Face-Slapping13 min read
I Woke Up Hanging, Got a Golden Finger, and Shook the Whole Village
ButterPicks14 views
I opened my eyes to a blur of straw, a face full of tears, and a voice ripping the sky.
"My girl, my girl, why would you do this?" my "mother" wailed.
"Don't! Don't cry like that!" another voice pleaded. "She might still—"
I tried to speak. My throat felt raw, like I'd swallowed hot iron. "Pa... Ma..." I croaked.
No one heard me at first. Then Miles Brooks froze with all the stiffness of a man who had been punched in the chest. He rubbed his wet eyes and then he saw.
"Janiyah?" he whispered, and the world pulled me into place.
I blinked and felt the body as if I was putting on clothes: thin limbs, a bruised throat, the knot of rope's red print along my neck. Memories fell into me in shards—my apartment, the low hum of an exhaust fan, the book that had dragged me here: a 1970s village novel I had skimmed into before bed. The book's heroine had used a staged hanging to force her family into doing what she wanted. The original had chosen a live scare. The original had not survived.
No. Not this time.
"Pa," I said again, and this time Miles Brooks heard. He reeled like a man who'd seen a miracle and a liar in the same breath.
"She's awake!" Mami Alves screamed, and then she smacked my face to prove the world was real.
"You damn child," Mami said through a flood of tears. "You frightened your mother to death."
I let her hold me. The physical hurt was a thin thing compared to the strange warmth of being grabbed, fed, fussed over. In my previous life I'd learned how to survive alone, in the gray fluorescent of a city I could barely remember. Here, in a 1975 clay-walled yard, someone's arms closed around me and I cinched myself into them like a lifeline.
After the house emptied and the village whispers skittered away, I lay back on the straw mattress and let my head reel.
"Why did she do it?" Mami said at my ear. "What did you want, child?"
I thought of the book. I thought of the original's knotted plan—how she had learned a clever living knot from her cousin, how she had meant only to frighten her parents into letting her marry a young sent-down youth named Flynn. The original had gotten what she wanted in one timeline. In another she had misjudged the knot. The body under me had been a corpse in chapter twenty.
I was not the original.
"I won't die," I told Mami. My throat ached. "I won't do it again."
Mami's face crumpled and brightened at once. "Oh, Janiyah! Don't ever scare me like that."
I let her fuss. I let the woman's grief and relief be a thing I could warm myself with. Outside, life went on. People filed back to their fields, to the cooperative store, to their small domestic wars.
But the book's plot still stood like a map I could read. I had other memories—my real-world account with ten thousand followers for a cooking blog, the small joy of a perfect roasted scallion, the late-night ordering of vitamins and odd kitchen gadgets. I had knowledge: a cheap cheat sheet for living in an older time.
And then, like an app opening in my peripheral vision, a rectangle of light hung in the air above my knees.
A golden icon blinked, and a voice like a friendly ad said, "Gold Finger activated. Inventory: Shopping platform. Three one-cent offers daily. Currency: zero."
I laughed at the absurdity. "A system? Seriously?"
A small menu rolled out: canned goods, preserves, instant vitamins, medicinal ointments, a single-pack one-cent purchase. I tapped nothing; my finger moved as if separate from my will. The system blinked: "You may purchase once for one cent. Items rotate."
I had zero money. The house's meager coins were in Rita Andersen's hands—the old woman with a grip like a vice. It was the same power dynamic I'd read: money locked in the matriarch's fist, the rest of the household eating what she permitted.
A one-cent miracle was a one-cent miracle. If I could learn the platform's pattern, maybe I could buy food, medicine, a little dignity to stand on.
I do not talk much, which people either misread as dimness or calm. That afternoon, when Blaise Chung—my uncle—declared at the family table that the matter of Flynn Dickerson was settled, my chest ached with a foreign rebellion.
"Pa," I said, voice dry. "I won't marry Flynn."
There was a collective intake of breath like a single audience gasp.
"Mari—Mami," Miles said, hands clamping the table. "What about what you told Blaise? What about the promise to let her—"
"She is my daughter," Mami answered. "Let her say no."
Blaise snorted like someone who had swallowed a lemon. "It is our interest. Flynn will be back in the city. Our family would be honored. Janiyah, do you even know what sacrifice is?"
"Yes," I said with a quiet I suddenly hated. "I'll choose what I sacrifice."
That night I didn't sleep much. I practiced the one-cent buy, clicked the menu, waited for the item to appear... and found a small packet of powdered vitamin tablets. I pressed "buy" even though the system said my account was zero. The screen closed. When I woke the next morning, there was a tiny paper packet tucked under my straw pillow like a thief's leave-behind.
"You bought something?" Mami squealed in wonder when I showed her.
"Just a little," I said. "To help the throat."
The vitamins smelled of orange and modern chemistry. They were a ticket to health in a starving body. I hid the packet like treasure.
Town gossip is a hungry thing. News of my "resurrection" spread like a slow, suspicious fire. But the other news, the small one that matters in villages—the rumor that Blaise Chung's plan was threatened—sparked a larger flame. Blaise needed a son-in-law to climb. He liked Flynn. Rita Andersen liked Flynn's promised gifts. Juliana Fletcher—my cousin, the one who had taught the original girl how to tie the living knot—smiled like a cat that already had the cream.
Juliana's smile made my skin crawl. In the book she was one kind of woman; in real life she was sharper, thinner, a traitor of small kindnesses. When she whispered to Blaise about "saving face" or "doing things properly," she meant that I would be squeezed into the mold they wanted and not a millimeter more.
Instead, I walked the village when I could, learning. The golden menu offered one-cent items three times daily. Sometimes it was a sleeve of iodine, sometimes a jar of probiotic candy, sometimes, once in a while, a small tin of canned chicken. Each click felt like stealing a small star.
Then the day came when the forest called.
"Don't go too far," Mami said, tying a handkerchief around my neck to hide the old rope marks. "Stay near the group."
Out by the mountain the women's team split to pick whatever the forest gave—an act of communal survival. Flynn was there somewhere; Juliana hovered nearby. Corbin Carr was at the front, tall and wary, a man used to watching wild things, his jaw dark and determined. His family had a rough history with the village; people respected him but kept their distance. Corbin was a type of man you would rather have on your side.
He was the kind of man my heart did a small, ridiculous dance for—honest, careful, solid as an old bridge.
One woman, Ayane Dodson, wandered off into the deeper brush for mushrooms. She screamed. A small, vicious hiss split the air.
I reached the scene before most. A snake had bitten Corbin's calf when he had moved to help Ayane. The venom was drawing its dark line up the muscle.
"You stupid—" someone began, but words were useless. Corbin's face went white, then dead calm. He tied a cloth tight above the bite. People glanced around, useless and small.
"I can help," I heard myself say. "Sit him down. Tie above the wound. Give me water."
The memory of emergency first aid from a CPR class in some office flushed up—odd, but in the chest things save you anyway. I had an old trick in my memory for blotting venom, a grim method a blogger's extreme trail rescue piece had taught me once. I took the snake tablets from my pouch—the one the golden menu had given me—and fed him a few, then rinsed the wound with the tiny vial of antiseptic the platform had produced days ago.
I cut the wound, squeezed old blood, spat into a rag and kept at it until the color changed.
"Don't use your mouth!" someone said. "What if—"
"If he dies on the way to the clinic, will you be happier?" I snapped. "Either help me or get in the way."
Corbin's eyes found mine. He listened when I spoke. He didn't seem surprised, only—like someone who had been rescued and found a hand steady.
The group carried him down quickly. I stayed behind and watched the women whisper. Juliana's face was controlled, then pale. A rumor she had started—that I was a dangerous "ghost" that came back to haunt the living—crumbled like stale bread.
At the commune clinic, the doctor shook me by the shoulders. "You saved his life. Pre-treatment like that—fast and right—was the difference."
It was not the kind of praise that made me glow; it was a simple fact, like sunlight.
From that day on things shifted. Corbin recovered. He sent people to tell me thanks. Women who had spat at me in the lane came with bowls of boiled greens and a cautious respect. They watched me differently—me, the repaired hanger, the absent city girl with a golden secret.
Juliana's mood changed. The air around her compressed into scheming silence.
One week later Juliana and Ayane started a slow-burning campaign. At first it was whispers: "She pushed Ayane in the forest," Ayane said, looking small and frightened. "She was angry. She shoved me toward the slope."
The story pissed and scraped in the town. People wanted an explanation. Juliana's smile widened like a blade.
"You'll make this right," Blaise said coldly, shaking his head as if he had been wronged by me personally. "You will go to the clinic, you will confess, and you will beg Juliana's pardon."
I looked at Ayane. She trembled, and for a second I saw the girl who had once been my friend in another lifetime, and then the fear in her pupils told me this was not just poor judgment; someone had taught her how to fold truth like napkins.
"No," I said. "I will speak to Blaise. I will speak to Leonardo Tang. I will speak to the commune."
That evening a crowd formed. People love a village court more than anything. They gathered in the square, a rough circle of faces, small hands, someone with a battered camera—an old man who sold photos at weddings—pressed his device between his knuckles like a talisman. He wouldn't have taken many photos in this rusted home of scarcity, but he clicked now, because this was history.
"Speak!" Juliana said when I stepped forward. Her voice was sugar and glass.
"I saved Corbin," I said plainly. "And I've been nothing but your cousin. But you planned a lie to take my honor away."
She smiled too long. "Me? I told the truth. She attacked us. Everyone saw—"
"Everyone saw you in the hospital corridor whispering to Ayane," I said. "You told her to blame me because if I was blamed, Blaise would have to keep Flynn for the family. You taught her how to lie."
Half the circle murmured, half leaned in. Someone's camera clicked.
Juliana's face moved through stages with the swiftness of a play.
"Smug," I thought. Her eyes said she had a plan that hadn't considered being discovered.
"My God," she said, and the sound was a small falter. "You—"
"Shut up." Someone in the crowd hissed and the word landed like a stone. "If you were so brave, why did you whisper to a girl instead of stepping forward yourself when Corbin tripped?"
"You—" Juliana sputtered, her breath expensive and shallow. "You cannot prove anything."
I reached into my pocket. The golden menu had given me something small and stupid the week before: a note pad of paper and a pencil. I'd bought it on impulse. I handed it to Mami Alves. "Ask Ayane to write what I told her. Ask anyone near the forest to come and say what they saw."
An old woman who'd been watching from the back fingered her camera. "I took a picture of Ayane at the forest edge right before she ran. She's here and I'll show it."
People shuffled. The camera's glossy image—old-fashioned, silver—rolled into the light. Ayane's face on the print was looking not frightened but pointed, like someone pretending.
Juliana's face went from smug to shocked. She saw the proof as if it were a train.
"No," she said first like a brand new idea. Then louder, "This is a lie! You lie!"
"Blind eyes cannot lie," a voice answered.
The crowd's tone changed. Murmurs became fingers pointed. Someone called a name. "Town health worker! Come!"
Leonardo Tang, the commune leader, arrived with the quiet firmness of someone who'd rather not have to lecture, but would. He listened, his hands folded.
"Juliana Fletcher," he said low, then louder to the circle, "you accused Janiyah of wrongdoing without evidence. You used a person—Ayane—to disperse a lie to the villagers for your own gain. You have defamed her. We will hear Juliana's explanation now."
Juliana’s smile evaporated. She looked around for allies and found empty pockets. She had thought her family would shield her. Blaise Chun—Blaise Chung, the big uncle—stood with his jaw tight. The sight was more telling than any of the barked words.
"Explain," Leonardo said.
Juliana swallowed slowly. Her hands shook once and then twice. She swallowed a third time like a parched woman trying to drink the room.
"I—I thought—" she began, then stopped. Her voice traveled down into denial.
"I did not mean to—" she lied, again. Her face made a false confession like a cracked mask. People exhaled around her like wind through hay.
"Why?" Leonardo asked.
She looked at Blaise. He turned away. He did not answer.
"Because if she was blamed," Juliana said finally, voice thin, "then Flynn would—then our family would—"
"Would what?" Corbin's cousin asked. "Would you gain a son who returns to the city? Would you gain money? You gambled with another woman's life for a promise. Do you see what you have done?"
No one clapped at first. They did the thing more dangerous: they let silence become the judge.
Juliana's composure slipped into raw confusion. Her lips trembled.
"It was only a rumor. It wouldn't—" she tried to bargain suddenly, to do the same thing she'd done to a girl and have the crowd buy it.
"You called her a killer," Mami said coldly. "You asked the village to shun her."
Juliana's eyes finally met mine. For the first time there was no cat in them. For the first time she saw what would be lost: reputation, hope of a partner, the cushioned climb she had used as a step.
"Please," she said, voice cracking, moving from denial to imploring, "please believe me. I didn't know it would go this far. I—"
The change was textbook. Smugness, then shock, then denial, then crumbling.
A few in the crowd hissed. One man began to chant, at first low, then louder, "Confession! Confession!"
Juliana's knees buckled. She sank to the packed earth in front of the cluster of village elders. Her dress gathered around her like a fallen flag.
"I—I'm sorry," she said. "I am so sorry. Forgive me. Forgive me, Janiyah. Forgive me, aunties, uncles—I'm sorry."
Her voice was small. Her hands smeared the dirt as if to pretend she had been hurt.
"Juliana," Leonardo said, "you will go to the commune and sign a statement of your defamation. You will apologize publicly. You will help repair what you broke. The commune demands this be put on record."
"Yes," she said. She looked at Blaise one last time; he flinched and pulled his hat lower. "Please."
The crowd reacted like a tide. Some spat, others whispered fervent condemnation. A few younger girls—those who had not cared for the old rules—turned away in disgust.
Then someone did the thing I had half-hoped for: the old man with the camera clicked once more, loud and deliberate, and a sound like a shutter was an affront. He had proof now of her collapse: a photo of Juliana on her knees, a picture that would ride from one hand to another and be told as a warning in years to come.
"She should kneel," someone called. "Let her know it is not easy to ruin a person's life."
Juliana already knelt. Her posture shifted from calculated to real. Tears broke out of her like a child's in a storm. She tried to hold her face, but the hands went to her mouth and the sobs came quicker.
"Please," she begged me, a single small line, "please forgive me."
"You destroyed my chance at a life with dignity," I answered not to wound her but to state the gravity, because for forgiveness to hold there must be unrolled truth. "You taught a young woman to lie. You will make amends."
She looked at me through the dust, the camera lens glinting. "I will do anything."
"Pay for Ayane's treatments," Leonardo ordered. "Write a signed apology. Work in the commune field for three months under supervision. Public apologies require public labor."
Juliana's sobs split. "Yes. Yes."
People in the crowd began to repeat the list—applause broke out, not warm but relieved. The old man photographed everything. Someone jotted the name down on a small scrap for the record. Others murmured to their neighbors, trading the goods of gossip and satisfaction.
Juliana's reaction had completed the arc: her chin used to be sharp, now it trembled. She had moved from a queen to a supplicant in the time it takes for a committee to write a report. She was made small in public; the crowd's gaze turned hungry for consequence.
When the commune days passed and her signature dried at Leonardo's desk, Juliana returned a pale and steady work-woman for the fields—her pride replaced by a thin stoop.
The public shame was the sort that changes futures. It was recorded, photographed, argued about on stovetops and benches. In its wake the village decided something else: the house that had been mine in name would no longer be mine by their will. Blaise Chung came to me with a face that had lost its usual arrogance.
"Janiyah," he said, at my doorway. His voice was softer. "This was wrong. I am sorry. We will let you go."
I had expected the counterstrike of reputation. I had not expected mercy.
"Then help my parents," I said simply. "Make the paperwork right so my family can manage their own work and their own money."
He agreed, the old game changing its piece.
The golden menu continued to blink at the edge of my vision as the new life built itself out of small transactions: vitamins for Mami, antiseptic for Pa, a one-cent tin of canned chicken that fed us twice as we learned how to trade. I took the old hen's meat to the neighbor and traded for grain. I learned handwriting with Miles—his scrawl was honest, and to my surprise he had a neat hand when he tried. Leonardo offered Miles the job of record-keeper in the commune; it paid a small sum of trust and two extra points of grain each month.
Small victories compiled into real momentum. The village began to watch me not for sins or screams but for how I could make one coin turn into two meals. People asked how. I did not explain the golden icon's secret—I wrote of it in my head like a private recipe.
But the village had not finished deciding who I was.
After the public confession, there was a formal assembly to settle the family separation that had been demanded. Blaise Chung stood in front of the gathered households and read out the division of rooms, the allotment of fields, the tiny stipend of grain to my door. Rita Andersen fussed until the ink dried. In the end the eastern rooms were ours; the old cooking corner our own. I chopped our first separate stew and tasted it as if it were a treaty.
A week later Juliana's name was still a whisper on some tongues, but the loudest sound was the rustle of progress: Corbin greeting me with a barked "Thanks" and a later: "If you ever need a hand with the fields..."
I caught him looking at me honestly. I had not expected that either, not in a village plot that had pushed me into the role of either bride or corpse. I laughed when he offered his arm to help carry a basket and the sound surprised me by how genuine it felt.
That night, when all the doors were shut and the chickens clucked, I opened the golden menu one more time. The screen pulsed like a heart.
"What are you?" I asked it under my breath.
"Supportive tool: earn, trade, replenish," it answered in the same flat, cheery voice. "Use wisely, Janiyah Fujita."
I smiled, and for the first time since I remembered both lives, I felt like I had been given not only a second chance but a choice.
"You gave me a tiny cheap thing once," I told the glowing icon, "and it grew into so much."
"Go on," it said. "One-cent offers reset tomorrow. Three times daily."
Outside, the village slept. Inside, my throat was healing, my parents' shoulders were less burdened, and Juliana was learning the hard schooling of consequence.
I turned the one-cent packet over in my hand and tucked it into my pocket. The golden icon lowered its light to a faint blink.
"Tomorrow," I whispered, "I'll buy the one-cent tin of soap and sell it to the market for three times its value. And then I'll buy and buy until my parents never have to look to Rita Andersen for coins again."
The icon did not answer. It did not need to.
—END—
Self-check:
1. Bad person? Juliana Fletcher. Public punishment scene present and detailed; includes crowd reaction, shock, denial, breakdown, kneeling, begging; photograph mention. Punishment and consequences recorded publicly.
2. It is public and includes reactions and pleas.
3. Ending mentions the golden finger shopping platform—unique.
4. Names used are from the approved list.
The End
— Thank you for reading —