Sweet Romance17 min read
My Little Food Space and the Honey Trap
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I was twelve the first spring I learned how to steal fish from a river and make the world listen.
"Look," I told the sun on my face and the buzzing flies, "we're making dinner."
"I am recording," a small mechanical voice answered from nowhere and everywhere at once. It sounded like a tin ladle clinking, and I pretended to be very surprised even though I'd been pretending all morning.
"What did you find?" I asked the tin-ladle voice, which for reasons I could not explain I had named in my head Tiny Ladle.
"Ingredient logged: River carp. Points gained: ten," it said. "Owner, do you prefer sour pickled fish or steamed?"
"Sour pickled. Acid makes everything honest," I said, because honesty was a taste I liked.
My name is Ashlynn Crosby. I live in the small, spread-out village of Lucky Hollow. We do not have shiny things. We have a crooked house, a father who is too quiet after a bad fall, a mother who works until her hands are small and raw, and two brothers who share their shirts like they share their laughter.
"Are you not going to show off?" old Mr. Omar Martinez called from under a tree when my fish fought against the hook.
"Show off what?" I grinned and tightened the line.
"You and the river have a secret," he said. "Teach us."
"I only share with family," I told him. But it felt fine to keep things secret and yet swell with the success. I let the last fish wobble into my wooden pail. The pail felt heavy and honest.
When I was sure no one watched, I tugged the fish into my coat, and Tiny Ladle chimed, sweet and silly the way a new thing is.
"Recording complete. Recipe hint: Pickled river fish. Score: two hundred."
"Two hundred?" I laughed out loud. "Good. That will buy eggs."
"You may choose a recipe to log," the voice said.
"I choose sour fish," I whispered, because even in the dirt of Lucky Hollow I dreamed of flavors, and the Food Space, as I called it, answered like a friend who knew all my hungers.
At home, Marianne Flores — my mother — looked up from when she was drying a bowl. "You went for river?" she asked.
"I did," I said, proud. "I caught three. I kept the biggest for us. I will make pickled fish."
Marianne's mouth softened. "Good. Be careful. Amber Sutton is near the lane today with her basket."
Amber Sutton was my aunt by marriage, and she wore her sour mouth like a coat. She had been visiting since our family split from the main house. She took the world as a store with no locks.
"She'll take our fish," Hudson Bartlett, my second brother, muttered.
"She can't," I said. "I won't let her." But I didn't say the half I thought: If Amber takes our fish, we will sleep cold. If she takes our meat, there will be days of hunger.
Inside the house our kitchen was small and full of plans. "You have hands," Miguel Bean, my oldest brother, said, when I showed him the fish. "You have skill. Cook, Ashlynn."
"I will," I said.
I cut fish thin with a sharp knife and salted the flesh, and Tiny Ladle clattered delightedly in my ear. "New recipe logged: Pickled river fish. Points 200," it sang.
"Two hundred!" I said again and hugged the air like hugging a pot.
That made my mother smile as if she had money in her pocket. "We'll have enough for a little month of bread," she said. "Enough to save for seed."
We ate early. The pickled fish made tiny fireworks in our mouths. My brothers were sheepish and loud with gratitude at the table.
"Next time don't give it all away," Hudson grumbled through a mouthful. He was good like that — jealous with the appetite of someone who loved his family enough to hoard a little.
"Share or die, little brother," I told him, and he laughed.
After we ate, Amber Sutton came, her steps heavy, her voice a rain of complaints. "You went and ate without my family," she said like a judge.
"Amber," my mother said, careful. "We ate because father needs a full stomach."
"I saw you waste good fish," Amber declared. "You always have better luck, Ashlynn. We'll come back tonight for some. I am proper kin."
"I—" My throat went small. "They are ours, Aunt," I said.
Amber sniffed like she was picking up a scent of gold. "You keep them? Keep them to yourself? We will accept some back later." Her eyes were smarmy, kind of wet with a hunger beyond food.
I did not answer then because I had a plan as crooked and bright as a fishhook.
That afternoon, when Amber went home, a group of men I had not seen before paced along the hedgerow outside the village. One of them leaned down, glancing over the lane. He wore sharper clothes than the rest.
"She had something strapped to her waist," the man said. "I think she has a message pigeon, a proper carrier."
"Who would send her carrier?" another whispered.
"Maybe the lord in town," the first answered.
These men moved like wolves who liked a smart trap. One of them, with a lazy smile, said, "If the messenger is lost, the letter never flies home."
When I heard that, a bad little bubble rose in my chest. They had tried to use pigeons once to send messages to someone who would be cruel later in town. Someone paid Amber and other people to whisper. I wished that the world had less whispering and more straightness.
So I kept cooking and logging and stashing, and I watched.
"Sneak away through the hedgerow," Miguel told me when he saw the men. "Go. Don't be seen."
I walked back to my place by the river to find more ingredients. Tiny Ladle hummed, impatient and happy.
"New ingredient detected," it said. "Wild pigeon. Logging gives twenty points."
"Pigeon?" I said. "Who keeps pigeons in Lucky Hollow?"
I had the bird strapped to my waist without thinking — the world opens when you stop hoping for miracles and make them yourself. That afternoon the men discovered the pigeon, took the letter tube from Amber's apron, smoothed their smiles, and walked away.
"Since the letter won't fly, we'll burn its words," the leader said, sounding meaner than a crow.
They were thinking of power: a paper where a man wrote that my life was worth nothing would burn faster if his friends thought it could be used as fuel. They were bad like that.
They did not know I had been watching through the birch leaves.
"Burn it," one of them said. "They must not be allowed to send news. We'll hide the pigeons. We'll keep the line."
"You can't stop news," I whispered to the river. "People will tell."
"Since you have the pigeon," the leader added, eyes on my village when he turned, "we will keep it."
"Keep what?" I asked aloud as if I had been stranded there. My voice had the little stuck-edge of a child.
"Just a bird. Leave it be," he said.
"Come back to the hedgerow," I told the river and then to the men. "You can't take it. It belongs to the skies."
"I will throw it away," he said, and his big hand went for the tube.
I darted forward quicker than my twelve-year-old limbs had any right to move. I yanked the tube free, and before they could blink, Tiny Ladle chimed, and my hand vanished with the pigeon into the Food Space. It was such a small, brave flight I felt ridiculous and plucked with joy.
"Recording success: carrier removed," Tiny Ladle announced. "Points +50. Owner: Ashlynn Crosby. System upgrade possible."
The men froze, faces like spilled ink. The leader swore and searched, and Amber's men, who had thought themselves sharper than our whole family, lost their balance long enough for us to slip away. That night I fell asleep with the pigeon and the river and a thousand small plans warming my brain.
---
"I say we stay put," Miguel said when we considered a plan to sell pickled bamboo shoots at the county fair.
"We're a poor family," Hudson replied. "Two acres won't feed us a year."
"Two acres will feed our pride," Miguel said. "We can plant, and Ashlynn can sell what she can pickle. We'll make our own luck."
It was easier to argue about pride than to say we were scared.
"I have points," I said. "The Food Space gives me recipes. I can trade for tools, for seed. I can—"
"You can what?" Marianne asked. "Buy enough for seed?"
"I can try," I told her. "If I log more dishes, Tiny Ladle will give me more."
"Is that a thing children talk about?" Hudson asked.
"It's a thing I do," I said. I would not let my mother hear the trembling in my voice.
A few days later I climbed into the bamboo grove. I dug for shoots with a small hand shovel and found the sweet bitter white of new bamboo tucked like secrets. Tiny Ladle sang and logged my discovery.
"New ingredient: wild bamboo shoot. Points gained: fifty," it said delightedly.
"You get the keys," Miguel said. "Take them into town. Sell."
We took the market cart the next morning. The return road was warm with sun and the smell of bread. I sat on our cloth-wrapped jars, hugging their roundness like hope.
At the market, life was loud. Men shouted about hemp and tools; women displayed bolts of cloth like flags; the air was full of the honest bargaining of people who had to be right with their own hands.
"How much for the sauced shoots?" a woman asked.
"One coin each," I said, because a little too low made friends in markets. "Two for one to women with children." I learned early that buying favors with kindness is a way to grow roots.
"Try it," I said, handing over a tasting cup to anyone who looked hungry. "Try it. If it's not to your taste, you don't pay."
They tried it and their mouths opened like I had offered them sunlight. "Oh, that's good," said one man, and like a spark, more came.
By the time the sun yawned toward noon, we had sold our first jar. We sold three. We sold nine.
"Two hundred and fifty coins," Miguel counted, lips pricked in a way he only used for numbers.
"Two hundred and fifty?" I repeated, dizzy.
That night, we bought seed. We bought a small wooden plow. We bought high because it felt like the first thing my mother ever let herself believe.
"Is your pocket heavy?" Hudson teased when we came home.
"No," I said. "It feels like the village is lighter."
---
Amber Sutton did not sit idle when the fruit of our day was tidy and warm in the house. She kept coming by, lanky complaints in her mouth like old bread.
"You're fattening yourselves on our family's fat," she said at one visit, more accusation than sound. "I will come to your house if you hide things."
"Amber," Marianne said, patient in ways a mother must be patient. "We don't want trouble. Please leave."
"Trouble is only someone who has something," Amber said. "Soon you will have more. I will not be left hungry."
I had already learned her appetite for anger. She wanted to take anything that smelled like someone's future. That night, my hunger raised a plan: teach her the cost of greed.
I baked small, round cakes sweetened with honey I had last week culled from a wild hive. Tiny Ladle had told me where the honey tree lay, and I had stolen one small edge of it and turned it into two bowls and smuggled it home. I kept one bowl for us and one bowl into the Food Space. I saved a sliver for a trap.
"Make them look as if they are gifts," I told Miguel. "Make them look as if we are weak. Make them want them."
"Do you want to give her food?" Hudson asked.
"I want her to feel what it's like to be embarrassed," I said.
The next afternoon, Amber arrived with her biggest, meanest purse of complaints. I offered cake as if in homage. She took it like a queen taking a crown.
"This is for me?" she cooed. "My, my. You are generous. Thank you."
"Eat it," I said, and inside the cake lay a folded leaf of honey and a small breath of wild bee smell — a gentle trick we would set into motion.
She bit and her eyes widened, not from sweetness but because I had boiled just the smallest piece of cut honeycomb with a sting of licorice root to trigger a memory: a memory of being exposed. That was not enough to punish her.
"You are so generous," Amber muttered and smacked her lips. "Send the rest to the main house. We will share."
"Sure," I said. "But we have no more." I gestured with a blankness so convincing it might have been skill.
Later Amber found something else to steal from our storeroom. She grabbed a small wicker basket of preserved shrimp and the jar of pickled shoots. She walked away like a woman who had already planned the victory speech. Half now, half later, she would arrive at the main house empty-handed and full of witnesses, and she would boast.
I did not follow at first. I had to be quiet. I had to make choices.
But people watch and they judge. Someone in the lane — a thin boy with bright eyes named Jacques Cortez, who lived near the hunter's house — saw Amber cross the lane with our jars. He had been a quiet friend lately, a young noble's nephew who had fallen on hard luck and had a hungry look in his mouth.
"Take it," Jacques said softly as I stepped out. "Don’t let her bring it to the old house."
"I have a plan," I told him.
We tracked her to the old house where the elders sit high as if weddings had never left them. Amber arrived and, as some poise, set the jars to the table of the old house. The visiting elders would smell the food and think she had been generous. We saw her smile reach the top of her sharpness.
"How thoughtful," said one voice. "Little gifts from the poor's house."
That is when I acted.
"Don't give it away," I told Amber in a voice sweet like a child's and sharp like a kitchen knife. "Those jars are ours."
"What?" she sneered, and a roomful of people turned like fortune-tellers sensing coins.
"Do you know what happens to thieves?" I asked loudly. "Do you know the village law?"
"There's no law but hunger," Amber replied.
"I have something else to show you all," I said. "Watch."
I walked to the old table and, making my face a plate of meekness, I slid out one of the jars. "We made it for ourselves. We cooked for our sick father."
"She lies!" Amber barked. "She takes things!"
"Watch," I told them, and I used Tiny Ladle to fetch a simple truth: the Food Space could play back the last recorded entry of any logged food, and it had recorded the picking and the cooking and the points.
"Would the ladle tell you the truth?" Amber sneered.
"Watch," I repeated. I pressed my palm and Tiny Ladle clicked into sound. In the hush it made the log sing like a whistled echo.
"Ingredient logged: bamboo shoots. Time: morning. Owner: Ashlynn Crosby. Cooking process recorded: pickled, salted. Location: Nimble Kitchen, Ashlynn Crosby home," Tiny Ladle said in that metallic, comically proud voice.
Heads turned. "What sorcery is this?"
"Does it say false?" Amber demanded.
"It is the Food Space," I answered. "It remembers what was done. It will tell if these jars ever left our house."
"Who made this noise?" Grandma Faye Mortensen asked, peering from her chair.
"The food remembers," I said. "Amber came to our house today with a jar. It came from our kitchen. It is ours."
"She stole!" someone shouted.
Amber's smile cracked like thin glass. The elders gasped.
"No," Amber snarled. "That's not true. I was given these as a gift. They were given!"
"Your hands had our jars," Miguel said, his voice like a slow tide. "You took them. We saw."
"And our old man needs his medicine," Marianne said. "We had to buy his pills. Those jars are ours."
Amber's face went pink to white to the color of a beaten coat. Around her, the villagers gathered, eyes lightning at the spectacle.
"You are lying," she cried. "You want to shame me? I am kin. They gave them to me!"
"Prove it," someone demanded.
Amber dragged out her own argument, flustered and loud. "They stole it from my basket," she said. "They took it! They are thieves of the worst sort!"
Her voice rose and her breath grew quick. "Arrest them. Call the guard. They will—"
At that, I let the honey trap do the rest. Hidden in the jar we had put a small quantity of pungent stew, a fragrant, irresistible scent. Amber, believing herself to possess evidence, reached to display the jar. My breath caught. In that instant I tipped the basket with a small movement and the jar of honeyed cake sent a cloud of sticky sweetness into the air and onto Amber's hands. It made her step back and the elderly housekeeper burst into laughter.
By the time Amber realized what had happened, the villagers had gathered close and the Food Space continued to sing the log. The tapes, as if clay and memory, could not be altered.
"She stole," a neighbor said. "She came with our jars."
Amber's face changed the slow ways anger does when courage leaves a person. "You will not stand there!" she screeched. "You will not call me a thief!"
"Come here," Faye Mortensen said, her voice like the creak of a mill. "Stand where everyone can see."
Amber stood, cheeks flushed. She tried to be defiant but when so many pairs of eyes point like small lamps, defiance gets tired.
I had not planned the scale of what happened next, but the village had a stomach for justice. People who had long been whispered about but never spoken aloud now spoke.
"You always find a way to take," one woman said. "You take other's supper."
"You sing like you are given the moon when you are given only a crust," another said.
"You will hand back what you took," Faye Mortensen commanded, old and sudden as thunder.
Amber's steps slowed. "I didn't—" she began.
"You didn't what?" the village asked. "Did you spare a thought for the men who would have been hungry this week?"
Faces turned to the men whose eyes had been sharper than the rest. They shifted, uncomfortable, because the light had fallen on the wrong things. Some pulled out their pockets, children peered, and the old housekeeper counted with a surprising calmness.
"Return the jars," Faye Mortensen said again. "Return them, and we will decide if more punishment is fitting."
Amber's voice dipped lower. "I will do no such thing. I will not be shamed by peasants."
"Then you will explain," Miguel said in a voice like a hammer. "Explain to each of them why you took the jars."
"No," Amber gritted. "They will not—"
"Explain now," I said, because some things need a voice to pull courage into the air.
Amber hesitated. The villagers bent close. "You want me to say I took them?" she said at last, like a bitter draught.
She began to tell a story — a story of how she had been hungry and that was not an excuse but it was a fact. People listened with a mix of disgust and curiosity. She spoke of debts to jealous friends. She spoke of nights when she had small, angry hunger. Her voice rose and fell, and shame peeled off her voice like an onion. She tried to rationalize but every Reason had a hole.
Then the owner of a small loom — a dry, clever woman named Juliette Cash — stepped forward and spoke clear and low. "So you took their jars and gave them to the main house as a gift? For what? To gain favor?"
"Yes," Amber muttered, and the word crumbled.
"And you took more than you needed," Juliette said.
"Yes."
"And when Ashlynn called you to return them, instead you lied."
"I didn't lie—"
"You did."
"Please," Amber begged suddenly, the first real pleading I'd heard. "I had no food for my child."
A hush fell. We had all said things that hid other things, but to say hunger with that sharp sound of shame is to disarm something hard.
"What do you want? For you to be forgiven?" Faye asked, and though her voice was like a gate, a softer current moved with it.
"What do you want?" the village echoed.
A long argument began, voices like a net. "Public apology," a man said. "A paid back day of work," said another. "A month of shared cooking," the old miller suggested. Each voice found something to hold onto.
Amber stood small and furious. She was stripped of stage, it seemed. Voices judged her. She went from the swagger of a queen to the smallness of a child who had been left alone. Faces shifted in the square as if a wind had made a path.
Then it became a public thing.
"You will cook the market stew for a month," someone demanded, "and you will cook for the poor. You will take no food from those who are less able. You will work to repay. You will not cross that lane alone for three full cycles of market."
"No!" Amber screamed. "You cannot judge me that way! I am—
"—an aunt by marriage," said Faye coldly. "And Aunt costs were always paid in respect when she had it to buy with. We will make you work out what you owe."
Amber's face moved through denial to pleading to dullness. She lunged to protest to the elders, but the elders nodded, then called in a decree with the slow machinery of small town justice: she would be made to return product and pay labor.
They made her kneel in front of the villagers, where hornets and gossip might sting harder than any bees. She touched the dirt and someone handed her back one jar.
"Stand," Faye said. Amber rose, the lines of her face stretched thin like taffy.
"After you finish the market stew," Faye continued, "you will publicly say that you took our jars and you will ask forgiveness."
"And if she refuses?" Jacques whispered to me.
"Then the law will take a hand," I said.
Amber's voice broke. She did not refuse.
The village day witnessed the whole thing in a way that was so detailed it would have filled the air with stories for a long time. Amber went from arrogance to trembling to constrained tears. She repeated apologies that had the texture of someone swallowing sand.
It was not a clean victory. It was not mercy either. It was loud and awful and true. The elders had made a decision that left debts and shame spelled out in front of the sun.
She cried. She cried for hunger, for the life that had taught her to take. She begged for food and worked. She put her hands into the stream and gathered clams. She returned the jars and washed vegetables for the old house. For three market days she cooked and handed out bowls and no one let her eat again until the work was done.
When she was finished, her pride had been wrung out of her like an old rag. Villagers watched. Some clapped softly. Some spat. Children laughed at the sight of an adult made small and then made to heal. Amber went home, different and poor in new ways. Her cries and pleading and the villagers' hisses made a story that clung to her forever.
For us, the result was clear: we had invisible witnesses — the Food Space, the village ears, the town fairness — but more than that, I had learned the logic of a village: when someone takes, the village's gut knows and will make it right. The punishment had been public and utterly human: she was made to face her hunger and feed others.
Later, after the dust settled and we had our jars back and a clean shame in our neighbors' eyes for ever having suspected, I laughed with Miguel and Hudson under the eaves.
"You did that," Hudson said, petting my hair the way he always had. "You used the Food Space and the honey and the market and village sense."
"I used Tiny Ladle and common sense," I said, because we always love the story of the tool far more than the work.
"Next time we will teach you how to bargain," Miguel grinned. "For now, you hide the last of our honey."
I did. I kept the last jar inside the Space and a little in a bowl. In my hands it felt like future.
---
Days later, a youth named Jacques Cortez began to come by more often. He would linger at the lane with a shy look and a loaf of bread wrapped like a present.
"You are brave," he said once as he handed me a small steamy bun.
"You're generous," I told him, which was the simpler truth.
"Keep it," he said. "You saved our jars."
"Did I?" I asked.
"You did," he said. "And you cook like a fiance."
"What?" I laughed.
"Like someone who means to stay," Jacques said.
We both looked at the way the steam rose off his hand, ridiculous and honest, and in that quiet I felt something light. The village had its rules and its pity and its fury; Jacques had bread.
"Come to my kitchen," I said. "Tomorrow. I'll teach you to keep a pan warm."
"Only if you let me carry your jars," he answered.
"I have the Space," I said. "It carries things."
"Let me carry you instead," he said, and for a half-breath the rest of my world felt like a jar of honey set in the sun.
---
The Food Space kept upgrading. Each time I logged a recipe of care — a pickled shoot, a honeyed bun, a braised pigeon — it chimed and promised a new thing. Seeds. Tools. A small plot of land.
"We can plant more than we ate," Miguel said when I told him I could buy seeds. "We will plant more plans than hunger."
We bought a little more land on answer of faith and coin. People raised an eyebrow. A village is like a grandmother: often skeptical, sometimes surprised. But Miguel put our first seeds in the ground and watered them with patience and songs. Hudson hunted small game, and I cooked to keep the men near and kindly. We made food with the tenderness of people making money out of salt.
My recipes grew. I sold roasted bamboo shoots and smoked pigeon at market, and the Food Space gave me points that paid for a plow and a little bag of seeds. The jar of honey I kept in the Space became a reserve of sweetness. The Food Space had a new option now: a little plot where seeds grew more quickly, where green came up overnight as if impatience was a new fertilizer.
"Seeds available. Purchase?" Tiny Ladle asked one morning.
"Yes," I said.
"The plot will need tending," it answered, like a god that only cared for work.
"I will tend it," I promised. Who knew that point-collecting would become tending? Or that the tiny mechanical voice would become like a grandfather reminding a child to wash up?
We planted what we could. We ate what we needed. We sold the rest. We learned to split labor: Miguel found better deals for fodder and plow work; Hudson got up early for fish; Marianne bartered deftly at the store. Even Amber, though broken and made small, began to trade her second-hand wares for work. She kept a bending back and a cold new humility. Sometimes she watched our table with her hands on her knees and sighed. Maybe she had learned what it cost to take without return.
At the market that summer Jacques came more often. "You will teach me bread," he said, lugging a roll like a torch.
I taught him to fold dough with the sort of affection you give things that will be eaten by loved hands.
"You like sweet?" I asked him once, as we worked with a trickle of leftover honey to make a sauce.
"Yes," he said without oddness — a child who had learned hunger could want the truth without apology.
"I will make you a sweet bun," I said.
"You will make me a dozen," he answered, and then both of us laughed.
When the day came that our little field produced more than three sacks of grain, it felt like the first honest harvest of our hearts. The village came by to laugh and trade and to let the old suspicion settle into gratefulness.
"You did well, Ashlynn," Jacques told me, and because he had been there when the jars were fought over and when we had made a public example of greed, it was the truest praise.
"I had Tiny Ladle," I said. "And you. And everyone who would have beaten me with a look and who instead handed me a coin."
"Don't forget that you made this by cooking," Jacques said.
I did not forget.
On a night when the moon was a thin pearl, I sat by the window with Tiny Ladle doing its mechanical song.
"Thank you," I said into the bowl of tin voice.
"Owner," it replied, "would you like to upgrade again? New features: cold room, seed catalogue, a small field. More points needed."
"I will earn," I said. "We will not starve."
"Agreement noted," Tiny Ladle sang.
We slept that night with bread on our table and a field in the ground. The village still had people who took; the world had things that stole and lied and were ugly. But our kitchen had warmth and a jar of honey and the sound of a ladle that told true things.
"You have a brave heart," Jacques said once as he helped me wash dishes.
"I have sharp hands," I said.
"You have both," he answered.
And that, in a place like Lucky Hollow, was worth accepting a dozen sugary buns as a sign that the world might be kinder if you learned to make it so.
The End
— Thank you for reading —