Rebirth12 min read
I Fell Asleep at My Desk and Woke Up in a Thatched House
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"I don't hear you answering, Antonia! Antonia, are you even alive?" someone kept calling.
I opened my eyes to sunlight that smelled of smoke and damp straw. My head felt like it had been stamped on. I touched the back of my skull and my fingers came away with a smear of dried blood and a strip of coarse cloth tied around a wound.
"This can't be the office," I said to myself before I remembered my mouth couldn't say it out loud because no one else was in the small room. The room looked older than the houses in my parents' village—if my parents had lived in a village in the modern world. There was a low bed, a wooden chest for clothes, and a single narrow window that threw a rectangular bar of light across the floor.
"Where am I?" I whispered. My hands—my own hands, I thought—felt smaller and rougher, like they'd been doing farm work for years. My nails were short and stained with dirt.
A woman burst through the doorway in plain, patched clothing and her face lit up like she had seen a miracle. "Antonia! You're awake. Does your head hurt? You scared me half to death. I was only gone a little while—your father came running with you saying you fell off the field edge!"
"I fell?" I touched my head again and tried to pull together memories. Office lights. My coworker asking about dinner. A sharp pain. Then darkness. Then this.
"Eat something," the woman said, lifting a rough bowl with steaming porridge. "You need strength. If the head throbs badly, tell me."
"I'm fine," I lied, because admitting I had no idea where I was would only make her look at me like I was mad. "I can eat."
She chattered as she fed me until I ate enough to stop feeling dizzy. When she left the room to take food to the kitchen, I let my mind race.
I should be in the city, kneeling over spreadsheets and answering calls. My phone would be buzzing with messages—'Still at the office? When will you finish the report?' I looked down at my clothes. Coarse, patched, and small. I wrapped my fingers around the sleeve and stared.
"Is this a dream? Did I pass out? Am I—" I laughed once, a short dry sound. "Am I in a different life?"
Outside, the courtyard smelled of straw and pig, and the sound of someone driving a cart creaked through the air. The woman—my mother, I later learned—came back in and smiled at me, relief on her face.
"Antonia," she said, and something in the way she said my name was tender, ordinary, real. "Don't frighten me like that. Your father and little Mateo will be back soon. Finish your porridge."
I swallowed the bowl and forced my throat calm. "Thanks, Mom," I said, because the name fit and because pretending fit made things less strange.
They called me Antonia in that house, and I answered. The name sat on my tongue like a borrowed coat. I learned my family's names in fragments over the next twenty- four hours, all delivered while carrying water, binding stalks, or chopping wood.
"My father is Alfonso. He works the fields and keeps the animals," my mother said as she tied my hair back. "My name is Emiko. Mateo—" she nodded toward the loudfoot child who burst into the yard—"is your little brother."
Mateo Bryan bounded toward me, eyes full of mischief. "Sissy, you're awake! I found some eggs. I can cook one for you."
"You always find trouble," I said, and he laughed so hard his shoulders bounced. His laugh was the same as any child’s—unconcerned, wide, confident.
They told me the rest between tasks. My grandfather lived with the eldest branch of the family—Carlo Bradford—who would take care of the old man's lands with his sons. There were uncles and aunts scattered across the village and the county: Ashton England and his wife Lindsay Evans with their teenagers Peter Bird, Adriana Richter, and Lorenzo Campos; Drew Teixeira and his wife Claudia Devine with their six-year-old Karl Craig; and Elise Nunes in the county town with her husband Gideon Heinrich and two children, Wyatt Dominguez and Ivy Makarov.
"Hurry," my father said one morning, handing me a sickle. "The sun won't wait."
"How long have you worked like this?" I asked him as we headed to the half-harvested field.
"Long enough," Alfonso said. "And you'll find the work honest if you don't mind your back."
I thought of my old office job, of air conditioning and coffee deliveries and deadlines that ate the night. Now my back bent to the field, my hands learned the rhythm of the sickle, and sweat mapped itself to my skin. It was hard, simpler than any spreadsheet, and every hour filled by the sun felt like a quiet penalty or blessing. I kept my old memories close like a secret weapon.
"Don't tell everyone you fell like a city ghost," Emiko would joke when other women came by. "You scare them."
When I first saw the small yellow-and-white flowers on a low bush by the riverside, I didn't know their value. Mateo pointed and said, "They smell nice!"
I picked a few for the house without thinking, and we steamed them and laid them on flat stone to dry. "What are those, Antonia?" Mateo asked, fascinated. "They look like sugar flowers."
"They're honeysuckle," I told him, surprised that the word came to me. Old books, a half-remembered blog, the face of a female botanist in a video flashed like a ghost. "They can be made into medicine—if you dry them right."
"Medicine?"
"The village had a scholar once who taught some of us basic things," I lied, because the truth—that I watched cooking shows and had a library of random facts—sounded like madness. "Go steam the rest, but be careful. Lay them thin."
Mateo obeyed like a soldier assigned to a mission, and by the end of the week we had a handful of neatly dried flowers stacked in sacks. When my father said he would try to take them into the county to sell with the rice, my heart jumped with the strange, electric hum of possibility.
"This is silly," I told myself on the walk into town. "Who would buy a handful of dried flowers?"
The county market was a grind of mud and wheels and voices. At first, the apothecary turned our nickname away.
"We take only seasoned stock," the assistant said, glancing at our rough sacks.
I adjusted my voice. "Please, sir. They’re steamed and dried. We steamed them before drying—see? Clean. My sister—my cousin— taught us the steps."
Something in the boy who handled the scales made him look more kind than the first man. I spread the flowers on the counter and his eyes lingered. "Honeysuckle," he murmured. "Good quality for decoction. We pay fifty coins per jin."
"Fifty?" My heart provided its own translation—one jin is a measure I understood from the rice carts; fifty is more than a sack of corn. I looked at Alfonso. He nodded.
"Take it," he said.
We left the shop with a small paper envelope heavy with coins. I folded the metal in my hands for a long while.
"Buy sugar," Mateo said, eyes huge.
We bought sugar and a little sticky candy and walked back to the village like we were carrying a treasure chest. The money sat between us like a map to something new. That night I cooked rice with a spoonful of sugar and a bit of fat and leaned back and tasted the future.
"We should do more," I told Mateo after the meal. "We could gather the honeysuckle properly—teach the others how to steam and dry it."
"Can kids do this?" he asked.
"We can teach them," I said, and my voice sounded like the beginning of a plan.
Days folded into the rhythm of the season. The harvest required everyone. We cut and bound and threshed and stacked. I learned to swing a bundle so it landed perfectly on the cart, to use the proper angle when striking the beetle of the threshing frame. The field stopped being a foreign instrument and became a language I could read.
At night, when the lamps were low and the house breathed as one, I would check the seeds I had started in my room—an experimental patch of mushroom substrate that I had tried to mix from old notes I kept in my mind. I pressed cobs of dried corn cobs and bran and ground them to a pulp, added just a touch of lime and sugar and placed the wrapped blocks on the warm window sill.
"If these grow," I whispered to my small, stern jars of hope, "we will not need to scrape by as much."
"I heard you," Mateo said, appearing at the door in pajamas. "If they grow mushrooms, I'll eat them all."
"They will be for everyone," I said, because fair or not, I had learned how community worked. You kept the table full for the table to keep you full.
One morning in August, on a trip to the nearby landlord's fields to collect stray stalks, we passed by two lads being chased by an angry dog. One wore better cloth and the other ran clumsily, but both were young and panicked. The dog bounded after them, slow to anger but set to push them toward panic.
"Come help!" Mateo shouted, and we grabbed a stick. There was a breathless moment where my city memory argued with my body. I could have walked away. But I stepped forward and waved my stick.
We drove the dog off. The better-clothed boy called out, "Thank you! If you want, come to my house—name's Peter. We can repay you with some rice."
"Peter," I repeated. The name was common, but in the market later, when he found us again, he said, "I am Peter Bird, my family owns the Peng estate just east. Come by sometime."
The Peng youth had a nervous smile and a soft voice. When he invited Mateo and me to try some tricks in his walled courtyard, I declined out of caution. There were things here—family expectations, whispered rules—that new friendships had to cross carefully.
In the county apothecary we learned our first trade lesson. "We take clean, steamed herbs," the shop's young assistant said. "If you bring them clean, we buy. If they're raw and dirty, we don't."
"We steamed them and dried them carefully," I told him. "Are they still useful?"
He tasted one, shut his eyes, and nodded. "Yes. I'll pay you ninety coins for this batch and pack your stone plaster too."
"Stone plaster?" Alfonso asked.
"Plaster for softening and coagulating," I said. "It makes the product nicer."
He smiled like he had just seen a small miracle—a farmer's child who knew the steps of making medicine. We left with coins in hand and more pride than the minute value deserved.
Back at home, the house bustled. We saved, we bought small luxuries—sugar and the paper envelope of rice paste—and I used a good portion of the money to buy gypsum for the experiments I had in mind.
That night, I made my first strange feast. By the riverbank, the mud gave up a bounty of river snails. They were ignored by many as a nuisance; to me they were a piece of the market puzzle. I taught Mateo and a neighbor kid to cut off the pointed tail and to purge the mollusks in salt water. We sautéed them in a spoon of oil, garlic, chili, and a splash of home-brewed rice wine.
"Try it," I said, holding out a shell on a narrow bamboo pick.
Mateo inhaled and slurped the snail out like it was the best thing he'd ever eaten.
"This is amazing!" he said, mouth full. "We should sell them."
"Sell snails?" Emiko raised an eyebrow. "To whom?"
"Everyone," I said. "We will take them to the town and—"
"Don't tell your mother everything you dream or she'll worry about it," Alfonso warned, but I could see the glint of interest in his eyes.
We cooked our snails and turned them into a recipe: garlic, chili, a dusting of local peppercorn. When I took a sample into the village and showed it to the elders, their faces lit up.
"What did you call it?" Aunt Lindsay asked. She had stopped by to see the family and took one taste.
"Spiced river snail," I said.
"Then we will take it to the market," she declared, mouth smacking.
We began with fear and a small basket of oil and spice. The town square was a chaos of bread steam and barley and people who smelled like travel and money.
At first no one came. We stood like young hawkers, our breaths forming small clouds of hope. I watched faces. A farmer leaned close and sniffed the steam and then stepped back. An old woman gave the dish a long look and then grabbed a bamboo skewer to test one.
"It’s spicy and sweet and strange," she said after tasting, eyes bright.
"How much?" someone else called.
"Five coins per jin," I said, using the unit we had prepared. We had pegged the price low to draw crowds and high enough to cover oil and salts.
Then a trickle became a river. They pressed forward for samples. We gave one piece for free to coax the taste. The market clapped the trickle of fear from our shoulders and threw coins at our small, hot pot. Shepherds and weavers and traveling tinkers lined up like the tide.
By day’s end we'd sold more than we dared hope. We piled the coins on our little wooden tray and counted. It wasn't a fortune—yet—but it proved the idea worked.
"Tomorrow we bring more," I said, my chest bright with plans. "We will make a small pack, two portions per wooden leaf wrap. We'll take it to the market every other day."
The snails gave us a new life. The honeysuckle gave us savings. The mushroom blocks in my window stirred faintly, threads of white like spider silk spreading through the pulp, quietly promising a harvest only patience could coax.
One evening, the family convened in the dimness under an oil lamp to divide the honeysuckle money. Everyone came because money makes a crowd of family make sense.
"How do we divide it?" Ashton, our eldest uncle, asked. He had a grave tone, and the old man Carlo watched us like a sun watches a field.
"Fairly," I said. "We all helped gather at some point. But father organized most of the work—he led the families. Let's split based on labor and need. Big families need more to feed mouths, but the heart should be fair."
"Fair?" Ashton looked at me like a boy who had learned new words. "You speak wise."
"We'll split half and half," Carlo declared, "and take a small share for each who carried the baskets daily. Antonia, you and Alfonso, take your share. But the elder branch helped by lending tools and carts, so they get part too."
We counted, measured, and told stories as we counted. Money grew into the shape of a promise: extra cloth for winter, a little bag of plaster to experiment with, sugar for a child’s teeth, and maybe—just maybe—one book for Mateo to learn letters.
"Will you really buy a book?" Mateo asked with the greed of all children.
"A book—and not just 'the three-character classic,'" I said, and he giggled. "If we sell enough snails and honeysuckle, we will get the 'three-character classic' and maybe 'the thousand-character text' later."
The money settled among us. I tucked my coin small into my mattress like a seed. Between the honeysuckle and the snails, I saw a path.
"Promise me one thing," Emiko said later, as we lay under quilts that smelled of straw and slow smoke. "Don't forget to rest. You are not a machine, Antonia."
"I won't," I said, and meant it. I had learned the machinery of a different life—where sleep used to occur in the few hours after a night of coding—but here the work and the rest had a clearer rhythm.
A month passed. We became small, local entrepreneurs. The apothecary bought honeysuckle from us again—after learning our methods. The snail stand became a market curiosity that turned into regular customers. The mushroom substrate in my little room burst and, after a frightened week, produced pale caps the kids called "little white umbrellas." I sold the first harvest raw in the market to a traveling grocer and used the coins to buy more plaster and sugar.
"Antonia," Peter Bird said once, leaning against the apothecary's doorpost, "you have a knack."
"Luck," I answered. "Mostly stubbornness and the way you can smell a market when you look like you belong there."
He smiled at that and left.
Word moved quickly in small places. Families in neighboring hamlets heard of the money. I heard whispers that the goldenseal bushes would next season be picked by everyone. The old patterns slipped like mud from a cart wheel.
"They won't stop us," I told Alfonso one dusk, when three candles had almost burned to stubs. "We did the work, we steamed the flowers the right way, no one else had the patience or the method."
Alfonso put his rough hand over mine. "Then next year we work faster and better."
"Yes," I said.
"Keep the recipes secret," Elisabeth—my Aunt Lindsay—teased once. She liked the drama of secrecy and the smell of spice. "Teach the step-by-step only to the people you're willing to share a bowl with."
"We'll teach those we trust," I promised.
We went on. Seasons rolled with the steadiness of a wheel. Each harvest, each trip to the market, taught me more about trading, about how a price can be a kind word, and how a little kindness in the apothecary's back room opens doors. I learned to soften finances with small acts—a free sample here, a child's skewer there—and watched old patrons return like predictable tides.
"What will you do when the mountain's flowers are gone?" Drew Teixeira asked me when he helped stitch up the drying racks.
"Make more things," I said. "Trial more mushrooms. Try fermented beans. Teach the children to read."
"You are an ambitious one," Drew said. He rolled a thumbs-up. "Keep your ambition. It feeds the table."
I did not know then what my future would be. I only knew the measure of a season and the weight of a coin. I knew how to hold a sickle, how to steam flowers without burning them, how to cut a snail's tail cleanly and turn it into something a stranger would want to pay for. I knew that in this life my hands would always be callused and my head sometimes giddy with too much hope.
And on windy nights when the lamp wavered, I would take Mateo's small hand and read to him the three-character classic, sounding each syllable out as best as I could. He slept with a smile. I slept with the taste of sugar on my tongue and a pocketful of small coins whispering like river pebbles against fabric.
I had come through a door I had not expected to find. The city I once lived in felt far like another country. Here, on the plowed soil and in the apothecary's dusty light, I had learned how to plant a life and make it grow.
"Tomorrow," I whispered to the dark, "we will take more snails. We will dry another sack of honeysuckle. We will make a bigger plan."
"Good," Mateo murmured from the next bed. "And if the mushrooms grow bigger, will you save one for me?"
"I will," I promised.
And the next morning, before the sun cut the edge of the fields, we were already at work.
The End
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