Face-Slapping20 min read
My Hands, the Fire, and a Rabbit’s Revolt
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I woke into a smell of wet stone and cut grass and for a dizzy second I thought I was back in my old dorm room after the sprinkler system failed. Then I opened my eyes and saw white fur, a circle of pink noses, and the inside of a cave that was somehow both ancient and too small for the life that surged outside it.
“Hey—” a tiny voice squeaked. “You’re awake!”
“That’s me,” I said, and when my voice came out I heard something thinner, sharper—like the voice I used to hear in childhood playgrounds, but filtered through whiskers. I tried to move and my body felt wrapped, not in sweatpants but in something that was warm, like a pelt. I sat up and saw a dozen pink faces looking like stuffed toys.
“Are you hurt?” a bigger voice asked.
“No,” I said, and then I lied. My head throbbed with a memory that was both real and impossible: a lecture hall full of blinking lights, a deadline, the sound of a ceiling tile dislodging. Agriculture research. My thesis. A ceiling that became an anvil. Then this.
“You’re Molly,” a small one said, and she jumped up and sat on the edge of the cave bed like a child claiming a throne. “Aurora says so.”
“Aurora?” I tried to smile. My teeth felt odd in my gums. “Aurora Johansen?”
“Who else?” she squeaked.
I rolled my shoulders and tried to recall the map in my head—my real life had been a province of spreadsheets and soil tests, of seed germination rates and nitrogen curves. Nothing in any of that prepared me for a body wrapped in fur or for the sound of dozens of tiny voices calling me leader before I had even brushed my hair.
“Where’s the rest?” I asked. “Where is everyone? What happened?”
“It was the flood,” Carolyn said, stepping forward. She was thinner than the rest, graceful where they were floppy, and when she spoke she sounded like someone used to explaining things calmly. “We almost lost everything. Ian Wood’s men pulled most of us out.”
Ian Wood. The name stretched in my mind like a banner. A chief. A tiger. A solid, carved man—no, a creature who had been carved by wind and hunting and the habit of being obeyed. “Ian Wood saved us?” I asked.
“He kept us whole,” Marco Brooks—tall, serious—added. “You were under the stone. We thought we’d lost the head of your tribe. Thank the old gods you woke.”
“Head of my tribe?” I blinked and laughed. “I was an agriculture student an hour ago.”
“You?” Aurora scrunched her nose. “No way you’re a scholar. You’re all white and soft and your ears are—”
“They’re not mine,” I said. “But if I am—if I’m here—then I’ll need to eat, and I’ll need land, and I’ll need—”
“We have something for you,” Carolyn said. “But first you must promise not to be stupid.”
“Deal,” I said, because lying was easy and I had to start somewhere.
Outside, the world smelled like wet clay and green shoots. The flood had been a blunt scythe; entire clans of beasts had vanished or been carried away. Our band—what remained of my ‘rapid rabbit’ tribe—had been lucky to crawl into the high caverns near Ian Wood’s people. Ian’s people acted like stakes in a tent: strong, angular, a little impatient with softness.
Ian Wood sat above us in a place of carved stone, his fur a bright burnish like sunrise on rusted metal. When I met his eyes I felt measured, recorded. He didn’t do small talk.
“Why are you here?” Ian asked, his voice like a river rolling rocks.
“We need space to stay,” I said. “We need time. We lost most of our burrows and crops. We’re quick to learn—if we have land.”
Ian shifted and looked at the circle of my small people. “Land is scarce.”
“It’s not charity we ask for,” I told him. “A temporary field. We will give monthly food or goods. We can be useful.”
“Useful,” he repeated, and the word floated like a simple coin. “You promise not to bring harm to my people?”
“I promise,” I said, aware of the old oath-mirrors that mimic reality. “By the name of whatever old thing rules this place: I promise.”
He nodded once, like a scale finding the right weight. “Then you can take the terrace to the east and twenty acres below. But you pay a tithe.”
“How much?” I asked.
“One of your first months’ yield, and gratitude,” Ian said.
“Deal,” I said, and the rest of the cave erupted in small, breathless noises. We had land. I held a handful of the soil and felt my fingers go numb with joy. It smelled good—sandy, the kind of soil that would let the roots breathe. My training came roaring back. We would plant radishes, greens, root crops. We would build terraces. We would get to work.
“You’ll need organization,” Carolyn warned. “You can’t expect to teach farming to everyone at once.”
“You’ll manage them,” I told her. “I’ll manage the plan.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll draw the lines.”
And so the first days became small, repeating: lines of fur and claws dragging bamboo, tiny hands making stakes, and me with a stick in my hand pointing and dividing and telling people where to plant and why. We built a series of small terraces on the east slope. We dug with the little claws we had and with help from Ian’s men when we asked. Marco and Ian’s hunters taught the men to lift and place beams. I taught our people about rows, about spacing, about how to let soil rest: the kind of things I had been planning for in a world that had textbooks and deadlines.
We were hungry the first week. The food Ian’s people left us wasn’t much, and my people weren’t used to meat at all. They were soft, raised on roots and leaves, and the muscle memory of fear made them skittish. But they tried. Aurora picked up cutting and cleaning faster than anyone. Carolyn organized the line. Marco showed his strength moving timbers and earned respect like currency.
And then the wolves came.
“They’re circling,” Aurora warned at twilight. “I can smell it.”
“Stay quiet,” Marco told the small ones.
We fought the wolves in stages. First, a few fast strikes that scattered small groups of my people. Then a choke here, a saved body there. Carolyn took the lead as I was still struggling with the memory—strategies that my modern brain should have known but didn’t translate to four-footed beings with different reflexes. She volunteered to distract the wolves, not because she was braver but because bravery in this world looked like choosing place and making scent.
“I can’t let them get to the others,” she said. “If I draw them, you run to Ian.” Her voice was soft but the decision was a blade.
“I will not leave you,” I said.
“You have the seeds,” she said. “You will be needed more.”
“Fine,” I said, and I felt the taut wire of responsibility tighten around my ribs. I turned to Marco and the small ones. “Run when you can. To the tiger line. We’ll draw them.”
We ran and hid and scrambled and were saved by muscle more than strategy. Ian and two of his big hunters—Edgar Barrett and Carmine Bray—arrived with the speed of cat-things and the force of living stone. Ian leapt forward and became a living wall. Sinew and fur met fang and wolf, and the wolves got a lesson in regret.
Later, sitting with bandages soaked and the blood of other things on fur, I said a word I’d been saving for myself: “Thank you.”
“Saved you,” Ian said simply. “We keep our neighbors alive. That is the law.”
That night we celebrated by fire. It was my first time making fire by rubbing wood into hot awareness with my own hands. I had done it as a child to impress a professor—drill and tinder—but it had never felt like anything more than an annoying chore. But that night I caught a spark on a pale tuft of dry leaves. Aurora fanned. A flame grew. The entire cave hummed as if the rock remembered.
“Is that—did you make the spirit fire?” Marco asked, eyes shining.
“It’s not spirit,” I said, laughing, the sound catching. “It’s friction and air and patience.”
They called it spirit-fire anyway. It tasted like beginning. We cooked meat that had been heavy and chewy and turned it into something warm and inviting. For the first time since the flood, my people ate without trembling.
Word of the fire and the feast spread. Not all news is kind in a fragile world. A small arrogance in two of Ian’s lesser men grew like mold. Curtis Farley and Evan Forsberg—both part of the hunting ring—watched from their ledge, cheeks stuffed with lamb, and decided that the food belonged more to them than to the rabbits. Matteo Xu, a large fellow with the appetite of a boulder, joined their whispering, and Fleming Chang leaned over to encourage them.
“They brought meat from us and call it theirs,” Curtis complained later, loud enough for his clan to hear. “They ate salt we gave and made themselves clever. They’re tricking us—using us to build their huts, while leading us to give them meat.”
“Let them enjoy what they like,” Marco said, blunt as a hammer. “You can spare your grudge for something more useful.”
Curtis leaned in like a cat about to pounce. “I’ll tell the whole camp. I’ll show that they don’t share what they make, only eat what they didn’t sweat for. They entice us with food and use us.”
Evan snorted. “Let them see what it is to be cheated.”
The next day five of Ian’s hunters—the ones who fancied themselves fair—went to work with our people, but they found that complaining makes hands slower. They whispered that our food was poor, that the fish were not cleaned, that the radish was bitter. They acted as if every bowl was an insult. Our men—small, proud, and desperate—bristled.
This was the beginning of the lie.
I heard it soon. “They poison the meat,” someone declared in Ian’s common circle, loud enough that rocks remembered the sound. “They cut the fish and leave the guts raw. They sell us nothing but cheap barley while eating our prized cuts.”
“You claimed you cooked it,” Matteo slurred later, already colored with the wine of accusation. “You called it theirs and gave us nothing.”
My stomach dropped into the wedge of my spine. I had to stop them before the rumor became a sickness. The only thing I’d ever wanted was to keep people alive and teach them how to grow things so they did not have to rely on favors. That was my crime: I wanted to build.
“I will go and talk,” I told Carolyn. “I will not let lies take the hills.”
“You should wait,” Carolyn said, cautious. “The men are loud when their bellies are full—watch when they are empty next.”
“I am not afraid of words.”
I went to the round place where the hunters sipped and spat and told each other who had slept with whom. Curtis saw me and smiled like someone who had discovered an insect. “You want to trade?” he said. “You’ve got nice fire and a knack for flavor. But you do not barter fairly.”
“I cooked for Ian’s folk and yours,” I said. “You ate the food and still call me thief.”
“Ha!” Evan cried. “You call us ungrateful. You invited us to eat and now shame us for being strong.”
“You’re twisting things,” I said. “We barter labor and yield. You supplied us meat and salt. We’ve given what we promised.”
“You are just a clever rabbit,” Fleming Chang said, smirking. “A little white fox with hands.”
“Be careful,” Marco muttered from behind me.
I should have walked away. I chose pride and words instead. “So prove what you say,” I said. “Look at our pots. Look at what we serve. Tell me the pieces you claim are poisons.”
“You dare?” Curtis barked. “I dare!”
They picked a fight—we all know those beginnings. A word, a glare, a braid tug. I should have known that some people would rather believe a good story than a small truth. In a world that had been leveled by water, a lie is an easier shape to hold than a mud patch.
It got worse. Over the next week Curtis and his crew went into the camp telling the tale of robbed hunters, of poisoned fish, and of rabbits who welcomed us only to take their goods. They made a case that we were taking advantage, that we were cunning and not to be trusted. Their words slid from ear to ear like oil.
My people tightened. They started giving their portion before the visitors ate. My innermost panic was for the seed-bags and the terraces and for the trust we were trying to build. Rumors spread faster than radish shoots. The tithes Ian expected felt like chains.
I decided the only answer is to show work and evidence. I accepted Ian’s invitation for a public dinner in which both tribes would share harvest and story. I told them we would cook together, but I had a plan that Curtis and his followers did not expect: transparency.
“Bring everything out,” I told Marco. “All your knives, all your salt. We’ll show them the cleaning. We’ll show them the pots. We’ll show them how we made the fish clean and how we used the salt.”
“They’ll accept it,” Marco said. “Some will. The loud ones may not.”
“Then we expose their lies,” I said.
The day of the dinner was blue with sun and smell of rice. We had pulled from the first of the terrace radishes and greens and a small handful of fish from the low pools. We pulled a pig from Ian’s provision with his permission and roasted it, showing how we had cut and seared—cleared, cleaned, soaked—leaving the waste piled where the dogs could take it away. Carolyn and Marco stood as witnesses. Ian declaimed his right to host.
“He gave us land,” I reminded the circle. “He gave us space in his winter. We simply want to celebrate and show goodwill.”
“That’s fair enough,” Ian said.
We began: fire lit, pots boiled, the small tribe watched the cleaning of fish in front of them. I took up a knife and carefully pulled bones, showed the men where the salt came from and how it had been rinsed. I said the words: “This is how we handled it. This is how we kept the fish clean.”
Curtis watched like a fox watching a trap. He sat with Evan and Matteo and Fleming, elbows together like co-conspirators. When the food was half ready, I stood and turned toward the crowd with a steady voice.
“If there is anyone here who thinks we stole your food or poisoned your meat, speak now and present the proof you claim you have,” I said.
A silence spread. The sound of the fire seemed loud.
Curtis rose. “You call your work clean, but my men found bones left to rot in their pots. We found them in their stores.”
“You had your chance to bring them before,” I said. “You said last week you were cheated. Where are the bones?”
“Someone hid them,” Evan said.
“So produce them now,” Ian said. “If you have found what you claim, bring it. We will judge.”
They started to shuffle. The crowd shifted. A few men took out wooden goblets, lips sucking air. “We will bring proof,” Curtis said.
He sent two of his men to the hut where he claimed we had left remains. They came back instantly—hasty, eyes like someone who had been told a funny secret.
“There’s nothing,” said one of them. “There’s only normal waste. Why do we come here?”
“Because they arranged it,” Fleming Chang said. “Because they wanted us to look weak.”
The crowd grumbled.
“Enough.” Ian’s voice coldened. “If you accuse, you must bring proof. If you lie, there will be consequences. You know our law: false speech harms the clan.”
Curtis’ face hardened. He didn’t have proof because he had made the proof. He had fed the rumor, prepared the crowd, seeded distrust. The kind of man who would rather topple a neighbor than ask a simple question.
I stepped forward then, because the chance to stop poison is different from the chance to stop a lie. “Ask them this,” I said. “Who among your hunters stole meat last full moon?”
A ripple of faces shifted. There was a name no one wanted to say, not aloud—Matteo Xu, the one who ate beyond his share.
Matteo went white. “I—” he started.
“Give him his name and tell the truth.” Ian’s paw pressed like a sanction.
Matteo swallowed and then, with the quietness of someone dragged by truth, confessed in a swelling voice: “I ate more than my share. I took from the pile, not noticing my hand was inside the communal place.”
His confession was small, but the effect was like knocking out a wooden column: the whole small room rocked.
Curtis’ face contorted, because he had used Matteo’s habit to turn a grain into a field of lies. Evan and Fleming looked away; the crowd blinked. The truth is a slow-acting medicine and a swift scourge for lies that need soil to grow.
“But what of the rest?” I asked. “Who told you the food was poisoned? Who said the fish were raw?”
Curtis opened his mouth and then shut it. He had no evidence.
Ian’s voice came like iron into cloth. “A public meeting will be held. You will speak your accusations with names and proof. If you cannot, you will be judged for false speech.”
It was then I made the choice that would change the shape of things: I asked for a ritual of accountability in the main square. A public space. I wanted the crowd to witness how quickly lies fall apart when you shine on them, and I wanted those who had been wandered by words to see their false maps crumble.
The next day, the square filled. Two tribes—my small rabbits and Ian’s tiger people—sat on opposite sides. Wind made banners of dust. I stood with Carolyn and Marco at my side. Ian sat in the middle like a judge. Curtis went pale. The men he had gossiped with were shifted to the back like mice.
“Curtis Farley and his followers have accused the rabbit tribe of theft and poisoning,” Ian said. “They have been asked for proof. They have none. They will speak.”
Curtis was the first to speak. He did it like someone reading a prepared speech about the weather. He tried to make his voice climb into righteousness. “They serve food prepared from our stores and hide the truth. We found bones in their pots—”
“And where are the bones now?” Ian cut him.
“They were gone,” he said.
“And who told you?” I asked.
Evan stepped forward then, his chest puffed like a drum. “I told Curtis I found a fish with a black lining—”
“I told you to bring it with you,” Ian said. “You did not. Why?”
Evan’s jaw thudded, as if struck. “We thought—”
“Thoughts are not evidence.”
I had prepared for this. I had printed, in a way only a person with a head for processes could, a small ledger of our exchanges: a tally of fish traded, who had eaten which portion, a list of salt stones given and supper cooked. Marco and Carolyn had spent nights with me checking the counts and the receipts—marks in charcoal on wood, of simple transaction and honest accounting.
“Here,” I said, holding up the little ledger. “This is our record. Every salt stone used, every fish processed, every offering returned. People ate at our table. We cooked in front of them. We invited them. We did not steal.”
Murmer ran through the crowd like wind. Ian took the ledger and looked. He peered and then he nodded slowly. “This shows nothing suspicious.”
Curtis’ face went the color of old bark. “You can make any marks,” he spat.
“And you can make any lies,” Ian said. Then Ian did something that made blood go cold for those who loved rumors more than truth: he called for witnesses.
Edgar Barrett and Carmine Bray, solid as stone, stepped up and laid out the fish bones, the cleaned pots, the burned wood. They showed the public the cooking process and how the waste had been discarded—dog food, compost, nothing to poison.
The crowd watched. Faces that had been coiled like springs let out breath. Children glared. The men who had been loud were called forward and asked to show the bones they had used as proof. They stuttered, they groped for meaning, and the truth sat between them like a bowl of water: clear and dangerously revealing.
Ian’s voice then became the thing is his people most feared. “You have given us false speech. You have broken the law of this camp. False speech harms the tribe. You will be punished in public so that no one else will forget the cost of lying.”
They had lied and now they would be reminded of the consequences. The punishment began in the wide square, with a crowd of nearly three hundred watching. The sun made everything true.
Curtis was called first. He had been loud, fortunate-enough to find men who would echo him, and thus his fall would be the example. He stepped onto the open stone. “I have been wrong,” he said, like any small man caught by his own breath. Then he apparently remembered the need for performance and raised his chin.
Ian held up his paw. “Kneel,” he commanded.
Curtis blinked, then bent, the joints of his knees creaking like old doors. The crowd was silent enough to hear the whisper of a leaf.
I had made sure our small people were out front. I wanted them to see not only the justice but the way lies are dismantled. I wanted them to feel the relief of truth like a hand on their warmed faces.
Ian spoke, and every residue of arrogance slid off Curtis like a coat too thin to hold in the rain.
“Curtis Farley,” Ian said, “you stood in a public place and accused without evidence. Name those who followed. Tell us your sources.”
Curtis flailed inside the command. He first tried to name others, to split the blame like a rotten plank. His voice changed: pride fell away; what was left was a man grasping for one last mask. He told of the many small humiliations, of how he had felt slighted, of how a portion of meat become an obsession when pride went hungry. He tried denial and then rationalization. The crowd shifted—some leaning forward, some turning away.
Then he stopped. He had exhausted his story.
Ian ordered the other men who had echoed Curtis to speak. Each of them went through the same arc: a burst of bravado, a crumble under the light, the attempt to align the self with the truth, and then a quiet, shame-filled drop. One by one they named their lies: they had exaggerated, they had salted the truth, and they had used Matteo Xu’s appetite to dress a claim in false lace.
“Now,” Ian said, “you will do penance.”
Penance in our world is not only pain; it is public repayment and rebuilding. Ian had thought up a punishment that would put muscle behind the apology: the accused would work alongside those they slandered, for three seasons, and they would do so without favor. They would rebuild the rabbit terraces and clear the flood drains that had rotted the older furrows. They would not be beaten by fists but by labor—by the slow, eroding force of honest work. They would kneel and help plant seed and they would stand for their lies at every dawn.
But that was not enough for the crowd. The demand for a dramatic humiliation rose like a tide.
Ian considered the murmurs and then said with absolute quiet: “You will go to the square and you will confess, naming each lie you made. You will kneel before the rabbit elders. You will ask forgiveness aloud. You will be stripped of badges—of hunting ranks—until you prove you can labor without lies.”
Curtis went through the steps as if on a stage. He spoke, and each word trembled from his mouth into the ears of those he had lied to. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was hungry for the praise of men.”
“Do not let this be only words,” Ian replied. “Lift that stone and place it where it will strengthen a terrace. Then come when the sun is low and plant one seed with your hands.”
The crowd watched as Curtis, with slow, practiced humility, lifted a heavy stone and set it into the terrace’s edge. His hands were clumsy—he had never been a laborer until rumor forced him—and the crowd made noises that were neither cruel nor kind. There was the first sound of pity. It was worse than mockery.
Evan and Matteo and Fleming went through their own long steam of confessions, each telling a different aspect of the same small, mean story. Evan’s voice crumbled halfway; Matteo cried because his confessed greed had eaten his sense of belonging. Fleming tried to maintain sterner mien but his voice broke. The crowd did not laugh. They watched, and many recorded with their eyes, like cameras without glass, the exact shape of each fall.
They begged in ways that had pattern: first they tried denial, then negotiation, then denial again, then finally the raw, exposed crying. They got louder, then quieter, then a broken whip of pleading. “Please,” they said. “Please—I was wrong.”
I had prepared not only a ledger but also witnesses. Marco and Carolyn and Edgar and Carmine stood quietly. Our tribe’s elders were there, too. We watched as the men staggered through the ritual. We saw Curtis’s face go from bravado to ash to raw pleading. We watched the crowd whisper. We watched the small ones giggle and then hush because the world had turned.
When the penance was announced—three seasons of labor, and public planting of seed in the central terrace—some of the crowd began to clap. It was not joy so much as the release of a pressure valve. People felt safer. They felt the rightness of public remedy.
Curtis was the last to kneel. He begged. He offered his hands. He cried. He begged to be allowed to keep his bow. Ian put one paw on his back and said, “You will keep your bow only when you can put it aside to heal the field.”
The men left that day to their work. The humiliation—the confession and the stone—spread across the terraces and entered the record. News would be told in the next seasons’ fires: liars had been brought down; they were given work. The public shame had its terrible turning; it made them small in a way that either remade them or broke them.
For three long seasons Curtis and his companions labored. They carried stones, they dug channels that caught rain without washing the terraces away, and they planted seeds under the watch of the rabbit women. The five seasons blurred into one long harvest of sweat. They changed in the way of weather without apology.
After the penalty, when the new terraces held water right and the seeds swelled like promises, a different thing happened: they began—awkwardly, inwardly—to look for ways to help. They learned how to clean fish systematically. Curry and smoke began to carry across the field at noon. The camp no longer had openly declared enemies. That was the point. The punishment had been public, shaming, slow, and persistent. It had forced them to rebuild—and from that rebuilding came, for some, a hardened humility.
As for me, I kept a hand on the ledger and never stopped talking about seeds and crop rotation. The world I had known in the modern city was a ghost that kept teaching me rules and piles of knowledge. Here, knowledge became a fire that could cook stew and a ledger that could stop a rumor. My small tribe learned how to plant and to cook and to manage a tithe. Ian’s people learned to eat with new sticks and to take care when telling stories. Curtis and his fellows learned in a public, painful way that speech has weight.
And the fire—the spark—I left in the square. Not as a miracle, but as a tool. We taught every household how to catch a spark and turn it into flame. We showed how to build a stone pot. We boiled salt. We turned river fish into stock and root into yield. We made a corner of the beast world remember that a hand that makes warm food can also make new ground.
In the end, the thing that sealed us was not revenge but consequence. The men who lied were made to labor in view of the whole camp. They knelt, they begged, they were stripped of titles and then given a chance to be remade. That was the punishment: public, long, human.
Sometimes I think of the ledger I held up in the square. It was twelve marks in charcoal across a scrap of wood, a silly thing compared to a city’s paper trail—and yet it stopped the worst of it. Names were listed after that night: those who worked and those who planted and those who learned. It was all recorded in charcoal, in memory, in the stone. If anyone wanted to undermine the truth again, they had to move the stone itself.
The sky that night was a ribbon of ember and bruise. Aurora curled up at my feet and sighed like something that had finally stopped worrying. Carolyn sat with a basket of seeds and a new plan. Marco tossed a log on the fire and said, “You did right.”
“I learned something new,” I answered. “Not from a lecture or lab, but from the ground and from people.”
“You found fire,” Ian Wood said, his rumble softening. “And now the land will remember.”
“Yes,” I said. “And the ledger will too.”
When the public punishment had run its course, and the men who had once made noise were easier to stand beside, they came to the terraces and worked with a careful and embarrassed competence. They told jokes about their mistakes. They apologized in small ways and with large stone. Some nights Curtis would sit with Aurora and learn how to carve a spoon.
One evening, months later, when the first young sprouts had made a green fuzz over the terraces and the new bamboo houses cast neat shadows like neat teeth, I found myself in the old square. I picked up a small rock, rubbed the edges down, and put a tiny charcoal mark next to the ledger’s columns. I wrote nothing grand—just a minute record: “First salt used, third fish cleaned, first beast roasted.” The small strokes were proof that the seeds had sprouted not only in soil but in behavior.
“We won’t forget,” Carolyn said.
“No,” I said. “We’ll burn that memory in—light it with wood and smoke and salt and keep it warm.”
The night closed in. The spirit-fire hissed and popped but did not roar. It was a tool. It was my first success in a world that had none of my old machines. People ate. They laughed. They argued. They mended. And when someone tried to make trouble with a story again, I pulled out the ledger and set a bowl of clean fish on the table.
They called me leader because I had land and hands and a stubborn habit of telling the truth, and because I could do something as ordinary and extraordinary as make a flame from wood. In that world, the rune of a leader is not always courage but the ability to feed and to hold people to the truth they live by. We built terraces and bamboo homes. We planted seed and salted meat. We made mistakes and we were forced to mend them.
When Ian touched the ledger with a slow, careful paw the night before harvest and said, “You turned a flood into field,” I only smiled.
“I only planted the first row,” I said.
“You planted the fire, too,” he said. “And that was the harder thing.”
The final sowing was a quiet liturgy. My name—Molly Jansson—has a place in the list of people who planted the first autumn rice in the terraces below Ian's house. The ledger keeps its place in the square, under a flat stone we set together, and every month someone adds a charcoal mark to say what was done. We write in small things—who mended the fence, who taught a child to plant, who went hungry so another would not—but the ledger is smaller than the story.
I still miss the city sometimes, the abstract math of labs and the way an experiment has only one right result in theory. But here results take more shapes. They are water pressed into terrace. They are a bowl of fish soup shared with a man who once lied to ruin you. They are the slow unriddling of rumor by counting.
My hands are rougher now than they were when I arrived. They smell of compressed bamboo and of smoke. I sleep now in a house with walls that breathe. I keep a small stone by my bed that I rubbed at dawn until it fit my thumb, and when I wake I put my hand on it and remember the ledger in the square. I put my hand on Ian’s shoulder and I say, “We will not forget the rules.”
He answers with a small snort, “We are not small things anymore. We are landholders and teachers.”
“And you,” I say, “you are my sharpest friend.”
He glances down, his eyes reflecting flame and the wide, terrible sky, and allows himself the ghost of a smile. “You made the flame. You held the ledger.”
“And you kept the law,” I say.
We sit in the square and watch the children pound seed into cups and the men and women tie bamboo stakes and carve spoons and remember that truth matters. We watch sparks lift into the night.
“Keep the fire,” Ian says finally.
“I will,” I say, and I press my thumb into the charcoal ledger’s margin—a new mark for a new season—and know the mark will be read by anyone who tries to tell a lie.
The End
— Thank you for reading —