Face-Slapping13 min read
I Woke Up in Red: The Bride Who Wouldn't Be Sold
ButterPicks10 views
I woke up to shouting, to the dry sting of sunlight and the smell of wet straw and old sweat. I blinked and the world spun—then steadied into a shabby roof, rickety beams, and the sound of someone crying like their heart had been ripped out.
"Not—don't take my sister! Don't! Please—" a child's voice cut through the noise.
"Shut up, you little pest, get away from my legs!" an old woman barked, spitting duty and greed in equal measures.
I tried to breathe and my lungs felt wrong. My chest ached as if a blade had been through it. I had died once. I remembered cold rain, a knife, and then nothing. Then I remembered everything else—training rooms, silence, knives, the small smile of the dojo leader when I made a perfect strike. I had preferred the dark because it kept things simple.
Now I sat up wrapped in red cloth, face pale and thin, and someone shouted that I belonged to another family's son. They called him the village fool.
"Don't you dare," I said, though my voice felt like it belonged to someone else. People quieted. Being quiet was dangerous in the wrong places, but in the right tone it taught the room to listen.
"Who are you," croaked the old woman stepping forward, the one with more teeth than mercy. Her eyes were hard as broken tile. "You ungrateful thing—this is a good match. A good match! Ten taels never came so right."
"You're selling me like a piece of cloth," I answered. My hands found the wooden ladle near the bed and I drank cold water in a long, wet gulp until the world stopped closing in.
"She rambled all morning," someone muttered. The so-called bridegroom giggled like a child and drooled when he saw red. "S-she's all ours," he said, voice soft and stupid, and the people made a small sound like approval.
The boy sleeping on the mat stirred and clung to a frail ankle. He was ten, indigent smallness carved into his face. He cried out, "Sister! You can't sell my sister!"
"Get away, you nuisance!" the old woman hissed. "This is for the good of the house. You don't speak when the elders talk."
Something inside me—a habit from a life of knives and waiting—snapped. I put my feet to the floor, found a small axe by a pile of wood, and felt a muscle I hadn't used in years come alive. I swung the door open and let the world in.
The room took a breath. The whole yard took a breath. I felt the red cloth over my shoulders like a banner I could burn.
"You want to sell me?" I asked. I don't know how the old fear in my chest became venom, but it did. People shifted; the crowd outside closed ranks like carcinoma.
The boy whimpering at the old woman's legs—Ming Morris, if the name that came to me fit him—covered his face and howled. I looked at him. He was all ribs and courage. He was my brother whether we shared blood or fate.
"You're selling her to my son?" the woman from the other village—Maria Tang—snorted. "He won't handle a clever wife. She'll break his mind."
"Ten taels," the old woman said with greedy satisfaction. "Three already for the match—just sign and bring the girl."
I moved while everyone was still thinking. I pressed the axe's flat end against the rim of the big water jar in the corner. One clean strike and the jar shattered like the house's patience.
Shouts. Screams. Someone grabbed at me; I turned, and with one movement I had the larger woman pressed to the water jar's edge.
"Let go of me!" she screamed. Her son—what a relief to have a stupid man—thrashed but couldn't stand the sight of the axe near his mother's neck.
"Anyone come one step closer and I'll make you miserable," I said. "You sold girls because you call it 'arranging a good match.' You hit the weak and think it is mercy. I'll decide my life."
They backed off like animals before a storm. Fear grows like frost.
A village head arrived then—Joel Garnier, official and slow. He frowned at the mess and took measure of who had authority.
"This is a wedding day," he said, more to placate than to decide. "Women quarrel and families re-arrange."
"Isn't she the one you would sell?" one of the kin spat. The crowd liked a story with a villain and a price.
I laughed. "If you have the money to buy me, buy yourself a conscience. Who put a price on another's bones?"
By noon the rumor had spread beyond the yard. People murmured at the gate and looked like vultures at our broken peace. My arms ached, but not with shame. I went into a yard to nurse the small boy—Ming—bandage a sore, feed a stolen spoonful of rice. I'd taken his life as a promise in that instant.
"Are you really going to keep me?" he asked in a whisper I had been given the nickname for in this life—'sister'—and I said, "Yes. I will keep you."
That day the match was called off. The other village folk went home angry, but the silver stayed in the old woman's hands. Enough had already exchanged and the truth was a delicate thing the world didn't like to overturn.
The second morning I woke to the first crowing of the chickens and a hunger that felt like an ache in my bones. I found Ming missing, then heard his footsteps and the sounds of being bullied. A fat boy—one of the granddaughters' son—was beating Ming for stealing food. He boasted and struck.
"Stop!" I said, and they backed away because who wants their fists used on a woman with a cold expression and a long history of killing in her bones.
I took a path I had noticed the day before. A neglected chicken lay in a woven henhouse, sleepy but alive. The hen was old, but its warm meat would buy time and more. I did what had to be done—quick hands, clean snap—and carried it away.
Ming's eyes widened when he saw it. "Sister—you killed the chicken!" He sounded as if I had done the most terrible thing.
"Feed him to your belly," I said. "Eat. I'll teach you not to let anyone decide for you."
We cooked by the river over a small fire. The chicken tasted like victory because it was stolen comfort we had taken back. I taught Ming how to center a stone, aim with a pebble. He laughed when his first stone hit a branch. He was learning territory.
The next evening a pair of ragged boys came running from the fields with an armful of panic. They brought me a man who had fallen into a hunting pit—a local hunter of little means who had collapsed and couldn't climb out. I dropped everything and dove into that pit, felt my old strength come back in feet and hands, and pulled him up.
I had no business being a healer—my knowledge had been knives and shadows. But I knew how to measure a body's rhythm. I pressed where the man needed it; he coughed and coughed up water. He did not have any name for me yet, but his little brother—Reid Henderson—offered two copper coins.
"You charged him," Reid whispered with the serious face of a child who understood contract.
"I charged him," I said and kept the coin. Money makes hands quicker and choices freer.
"His name is Emmanuel Beard," Reid added, "and he carries a piece of jade he never leaves."
That name chimed oddly with something in me like a foreign song. Emmanuel lay pale and the light made something at his belt shine. He carried a jade pendant that caught the sun. I took note because riches talk, and what closed mouths hold in their pockets is useful.
"Take him home," I told Reid. "I'll see what I can do."
I brought Emmanuel to his threadbare home and found the house smell that old poverty has. He slept and then, days later, he woke with eyes that saw nothing. Those pretty, ruined eyes—my hands detected it as I brushed the sweat from his brow.
"You went blind," I said outright.
The room grew small with that news. Reid looked at his brother with a heavy brow.
"Blind?" Emmanuel faintly smiled; his voice was honey in a jar. "You saved me. I am in debt."
"Debt goes two ways," I replied, and took Emmanuel's jade. I had paid Reid already for the rescue—the boy didn't know the worth of the stone but it would help us buy food and protect us.
A week later, word reached me that the rich household—Mu House—wanted the birds I had captured in the hills. I delivered the chickens and staggered into a world that smelled of lacquer, silk, and power. Servants parted for me like reeds for wind. I had never seen such order.
People stared, and I noticed it. I held Ming's small hand and walked past high doors until a sallow steward—Graham Costa—beckoned me inside. I followed into a garden like a painted scroll and felt the luxury like warmth and cold at once.
From beyond a lattice came the soft cries of a child and then a splash. A young master—Arnaldo Dudley—had plunged into the lotus pond. People screamed; twelve maids babbled in fright, but none moved. The woman who came running was a carved thing of silk and cool will—Bianca Roussel. She was both an accusation and a calm.
"Someone jump!" one servant shrieked.
People hesitated. I saw the water bulging with the little head thrashing. The woman in silk faltered, and I didn't.
I flung my pack down and dove. Cold embraced my skin and I surged like I had practiced in the dark all my life. I clutched the child and pulled him out. I slapped his chest until he spat water and coughed like a chest that had been bruised open.
They stared as if magic had been committed. Bianca walked to me and her eyes, at first surprised, softened. "You," she said. "Who taught you that for a child?"
"An old trick," I answered, tired and wet. "Someone needed help."
She offered money—one hundred taels, and I almost laughed at the number. That's a fortune. "Keep it," I said.
"Do you want new clothes, a bath?" Bianca asked, curiosity softening into a rare courtesy. She had that ease of someone used to being obeyed into good fortune. Her maid prepared a hot bath. For once in a long while I let moss of city life slip off me. I put on a clean robe—still, the smell of the river clung to my sleeves.
Bianca's steward, Graham, later asked if I could provide goods—tea and flower blends. An idea shaped in my mind like a blade: flowers, dried petals, city tastes. Tea, yes, tea could be my way out. It would fit my quick fingers and patience. I could plant a reason to move out of that yard forever.
I told Bianca I'd provide samples. She clapped her hands like a judge giving a quick, approving sentence.
"Bring them here," she said. "If they are good, I'll buy more. If they are excellent, I will make you an arrangement."
The thought of earning a true, free life for Ming sparked like a light in my chest. "I will bring them," I promised.
When I returned to the village with money and new clothes, people whispered. They focused on the red of my robe and the way I'd been carried in like a small storm.
"Where did you get the money?" asked Kelsey Greene, a woman of loud smiles and sharper teeth, who had been one of the many to suggest I be sold. She had a habit for cruelty and for preening. She liked her poison sweet.
"From the Mu House," I said, and the crowd hummed.
"She saved the rich boy," one neighbor said. "They gave her money and clothes."
That same night, the old woman Marianne Friedrich—my grandmother in this life—called a meeting in the yard. She wanted to humiliate me, and she wanted to take back whatever dignity a village might afford her.
I would not let her. The day she dragged me outside, she bragged and cried and painted me as the scandal. The villagers gathered like gulls. Kelsey stood with a folded hand, her face a clever smile.
Marianne began, loud as a bell. "This girl—this witch—she steals and fights and has no shame. She hit her grandmother!" she accused, and crowd gasped because a grandmother should be sacred.
"It was self-defense," I said. "And I will not be sold."
They wanted spectacle. They wanted the ritual of condemnation. I gave them better: truth.
"Who here has seen me with a man?" I asked. "Who here can say I sold my flesh for a coin?"
No one stood. The crowd shifted like barley.
"If a thing is done in darkness to break a child's back and sell a girl," I said, "it is you who sold us all to a ledger. If you ask for proof, I have proof." I pulled out the strips of rope that had bound me the night they beat me. I pulled out the scarred sleeve that had been sewn over a raw cut. The old woman vibrated with fury.
"You—liar!" Marianne screamed. "How dare you! I did what I had to!"
"Did you beat your grandson?" I asked, pointing at her swollen pride.
Kelsey and several others turned pale because the crowd knew the smell of truth. The boy Ming stepped forward and told, with a small voice that became a blade, how he had been kicked and beaten until he had blacked out, how they had meant to ship his sister off like a crate. His sentence was a little arrow.
"Who took the silver?" I asked next.
Faces dropped. They could not all say it was a crime to keep the money. The older sons shuffled.
"You think ten taels buy a girl's life? Ten taels buy your guilty sleep," I told them. "I am not for sale."
Then I raised my voice and invited any of them to follow me to our old meeting place—at the village square where we had the prayer pole and the well. "If you have evidence that I did wrong, let's unveil it now, with every neighbor's eye."
People came because village scandal is a sport. They came with straw hats and gossip.
In front of the square, I placed the old woman's ledger and the list of things taken: rice, silks, the old family spoons. "This ledger," I said, "says who received what. It also notes what never left this house and what the old woman never shared. She took bread, she took wool, and she intended to take me."
Marianne turned to denial. "That's not mine! That is not my hand!" she cried, hands shaking as she pointed to the writing. "I wouldn't—"
"You would, because you already did," I said. My voice didn't shake. "You would sell your own. You already did."
Kelsey—her cheeks tight like a woman who'd been painted to jeer—laughed then. "She's mad," she said. "She's mad, everyone. Do you believe her? She sold chickens and she calls this an accusation."
"Name a witness," I said “or I will spill everything that I know."
The crowd started to murmur. People began to move closer, their eyes bright with presumed entertainment. The old woman bit off a breath and then she did something that made my stomach turn: she angrily insisted on calling the village head, Joel Garnier, to arbitrate. She believed the law would save her face.
Joel came and stood between us with an old expression on his face. "We will hear both sides," he said, the official voice. "This is a fine matter."
He called for those who saw the trade, for those who saw the beatings. Mothers shifted; hands raised slowly. Children pointed. Kelsey squinted, trying to find any detail that might break my claim. Marianne's hands trembled because she hadn't reckoned on witnesses; she had relied on fear to hold people shut.
I had something she did not: the raw, wet truth. I let people speak. I let the people see the marks—scars on my arms, the raw bruise at Ming's waist—and the ledger with the old woman's initials. I had collected stone-cold proof and witnesses: neighbors who had heard cries at night, a woman who'd seen the old lady-bribed marriage goods carried in secret, a man who had been paid off to sign falsified receipts.
As accounts mounted, her demeanor cracked. She blinked like a thing waking from the sun. "That's a lie!" she gasped at one witness who said he had heard the beating. "You are lying for her! You all are traitors!"
First there was disbelief. Then there was a thin hope of escape. "I never—" she begged, then shook her head. People began to record with their phones—new tech in a small town, but there were always a few with a lens. The crowd hummed and someone laughed.
"Look at her now," said Kelsey in a thin voice, stepping backward. "You think you can shame me? I'll tell the truth. She stole our bread!"
People had seen Kelsey's harshness earlier that day. The truth set like quicksilver. On one side, Marianne's anger changed into shock as ledger by ledger, witness by witness, her complicity opened like a folded fan. On the other, Kelsey watched the crowd tilt away from her—toward the red clothed woman who had refused to be sold.
Marianne's posture fell from tyrant into the small, backward cup of a beaten animal. Her eyes burned harder than before—they had gone from cruel to panicked. She took a step forward and then froze.
"Stop this," she whimpered. "Stop it—" She tried to argue, tried to call for law, but there were too many faces lined in the square now to be fooled.
"It was a bargain," she croaked. "They gave me coin to marry her off. I didn't—" She couldn't finish. She was unraveling in front of everyone.
The pattern we needed was simple: shock, denial, collapse, then begging. It unfolded.
"She took our daughter's meat," someone announced—a woman with a voice like cracked bell. "She ate what she should have shared. She sold it—then lied!"
"Marianne!" someone else cried. "You took the silver and left the kids to rot!"
She tried at last to put her hands out. "Please—" she whispered. "Please forgive me—"
"Beg for forgiveness," I said. "Beg in public. Tell everyone how you took bread from our mouths and sold us like sacks of grain."
Her knees buckled. She dropped to the ground and scrabbled. "I'm sorry—I'm so sorry," she choked. "I was cold. I was hungry. I thought of my sons. Please, don't take my sons' food—"
For the rest of that hour the village listened to her confession. They watched as her defense collapsed. They watched her tear at her hair. They watched the old woman try to bargain with remorse as if it were another coin she could tightly clutch. Her voice became a small thing.
Kelsey, who had laughed first and hurled the worst words, turned hot and uncouth. She kept saying, "It's not me— I didn't know—" but the crowd laughed hollowly. Someone took their phone and filmed Marianne kneeling, and someone else filmed Kelsey sputtering guilt. People around them began to clap—sharp, rude claps—until laughter turned the square into bedlam. Others recorded, others whispered. Shame had become spectacle.
At the end of that day no one in the square looked at Marianne or Kelsey the same way. The old woman crumpled into a sorrow that looked like reckoning; Kelsey had been stripped of her social sneer. She moved through shock into anger, then into denial, then into broken pleading. "Please—" she begged like a woman learning what humiliation is. "Don't do this—please!"
People muttered, took pictures, some applauded me like a hero, some patted Ming on the head. The old women of the village came up and told Marianne they knew her greed—how long had they kept quiet?—and then they left.
After that, something changed. The ledger's receipts were returned, the old woman's contracts cancelled, and the ten taels got walked back to the doorway they had come from. The men who had agreed to the bargain avoided my eye, because even they could see that what we'd done was not just to expose the crime but to take back our lives.
The humiliation had been public and savage, but I made sure it was fair: evidence in hand, witnesses at the ready, a lawman in Joel Garnier to accept the depositions. The villains' faces had moved from smug to astonished to pleading, and the crowd's reaction had changed from gossiping to righteous. That was the arc they deserved: their own bad choices shown in the sun.
The day after, I made plans. I had money from Mu House to buy seed and jars; Emmanuel—who had no sight but keen hearing and a jade to prove he had been someone before—offered to teach me a soft craft of sorts: scent and tea. He could blend perfumes and describe the way a petal burned on the tongue. He could help me make tea that tasted like home. Bianca agreed to buy every batch if it pleased her.
Ming and I left the old house for good. I signed the written note with the village head that severed us from Marianne. Ming squeezed my hand and we walked away from a life of being taken.
I kept the jade pendant Emmanuel had worn for a while. It was heavy with other people's pasts. It glinted in my palm as payment and as a story.
When I finally sat by the market stall and spread the first handful of dried flowers, people sniffed and bought. "Lavender," said a passing woman. "And these petals—do they have rose?" She tasted, smiled, and spread the word.
"You're the girl who threw the pottery jar," someone said laughingly as a memory. "You were the one who burned the old bargain."
"Yes," I said. "I'm the one who won't be sold."
The jade made a soft, patient thud in my pocket as if to remind me everything we carry is not only for ourselves. I had come back from a dying place and built something I could keep. I would teach Ming how to throw a stone, and teach Emmanuel how to blend scent from the mountain. Bianca had bought my first samples and paid well. The Mu household's patronage was not servitude. It was a way out.
That night I lay on straw and thought of the village square, of grudges unwound into truth. I thought of the old woman's cry, of the crowd turning. I thought of the day I drowned and came back with a new skin and an old skill.
"Promise me one thing," Ming muttered sleepily.
"No," I answered, and wrapped my arm around him. "I won't promise the future. I will promise to keep the present."
He smiled into sleep beside me.
Above us a single piece of jade at my belt warmed against my hip.
When the wind moved through the eaves it sounded like a clock ticking—slow, deliberate. The world was my field now; I would plant and sell and grow and not be sold again. The pendant in my pocket was a small, private metronome. I wound nothing but myself, steady and heavy.
And in the morning I woke up, took a stone from the shelf and taught Ming how to aim.
The End
— Thank you for reading —