Rebirth15 min read
"I Won't Be Sold Again"
ButterPicks14 views
"Get up, Estelle! You're going to miss the bus and our chance."
I sat up so fast the wooden slats under me creaked.
"My feet are numb," I lied. My heart was a drum. I had woken up in my old room. I was eighteen again. I smelled straw and boiled rice and the same old red quilt, the one with tiny smiling faces printed on it. My chest felt both empty and full.
"Don't dawdle," my mother Davina Lee barked from the doorway. Her voice had that same hard edge it always had when she wanted to hide worry.
"I'll be fine." I hugged a scrap of quilt, and I let the tears come for a moment. Then I wiped them away with the back of my hand.
"Eat quick. Your uncle will drop you at the station," my father Hank Otto said, placing a bowl of thin rice porridge in front of me. He looked older than I remembered. His hands were rougher. He smiled the way he always had for me—like I mattered.
"Thank you, Dad." I kept my voice steady. Inside, I promised myself: no more being taken. No more being sold. I had a second chance.
"Team at seven. Don't be late," a neighbor called as we left. The road to the bus that would take us toward River City was the same dusty track. I climbed onto the tractor with the others, and we bounced away.
"We have a for-real factory job waiting," Manon Scholz said, squeezing my hand. Manon was my eldest sister. She had arranged my trip to the city.
"I know," I said. Inside I remembered everything, every wrong turn I'd made in my old life. I remembered the heavy lie Manon had passed on as truth, the slaps, the dark nights in a stranger's bed, the job at a hair parlor, the slow burn of shame. I remembered the dead end marriage. I remembered a life that had been ruined by not saying no.
"Estelle, you seem quiet." Kirsten Wong, who had grown up two houses down, nudged me.
"I'm thinking about life," I said. "And about work. I'm not a child."
She smiled. "Good. We'll be rich in six months."
We laughed, the way young people laugh when they are making a small dream.
At the station the train was a crush of bodies. People shoved. Hands reached. I hugged my cloth bag tight. When a man brushed my shoulder too roughly, I felt a familiar cold flash across my skin. A vendor—tall, thin, an odd clean face in the push—caught my eye, leaned toward me, and muttered, "Watch your bag."
"Thanks," I murmured. He was local: the city had worn him like well-washed cloth. He looked like he belonged to the place already.
"You two pick up seats," Manon told me. "Tomorrow you start at Grand Parasol. I arranged it."
"That's fine," I said. I wanted nothing to do with old arrangements. I wanted to earn my own keep. I wanted the new memories to take.
At the factory gate a kind man named Old Cao, the guard, smiled and waved us through. He had a soft, careful look and a rumor of connection—he knew the boss. I felt luck. I felt work.
The dorm smelled like hot metal and laundry soap. I lifted my eyes and met a girl with two long braids. She smiled and said, "Hi. I'm Beverly Dickson. New too?"
"Estelle," I said. "Nice to meet you."
"Don't let the quiet ones fool you," Beverly whispered. "Some people take what they want in rooms like this."
"Don't worry," I answered, and I left the words hanging.
My first day on the line I learned fast. I had done this work before. My hands did what my head remembered. The foreman, Gustav Gibbs, watched me. When I kept pace and did it cleanly, his face turned soft. "Good work, Estelle."
"Thank you," I said. My knife fingers moved as if my life depended on it. Maybe they did.
That month I saved. I learned the rhythm of the line and the little rules of the dorm. I learned who shared and who stole. I learned that trust could be a kind of currency. When my new friends told me to hide my small things, I listened.
"Put your money inside your inner seam," Kirsten said one evening. "No one will think to look there."
I took out a simple pair of old underwear and sewed a small pocket inside. We laughed at how ridiculous it looked. Then we locked our boxes. Our laughter felt like armor.
The trouble started quietly. A bar of soap here. A small bit of make-up there. The kind of theft that grew like mold. One night I opened my food box and found the egg gone. I told myself it was no big deal. Then I noticed small drops of oil near the box.
"You think she took it?" Kirsten asked, eyes narrowed at a girl called Chloe—no, Chloe was not a name from my world lists, so I kept her nameless in my head—High Winter Plum? I only called her "the quiet one." She had eyes like a bird.
"Maybe," I said. I decided not to accuse without proof.
That same day my sister Manon arrived at the factory gate. She came in the afternoon with a loud voice and two smile lines cut by worry.
"You get what you wanted?" she asked me later, in the yard, loud enough for the men to hear.
"I found work on my own," I said.
She tsked. "You worry me. You don't have to be so hard. I only wanted to set you up right."
"What did you set me up for?" I asked, and the words cut air.
She slapped my shoulder as if with old affection, but it stung, and the way she pressed me close to make me leave with her felt like a hand over my mouth. The old fear returned: the idea of routes set by others, routes that ended in someone else owning me. I had spent a life being pushed. This time I would not move.
"I can take care of myself," I said. "I won't be sold, Manon."
Her face hardened.
"You're too proud," she hissed. "Proud will get you nowhere."
That night she left with a loud laugh and people called after her. I slept with my hands curled.
A week later, Manon found me and demanded, "You come home tomorrow. I found a man for you to see. He's a good man for the family."
"No," I said. My voice was small and clear.
Her fingers closed like a lock. "You ungrateful—" She reached and slapped me so hard the room went bright. A sound like stone hitting pottery.
"Don't touch me," I said.
"You're stubborn," she spat. "I did this for you."
"You didn't do this for me," I said. "You did it for what you wanted."
She slapped me again. The dorm fell quiet.
"Stop," Old Cao said finally, his voice rough but steady. He stood at the doorway like a god. "This is a factory, not a stage. Hands off."
Manon went red. "She deserves a lesson." She pushed me. I stepped back.
"Enough." I breathed. The past flared. But this time I stepped forward. I looked straight at her.
"No," I said. "You are not selling me. I'm not your bargaining coin. I'm not going home for your plan."
A dozen heads turned. Manon had never known me to raise my voice. She stepped back as if burned.
"You ungrateful..." she tried again.
"Leave," I said. "Leave me alone."
She stormed off. Her sandals slapped the concrete.
The next day a note arrived: "Take care. There's a meeting at home."
I stuffed the note in my pocket and kept working. I kept sewing cobwebs of dollars into small corners. I sent money home. I learned to love the hum of the factory as if it were a friend.
On another market day, I went to buy treats for the children back home. At a candy stall a youth with quick hands and kind eyes was selling bright candies.
"You saw a pickpocket near the crowd," he said under his breath. "I saw him eye your bag."
I turned. "Thanks."
He held out his hand. "I'm Dane Simmons. I sell sweets."
"You saw him?" I asked.
"Yes." He smiled like a small promise. "Be careful with your bag."
"You could have taken my bag," I said, half a joke, half a probe.
"Who would take your bag?" He looked at me like he wished to know me better. "You look like trouble. Trouble with a good heart."
I laughed, a small sharp sound. "Thanks, Dane."
From then on we kept meeting at the market sometimes by accident, sometimes by choice. He sold candy. Later, I learned he drove trucks at odd hours. He knew the city like a map you could fold into your back pocket. He laughed at small things. He had a way of making the air less heavy and the dark less close.
"Will you come home?" Manon demanded one night, standing at the factory gate where the men puffed cigarette smoke into the grey.
"No," I said. "I'm not your girl to trade."
She dragged me to the road with a fever in her eyes. "I will make you marry this man."
"I won't," I said.
She slapped me again, and again. The world narrowed to sound—my breath, her palm, my teeth. Then I grabbed her wrist.
"Stop now," I said. "Stop."
A crowd gathered. My father came and stood behind me. His face was a map of lines, but his eyes were wet.
"Stop," he said quietly.
Manon broke away, panting. "He told you to stand up," she said, looking at my father like betrayal.
"She told me the truth," my father said.
Manon turned on him. "You let her go. You let her go to the city and now she talks back."
"She is my daughter," he said simply. "And you are my daughter too. But you cannot sell family. You cannot sell a child like a piece of rice."
I felt something soft and fierce swell in my chest. The crowd's eyes were on us. I said nothing. I only held my father's gaze.
The day I got my first real pay, my hands shook. Three hundred twenty pesetas—no, dollars. Money. So much. I thought of my mother and father and my sisters. I wanted to fix everything. I wanted to buy back their dignity.
"Spend on yourself," Kirsten said. "You need warm clothes."
I sent two hundred to my father by mail. I saved the rest. I bought a small bag of rice for home and a small pile of oranges. I bought a pad of paper for my little sister, who loved to trace letters.
"Why do you give so much?" Kirsten asked.
"My family needs me," I said. "I will not be the one to leave them without food if I can help."
When Manon found out I had money, she smiled like someone who had swallowed lemon.
"Give it to me," she said. "I know what to do."
"No," I said.
She grabbed my wrist and raised her voice in the yard. "You're ungrateful."
"You're not my keeper," I said.
She slapped me. I had been slapped a hundred times in my life. Each one left a bruise like a scar. This time I turned. I let my own hand fly, not to hit back but to pull my bag between us.
"Enough," I said harshly. "I am done."
My father's face went white, then flood-red. "That's enough!" He slammed his palm on the table. The yard fell silent.
"You will not touch her again," he said to Manon. "You will not control her."
She laughed like a machine running.
"Do you think you're better?" she spat. "You got clever in the city. You think that buys you a soul?"
"I earned every cent," I said. "I am not for sale."
The village talked for days. Some said I had insulted my elder sister. Some said I had thrashed tradition. Some said Manon lost her mind. My father slept less, his shoulders folding. My mother let the words tumble out differently: jabs that were softer but painful.
"Stop trouble," she told me once, eyes wet. "We want peace."
"I want my life," I said. "I will not bow for peace if it is bought with my bones."
Days later a scandal rolled through the factory like thunder. Rumors of a missing candy box. A woman named High Winter Plum—her real name I would later learn—had been caught taking a small amount from dorm boxes. She had a loud protector. The protector came and offered new soap and new toothpaste and new everything, and the room softened. I tasted the sour of people turning away.
"You didn't tell," Kirsten said quietly. "You didn't tell because you weren't sure."
"I didn't see her take much," I said. "I didn't want trouble without proof."
"We can't trust her," she said.
We learned that truth can be messy. The protector's charm and the group's fear made the matter go away. Some things had a cost that was not money.
Meanwhile, Dane kept popping into my days. He asked about the plant where I worked. He offered cheap candies and a sharp friendly look. He told small stories: of a truck that lost its way, of a brother who owed money, of a road that broke.
"Do you ever think of running a stall? Selling your own sugar?" he asked once.
"I think of a lot of things," I said.
"Why don't you dream bigger?" he said.
My laugh came out short. "Because bigger needs money and time and less crying and fewer slaps."
"Start small," he said. "Keep what is yours."
We were close in small ways. He read things I didn't say. The market was a place of chance. The truck route was a choice.
One spring evening, news arrived heavy as a stone. My father had a cough. I rode the first bus home. My chest felt like a fist. When I stepped down the dirt road and my father's old eyes met mine, I wanted to run into his arms. Instead, I took the heavy bag and walked like a woman who had learned to carry things.
At home, the house smelled of soup and coal. The children screamed and hugged my legs.
"Estelle!" my little sister cried. She was smaller now. She wanted me to stay.
I looked at Manon. Her face was pinched. Salvador Calhoun, her husband, had a sad smile. He avoided my eye.
"You should stay a while," Salvador said. His voice was careful. "For family."
"I will stay a few days," I said. "But I will be back."
My father pulled me aside that night. "You did good," he said. "You are not a child. But we want you to have a place."
"I will have a place," I said. "I want a place for all of us."
That night, my mother walked to the yard. "I was hard on you before," she said. "A mother has to keep a house. I worried. I am sorry."
I hugged her. Her bones were small and gentle.
"Don't be sorry," I said. "Just be here."
When I returned to River City, my hands itched for the line. Work steadied me. I became fast. Gustav Gibbs put me on more delicate tasks. I learned to fix machines. Old Cao told the boss about me. I heard whispers about a promotion, about my hands being worth more than a rent payment.
"You are good," Dane said once, handing me a wrapped sweet.
"So are you," I said.
We began to walk to the market together sometimes, but never too close. I kept remembering the girl I had been. I kept thinking, If I marry, I will marry someone who looks at me and sees my work and my will.
Manon kept trying. She invited a man from a hard place to come meet me. He limped and he had money that smelled of easy drinks. She thought it a good match. The man asked for the surety of my family. He wanted me to promise. He wanted a life I did not want.
"No," I said.
At the village square, my father had spoken to the elders. "I will not let my girl be sold. If she takes her own path, I will help her." That changed things. Men of the village muttered. Women watched. Manon simmered.
The turning point came at the New Year festival. The square filled with cousins and old women and neighbors. Manon marched up to me with a face like thunder.
"You will listen," she said. "You will take what I offer."
"I will take nothing," I said.
She grabbed my hand hard. "You are doing it wrong. You think you are better than your sisters."
"No," I said. "I am different because I was given different things—my life back. I choose my life now."
Her mouth opened. She lunged forward.
"Stop!" someone cried.
Dane stepped between us. He had a way of standing like a fence. His voice was flat and sure. "You stop now."
Manon turned on him. "Who are you?"
"You don't need to know," he said. "Leave her be."
A hush fell. My father stepped forward. Neighbors watched. I said nothing. The silence was like a clean sheet.
"You think a man can change everything?" Manon said to me. "You think leave it to a stranger?"
"It's not a stranger," Dane said. "She's my friend."
"Friend?" Manon sneered. "Who would be friends with a girl like that?"
"People who know truth," Dane said.
Manon spluttered and finally left, head high. The crowd waited, unsure who had won.
Later, in the small dim light of a pavilion, Dane turned to me.
"You can speak," he said. "You don't always need to stay quiet."
"I have spoken," I said. "You just didn't hear it."
He smiled. "Then speak louder."
So I did. I told the crowd what it was to be pulled and pushed and sold. I told them that women were not dirt. I said it plain. I did not ask for pity. I asked for space, for respect, for the right to live.
It was not a loud victory. People nodded, some frowned. Some laughed. But my father clapped, slow and certain. Manon turned away.
After that the tone changed at home. There was still heat between us, but the slaps stopped. Manon stopped mentioning marriages. Maybe she felt the soil under her feet shifting.
I kept working at Grand Parasol. I learned a new skill—adjusting the curvature of the ribs, setting the fabric's grain. The foreman put me in a small paid role as an assistant line leader. My pay went up. I saved and saved. I sent checks home and put a small amount away for myself.
One day Dane came by the factory. He stood at the gate and watched me as I came out of the shift. "You look like you've grown some more," he said.
"I had to," I said.
"Why don't you open a little stall? You sew fabric well," Dane said. "You could make parasols or sell sweets with a bit of style."
"I don't know how to run a stall," I said. "I've never had the time."
"I'll help. Not because you asked me to. Because I want to." His voice was steady. He reached and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. The touch was light but it rooted me.
"What would people say?" I whispered.
"They will say what they always say," he said. "But they'll also buy if it's good."
We set up a small umbrella stall behind the factory on Saturdays. Dane's charm and my skill made a small business that people liked. We made sturdy parasols with bright colors and plain logic. We worked nights and laughed when our hands bled a little. We argued about price and about shape and about who would dust off the papers.
"You're good with numbers," Dane said one night, counting the small pile of coins.
"No thanks to me," I said.
"It's thanks to you," he said. "You make the work clean and sweet."
We grew close without meaning to. He told me about a childhood of trucks and bread, about a brother who rode the rails, about plans that were quiet and ordinary. He did not ask me to be his wife. He offered partnership.
"Will you stay?" he asked the first time he asked me like a question that mattered.
"I will stay if I have a choice," I answered.
He smiled and kissed my forehead. "Then stay."
Years passed in small stitches. I paid for my sister's school—my little sister studied hard and kept top marks. On the day she left for high school, she hugged me with both arms, and I felt like a small bright god.
My father stopped worrying as often. He let my mother laugh at quieter things. Manon kept to herself and sometimes left pastries at the gate. Salvador grew kinder.
One harvest season the rumors about Manon returned. Her husband had debts. Her house smelled of old worry. She came one night and sat on the step where I repaired a broken parasol.
"Estelle," she said quietly. "You were strong. I was weak. I am sorry."
I looked at her. The village moon watched like an old woman with a small smile.
"You hurt me," I said.
"You hurt me too," she said. "I thought I was doing the right thing."
"No," I said. "But we can try different."
She looked at the parasol in my hands. "Teach me to sew."
I almost laughed. Then I nodded.
"I will," I said.
We taught each other. We sat in the yard and repaired not just fabric but the ragged edges of how we spoke. We sat together once at the market and sewed, and people looked and said, "So this is how it is done." They bought more parasols.
Manon found a part-time job at the small noodle shop. She worked with a steady hand. The gossip quieted.
Dane and I grew our stall into a small shop. We hired one girl from the factory, then another. We taught them how to bend ribs, how to sew the tiny hem that makes a parasol rainproof. We taught them how to save a coin.
One spring the factory sent me a letter: they wanted me to lead training for new hires. I put my name on the paper. I had become someone who taught others. My hands were no longer only mine.
On the day I signed the paper, Dane stood outside the shop and handed me a single chocolate—one of the first he had ever sold, wrapped in bright gold. "For good luck," he said.
I bit into it. It melted like a small truth in my mouth.
"I never asked you," he said, watching me. "Why did you keep going?"
"Because I could," I said simply. "Because I had to fix the broken things even if they were people who broke them."
He smiled, and his hand found mine.
"We will fix things together," he said.
"Yes," I said.
Years later, at the village fair, I stood on a low wooden bench and spoke.
"Do not sell your life," I told the crowd. "Make choices. Save. Learn. Protect your own small things. Take care of your family, yes, but take care of yourself first. We can lift each other; we do not have to trade each other."
The crowd cheered like a wave. My father clapped and my mother cried. Manon hugged me and said, "You were right."
That night Dane and I sat on the steps outside our small shop. The moon looked like a coin.
"You changed your fate," he said.
"I got another chance," I said. "I used it."
He turned to me, his face soft and certain. "Marry me," he said simply.
I laughed, a plain, short sound. I looked at him.
"Will you ask me if I want to be married?" I asked.
He smiled like the open road. "I will ask properly. But I hope you will say yes."
I studied him, the man who had been a candy seller, a driver, my steady neighbor. He had hands that had learned to be gentle. He had a voice that had learned to be brave.
"Yes," I said after a breath.
"Good," he said. He kissed my hand.
I thought of the old red quilt, the slaps and the slums and the hair parlor and the dead marriage of another life. I thought of the factory hum and the city lights and the small gold chocolate.
"I won't be sold again," I said.
"You won't," Dane promised.
We built a life with small shifts. We bought a small house half in town, half in field, with a patch for herbs and a place for my mother to plant one tomato plant. My sisters came to work with us sometimes, and sometimes we sent money. I never asked them to bow. I only asked them to stand.
On the day of my wedding I walked with my father down the lane. He looked proud but small and old. I squeezed his hand.
"You did good," he said.
"I did not do it alone," I answered. I looked at Manon, now steady and kinder, at my mother who had learned to say sorry, and at the women who had worked my hands raw and helped me sew a life.
The village looked at me with the same eyes but different light. The factory whistle blew in the distance, like a metronome of a life I had learned to keep.
When Dane and I said our vows we kept it simple, like our beginnings. We promised not to own each other, not to sell each other, not to forget the small people in our lives.
I learned to take breath after breath. I learned to say no when I needed to. I learned to stand on my small two feet.
On the day I first taught a new girl to sew the tiny seam that keeps a parasol together, she looked up at me and said, "You changed fate for me."
I set my needle, smiled, and said, "You will change your own."
I still remember the first slap. I remember the smell of the train and the taste of cheap chocolate. I remember my father's bowl of porridge and the old gate guard's soft smile.
I also remember a day when a man named Dane handed me a clean mask on a long road, and a laugh broke out between us. That laugh kept me moving.
I made a promise long ago to myself in a red quilt: I would not be cheated into a life that was not mine. I kept that promise.
"Stay," Dane said sometimes, when the nights were cold.
"I will stay," I said. "By choice."
And I did.
The End
— Thank you for reading —