thought you needed it, and you thought the world owed you a stomach," I said. "You used my life as a ledger, and you used a girl's days like a ledger."
Her face crumpled. She had never been a villain to herself. She had been the protagonist of her own small, sharp story of survival.
"Stand before them and tell them," I told her. "Tell the whole village."
And she did.
It was long—five hundred words at least, not that anyone counted then. She told how she'd been given a life where threats were currency, how the village had learned to trade away softness for sustenance. She told how greed had grown like mold in the dark cupboards of a household that was never warm. At first the people leaned back in horror; then they leaned in as the liar who had taught them to lie confessed. They had never been asked to hear the sound of their speaker's own shame.
"You were proud," she said, voice dwindling. "I was proud. We called it prudent. We called it caring. I wanted a seat of respect when I had been given a life with no mercy. I wanted what they had. I took and I hid."
The courtyard had watchful eyes. Some drops fell from a woman's cheeks—not pity, not exactly, but a thing shaped like finality. Others shook their heads and said the single thing old men say to wrong the world: "We always suspected."
My grandmother tried to touch my hand. I did not step back or forward. The village time slowed, like wind over a bowl. She moved from defense to pleading to denial to crumpling.
"Forgive me," she begged. Her voice mirrored the stages of a man who had expected wealth to be a cure. "I would not know how to give things back."
"Then do the work," I answered. "Undo what you can. Share what you must. Teach your hands to give more than they take."
People began to clap—not the joyous clapping of celebration, but the sound a crowd makes when a confession overflows to become action. They moved to the piles of food and to the family chest and began to divide. Some set aside a share for the bride, some for the groom, and some for the poor men who had not eaten well that season. They placed the coins into cloths and passed them to Dempsey's side.
My grandmother stood there like a person who had had a mirror smashed and then been handed the shards. She vibrated with shock, then with the strange calm of those who survive public collapse. Her face passed through colors I had never seen on anyone: anger, then shame, then the slow, ridiculous relief of one who had been unburdened.
At the end of it, she sank into a low crouch on the steps and sobbed. People stood and watched and recorded and whispered and then left as people do—life must go on. Some followed to help; others stayed away.
The punishment had been public. It had not been violent. It had been worse: it was the public unmasking, which often corrodes people more cleanly than any beating. The hardest part was the change in my grandmother. She had been the matriarch who ruled by small cruelties. Now she was the woman who had to face every eye she had previously demanded.
She begged me at last, voice like dry paper. "Please, teach me," she said. "Teach me to do right."
"Start by making the soup tonight for those who have no pots," I said. "Start by teaching the boys to read a line or two. Stop hoarding. Share the bed covers with the cold ones. And stop making children into silks you can trade."
She nodded until her hair shook. The crowd dispersed. The wedding still happened, but like a tree that had lost its leaves in one storm: the branches stuck bare, but they could still bear fruit next year if tended.
Later, alone, Dempsey came to me. "You did something today I think only a stranger would do and only a family should have done," he said. "You broke the spell at our cost."
"I wanted them to be free before they had to be kind," I told him.
"You did better. You made them feel their choice." He looked wide and strange in the dim light. "You will be gone one day. Go where you wish. I will keep an eye on this valley."
"I know," I said. "Also, I have pills if anyone coughs."
We laughed, brittle and true.
Months blinked into a year like lanterns drifting on a slow river. The shard in my pocket pooled fragments like coins. Evangeline left with Fernando Gonzalez to search for another piece. I taught them how to make a space seed grow into a thousand-year root in one month. I fixed cuts. I taught the boys to read and to stand differently. The house gained warmth because people learned to share it.
When I finally left the valley, I did not go because I was chased; I left because there was a line I wanted to cross. I had a map of the other shards, and we had three pieces in hand. The world was not so vast when you had good boots and a small stone that remembered lightning.
"Keep Jensen safe," I told the stone before I closed the space door. "If someone cracks you, I want them to regret it."
"You are theatrical," Jensen said, but he hummed. "And not bad at setting a room to rights. Go. The world is full of idiots and soft things. Both need you."
I walked out of the mountain into a low, breathing dawn and felt, perhaps for the first time, like someone who had not merely been moved but had chosen where to put her feet.
I still have the shard in my pocket. It is quiet now. I can feel Evangeline and Fernando's edges in it, and sometimes I get Jensen's little snipe in the night. When I fold my hands, I remember the courtyard and the sound of a woman kneeling. When I wind the tiny charm that looks like a piece of a small world, the fragment hums like a heartbeat and I think of a ruined, glittering sky.
And that sound is mine.
The End
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