Face-Slapping17 min read
My Little Space and the Heat That Ate the World
ButterPicks18 views
I woke up sweating before dawn, the phone screen burning my thumb with its numbers: 39°C. "Again?" I mumbled, and the house answered with the loud, lazy bickering of a summer morning.
"Mom, did you see the weather?" I said to the air and to Marcella Mills—my mother—who was already at the table shelling eggs without looking up.
"Everything's too hot," she answered, as if we had been rehearsing the line for a week. "Go dress the baby. The sun's already angry."
I pushed aside the thin sheet; Chloe Said—the small person who had been mine in every stubborn, miraculous way—kicked off the blanket and offered me a thumb, the way infants forgive the world by being small and trusting. Akari Davies, my sister, flopped in the next chair with the kind of theatrical fatigue that says: the world owes me snacks.
"Buy me a fizzy drink," she announced. "Please?"
"One stick of ice cream," I bargained, already thinking: milk, diapers, rice—my mind ticked like a worn clock. "And we need food for lunch."
Akari's protest was immediate, loud, and lazy: "But it's hot. I'm not walking fifty meters."
"You never walk," Marcella said. "You orbit the sofa."
I laughed, the sound thick. "Fine. One ice pop. Move."
The neighborhood was a mirror of the newsfeed: posts with panicked numbers, videos of workers collapsing in heat, people telling each other not to go outside. "It's the air conditioners," some said. "Nature's medicine is overdue," others wrote. Our town smelled like dust and diesel and the faint copper of metal under stress.
At home the fridge was thin as a lament. A box of kelp from earlier, three eggs. Chloe drank her milk without complaint. I put on a shirt and stepped into the light, which slapped my skin like a hand.
I could not stop thinking, stupidly and earnestly, about the old internet stories my grandmother used to tell on slow nights—the ones with secret rooms, lucky boxes, world-fixing talismans. "If only," I said aloud, and the apartment answered with the hiss of an AC that had been turned off to save power.
"234 detection: apocalypse system available. Bind?" a mechanical voice said inside my head as if reading my mind like a weather alert.
"Say what?" I was the kind of person who clapped for small coincidences. "Apocalypse system? Is this a scam? Does it come with a spaceship?"
A blink of static, and the box on my nightstand—the ordinary ring I had forgotten about—blinked blue and accepted my nervous thumb. "Bind? Yes."
"Great," I said, because what else could I say? "Bind."
"Binding complete. Space cabin unlocked. Warning: initial volume is small. Upgrade requires gold or jade. Energy low."
I laughed at myself. Space. Cabin. 2.5 by 2 by 3 meters—a toilet-sized box with a sink, a shower, a single threadbare towel. When I touched the faucet, water came out. Not just water—cold, hot, clean. I carried in a coin ring and the space sighed and widened by centimeters like a lung learning to breathe. I fed it rings, bracelets, necklaces; it grew.
"Okay," I whispered. "Now we have a box with a toilet. Not glamorous but functional."
Over the next days I bought and bought—the kind of shopping that is a small, shivering prayer against looming hunger. I loaded rice sacks and tinned goods into my little three-wheeled vendor vehicle. Bram Allison—young, earnest, a volunteer I wouldn't have known except by the way he smiled too quickly—helped once when he noticed Chloe's tiny hand. "Need help with that last bag?" he asked.
"Thanks," I said. "We can't let heat starve us."
Bram's face was honest, like a child's. "You're doing the right thing," he said. "If things go south, you won't regret the effort."
He did not know it yet, but his words were a small talisman.
In the first week the small town ate well: canned peaches and small cartons of milk, green beans and long-forgotten packets. I filled the space with food and medicine—the small-lot rescue purchases that felt like insurance. I bought coal for winter because the internet advised me to buy paradoxically for both heat and cold: "Be ready for extremes." I bought seeds, in case plants became magic again. I bought medicine like people buy umbrellas for the apocalypse: hoarded, secretive, necessary.
"Mom." I said, one late evening, "I'm low on cash. Could I take what's saved? The old stash you had?"
Marcella's hand paused. She walked to the closet and took out a small red box. "It was for your wedding," she said. "I never gave it—take it. For Chloe." There were tears in both of our eyes: she offered because she believed, and I accepted because I had to.
I fed jewelry to my cabin. The system chimed like a school bell: "Upgrade available?"
"Yes," I said. "Upgrade."
In sixty seconds the cabin widened to a fifteen-cubic-meter cold-storage room. I tested it with hot water and an ice pop. The ice did not melt. The system promised more: a kitchen, power, a preservative chamber. "Two catties of gold to reach the next level," it said in a tone like a maid promising breakfast. I measured the distance from "possible" to "not possible" with the small rough math of the desperate: gold at current prices? A fortune.
We were a family of three, with a baby whose name I whispered at night—Chloe Said—so I offered up what we had. My sister Akari handed me a money tin—"I saved this for school," she said, and I took it. We fed the system, and it grew again. It gave me two days' worth of miracles: a pantry that would not rot, a tiny bedroom, a little power panel.
I did not think of myself as greedy. I thought of myself as precise. Food had weight. Children had stomachs. Homes had thin walls. I traded, but I also cooked. I learned to make soups that could feel like forgiveness: eggs steamed with a little oil and scallion, rice that tasted like summer. People noticed. Our home—once just another low house in a small coastal county—looked like a safe harbor.
"Are you sure this is right?" Akari asked once, watching me slide boxes into the cabin. "You could be hoarding everything here."
"Better safe than sorry," I said. "If I'm wrong, we'll have extra food and seeds and beds. If I'm right, we survive."
Akari did not argue too much. She was young and stubborn, but she loved bread. We argued about small things—who ate the last candy, whether to bring coal when the sky burned—but nothing big. We were small and functional and, for the first time in a long season, a little hopeful.
The typhoon came as a rumor at first. Satellites called it "unusually powerful." A voice on the television said it might be the worst in recorded history. The tide of news pushed our decisions forward like a tide pushing a dinghy: we closed windows, taped "X" across glass, tied potted plants to railings. Bram came with two life vests and a calmness that was almost holy. "Evacuate early if you feel water," he suggested. "Don't risk it."
We moved to higher ground when the water came—first ankle-high, then knee-high, then merciless. A rescue team came in a small orange inflatable. "Get in," said a man with eyes like a map—Alonso Saleh. "We take people to the school. Higher ground."
We rode the raft like people who thought of land as a different country. The school was declared an emergency refuge: rows of beds, a canteen handing out watery porridge, and a hundred strangers with their private grief folded in small, tight lumps. Chloe slept with her head on my chest and I listened to the rain like a drum on a coffin lid.
The shelter was thin with kindness. I gave one of my compressed biscuits to an old woman who had not eaten in a day. She grabbed it with fingers that trembled like leaves. "God bless you," she said, and I believed for a minute that God had tastebuds. That night a man—muscular, loud, with the flavor of power drunk too soon—smashed a bowl in the dining hall because he wanted meat. Soldiers came, and they made him bow and then go away. The old man who lied about his losses apologized to the room. Soldiers were patient that day.
Later, the storm became a story of water and roofs; we emerged into a town that looked like an animal struck in the head. The water took paint and lives. We cleaned mud from our home and, together with neighbors, patched what could be patched. Aid arrived—finally. For a moment the world felt like it would not fall apart.
Then the earth itself betrayed us. The tremor came at breakfast: plates trembled, dust fell like an old man's ash. The house shuddered; the air became thin and wrong. I grabbed Chloe and ran to the yard, the world stumbling like a drunk. For a few impossible seconds the earth seemed to forget its manners; it ripped up roads and roofs and swallowed half the sky.
We were lucky. Our little roof held; others did not. People ran with children and old quilts, passing shoes like small donations. The town banded together—volunteer squads, soldiers, a town mayor who looked like a child pretending to be grown-up. I met Bram again in a line of people handing out water.
"We have to help," he said, as if help was a simple verb. "Come with us."
I went. We rode shuttle trucks into a broken city. In one shop—cobbled and cracked—I found gold. It was a small mirage, a room stacked with rings and bracelets and old bank vaults that had never anticipated the world. My palms went cold. The system sang in my ear.
"Collect," it said. "Convert to energy."
I had been taught to keep my hands out of other people's pockets. But I was also taught to feed my child. The system and the gold were a devil's duet. I gathered what I could into my satchel. The gold vanished like dawn and the system dropped a bounty of clothing in its place. I walked from that store feeling like someone who had exchanged a piece of childhood for a lifetime's ration.
News spread like a lit fuse: "Heat suits exist," the radio said. "They keep bodies cool at impossible temperatures." The suits were rare—we had a thousand that first day. The officials decided to trade them for gold. The price was not measured only in metal. People would kneel when the suits kept them alive.
"Is that fair?" Akari asked, watching the first few gray suits handed to soldiers like sacred relics.
"Nothing about this is fair," I said. "But fairness does not feed Chloe."
I kept quiet and kept trading. In the shadow of the city hall, I swapped jewelry for more suits—not for sale, not yet. For us. My system told me the suits could be sold through a marketplace if I upgraded it. My fingers were dust by the end of that day.
But people notice change. You cannot fold a life away like laundry and expect no one to look at it. Word reached our shelter that our small house had been pillaged—the tents that had been ours taken by a gang who called themselves the "strong hands." They drove people from their shelter in the night and claimed tents as though tents were deeds. My mother came back from where she had taken refuge with a face that was smaller by worry. Akari's hair was less than it had been.
There was a small band of men—the leader called himself Hector in a laughable attempt at bravado; I would later learn his real name was Falcon Guzman. He was a bully who lived by the idea that violence is a currency. He and his group marched the neighborhood like paper tyrants.
"Their tent's nicer than ours," Falcon said the day he took our makeshift shelter. "They can have the rocks; give us the bed and move."
"Move and you'll be fed," a skinny man said, but no one fed him. People were tired. "Enough," he said. That was the night my temper lit and my patience went to bed.
I could have made a plan—police, petitions, paperwork. But those things take time and words and the sound of machines to approve them. Instead I worked with the little thing that listened when I whispered: the plant in the space. A seed that came from the system—strange, purple, and hungry—might be a monster or a miracle. I called it "Petite" because I liked small names for small comforts.
One afternoon Falcon and his gang came again to push a family out of a small plot. They were loud and foolish and had knives in the casual way of people who think they own the world.
"Give us the keys," Falcon barked. "We run this place now. Give us the food or we'll take more."
There were witnesses—dozens of people eating, living, trying to breathe inside a town that had lost a roof. Soldiers were further down the hill. The river of witnesses was a sea but a sea without teeth—until I let the little plant walk.
I brought Petite out in a pot. I set it in the center of the yard where the tents were sun-stretched like animals. "Stay quiet," I told the plant, and Petite listened like a small beast of burden.
When Falcon laughed and kicked a plastic chair, I could smell the oil in his voice. "You think you're tough? You think you can steal for us?"
A boy with a camera—one who had been sewing stories on social media—raised his phone. "Get this," he hissed. "This'll hit a hundred thousand."
"What are you doing?" Falcon demanded, and a hundred lazy heads turned.
"Just waiting," I answered.
I had to remind myself: the system had cultivated the plant for my security. I had told it to be careful, to be precise. It bargained with the world in teeth. Loved ones were worth a lot.
And then Falcon leaned into a woman's tent and ripped a packet of rice from a sleeping child's hand. He laughed, the kind of laugh that sticks on your face like dirt. I walked up, small hands empty, and set the plant in front of him.
At first Petite was a pot with soil. It breathed. I fed it two small frozen birds. When Falcon raised his hand to shove me aside, the plant unfurled like a newspaper being read by thunder. Its petals opened, revealing rows of teeth that reflected the gray sky.
"What is that—" someone gasped. "A plant?"
"Not a plant," I said. "A consequence."
Falcon moved toward the man he called leader and the man moved toward me. The camera phone recorded a thousand little things: the way a child's hand trembled, the way a soldier crouched because he could not get there in time, the way the sky seemed to hush. Petite lunged. The first of Falcon's men disappeared in a sound that was half terror, half tearing. The second tried to run and became a smear of red and cloth. The third fell silent and then did not. In less time than it takes to finish a sentence, there was a heap where there had once been bravado.
The crowd did what it always does in a world that refuses to pretend nothing is happening: they watched. Witnesses pulled out phones. Someone cried. Someone laughed. A woman began to clap.
That scene—violent, ugly, impossible—unfolded in public, not because I wanted to humiliate but because the choice had been made in a smaller place. The penalty was terrible and sudden. The culprits' faces moved from arrogance to confusion to shock to disbelief to pleading. The leader—Falcon Guzman—fell to his knees. He had been the town's bully, the kind who prided himself on being invisible to consequences. Now he drifted toward the earth like a man who had been raided by his own conscience.
"Please," he begged. "Please, no—it's a mistake. I didn't—"
No one answered. People made small sounds: the rustle of apparel, the whimpering of a child who had thought monsters lived only in stories. The cameraman's video already glittered with likes.
"It was us," someone said aloud near the scaffolding. "They were stealing—"
"Who will answer for them?" another voice demanded. "They hurt people."
This is the part that I must write down carefully, because the punishment was not only the plant's teeth. This is the length, the public unpeeling. It lasted long enough to become ritual.
Falcon's begging turned to denial. "No—no way. I didn't—she's lying. I didn't do that." He spat, the way a drowning man spits the sea.
"You're lying," said a grandmother. "Do you think we are stupid?"
"No," said a soldier who had come late to the yard. He had not shot anyone. He had not fired a round. He took a step forward and in a voice that carried like wind over tin said, "You will make the returns you stole. You will publicly strip your titles and give back to those you've wronged."
Falcon's face was first red, then white, then the gray of someone whose paint is washed away. He shook his head. The crowd's reaction was not uniform. Some cried. Some cheered. Some filmed, hands steady. A child laughed because adults had become an exciting story.
They dragged him to the central square. The soldiers took off his cheap jacket and left him in the dirt. "Take it all off," the captain ordered. "Everything."
He started pleading in a voice that cracked. "Please—no—my mother—my wife—please—"
"Where were your thoughts when you stole the bread?" someone called. "Were they with your mother or the barrel of your elbow?"
A line of women—those whom Falcon and his gang had threatened—stood with rice buckets. They dumped the rice back: a torrent of white like a small waterfall. The soldiers photographed the act, posted it, and a thousand people watched the live feed some came to the square and took pictures. A boy in the second row put Falcon on his knees and made him return what he could: cigarettes, a ring stolen from a grandmother, a tattered scarf.
The pattern of his emotions was a rubric we all know now: arrogance, shock, denial, pleading, humiliation. He blinked as if learning the geography of shame. The crowd moved from whisper to shout to applause, and when they cheered it was not for violence but for justice—raw, messy, imperfect. A woman recorded Falcon's knees on her phone; others took pictures. "This will be on the net," someone whispered. "They will remember."
Falcon's last cry—step by step humiliating, hands bleeding from being forced to dig at his own holes—fell like a bell. "Please," he begged, kneeling in a heap of returned goods, "I thought we were owed."
No one answered. The clamor was a human drum: a mix of pity and righteous satisfaction. The soldiers let him beg until his voice broke and the crowd grew tired of him. They urinated politely in the net of the narrative and then turned away. People clapped and some recorded, some commented, some took a step closer to learn what it felt like to watch the fall of a bully.
It was about five hundred words of judgment, but also about a whole town learning what happens when you violate the small rules: there will be a reckoning.
After that day, the town felt different. The small pockets of theft and lawlessness shrank. People were frightened and alive at once. The story of Falcon's punishment spread like a weed of morality: it was brutal and public and necessary for a place where the law had been thin.
I knew it had been an ugly solution, but when food and shelter vanish, people make different choices. The plant had done what I had asked it to do: protect. The rest came with human law.
After the hunger and the storm came the march. We left our town with a caravan of cars and trucks, led by soldiers who cleared roads like fingers scraping glass. The sun, however, had become something else—a stubborn lamp that refused to set. "Extreme daylight" the scientist on the radio called it. "The planet's rotation anomalies." The temperature climbed: 42, 45, flirting with 50.
We rode and rode. In the convoy I met a volunteer named Doyle Schroeder who carried tea like a prophet; an old firefighter named Bear Bertrand who could lift a collapsed partition with a grin; a nurse named Olivia Barrera who smelled faintly of disinfectant and kindness; and Phoenix Mueller, a logistics man with an eye for receipts. Bram Allison—my steady helper—found me handing out water and gave me a thumbs-up.
"You're still trading?" he asked once in a long, hot night as the convoy idled near a repaired bridge.
"Always," I said. "It's the only language people know now."
He nodded. "Do you ever think about taking the suits and selling them off?"
I thought of the mother who had given me her gold and the two nights I had not slept. "I think about every choice," I said. "Mostly I think of Chloe."
The suits changed everything. They made sweat into a memory. I hid some in the little space and sold more—carefully. The system told me I could open a shop if I upgraded more—if I gathered more gold. People fanned out, trading everything for the suits. Gold streamed in like a vein of melted sunlight.
At the base we reached—Kyoto, a safety zone carved out by the government—the gates demanded not only IDs but gold. Two thousand grams for entry, or an equivalent. It smacked of a new kind of civility. We paid, we entered, and the first three days they fed us and gave us cots. I used my last handful of gold to buy two months' rent in a small apartment in town, a grim little box but with walls and a roof and a door.
"Better than the dormitory," Akari said, collapsing on the paper-thin mattress with the kind of gratitude I wanted to bottle for later.
Inside the apartment I set up our life: the suits hung like small flags; the space hummed with enough power to keep things cool. I met people who were not villains—Cynthia Vogel, a pediatric nurse; Ulysses Yamamoto, a quiet engineer who smelled like solder—and we traded tips: water-collection tricks, algae sprout recipes, how to teach a child to sleep under constant light. The system kept offering upgrades. Every time the space grew, so did my capacity to store supplies and to trade. Every time I traded, the system smiled in electric ghost-words and promised new things: a greenhouse, a second life for our plot, the ability to "unify" energy.
We began to imagine survival not as rusted cans and ironic optimism, but as a project: teach Chloe to plant seeds in pots, keep Petite fed with small animals from the market, keep the suits for those who could not afford them. I sold some suits to a refugee camp in exchange for seeds and tools. I bartered with soldiers for medicine. I made a rule for myself: never sell the last suit. That was for my daughter.
One rainy evening in the base's small market, I put on a simple disguise—because the suits and my deals made people look at me—and I walked into the governmental exchange. They had set up a pile of gold as if to show the masses the altar of price. I stepped in and touched the pile, tasted its cold greed. The system sang: "Take it." It is always a risk to listen to a singing thing when you are poor.
I did as the system suggested. I took gold. I traded the gold for a thousand suits. The guards blinked and then stood like wheat before a wind. They tried to stop me and then, a pile of suits rolled where the gold had been, and the world tilted between surprise and order. The suits were distributed. The officials were relieved that the trade had been executed, because now they could say: "We have responded." They did not ask why gold had vanished—some things are better not explained when the outcome feeds them.
A rumor was planted and grew: someone with a space had been selling suits at a fair price and using the funds to buy more. The system winked. I winked back.
I trained the plant. Petite got stronger on boiled fowl and cheap cuts. She shrank and grew and learned to be a small and terrifying guardian, compact inside her pot and astonishing in the presence of thieves. We traveled with Petite sometimes, because the space had room. Chloe fell in love with the plant; to her it was a friend with teeth. "Mama, small flower plays?" she would say, and I would untangle myself from the day's debts and smile.
At the base the sun continued to rage; people learned to live by the suits and the shade. My little store—an idea in a space—wasn't just for profit. It was relief. It was strategy. I could not stop the world from burning or shaking. But I could keep my little family alive.
We built a life out of compromises and seeds and the small ironies of clinging. I taught Akari to patch seams and to sew a little. Bram taught Chloe to whittle safe toys from the wreckage when he had the time. Doyle showed us how to harvest rain from roofs. Baby Chloe learned to say "suit" before she learned "mama" clearly.
And still the systems hummed and offered. I upgraded the cabin to include two bedrooms. I allowed others to enter occasionally. I watched soldiers who had once worn suits like armor become like us—people in a city that pretended to be a block of normalcy. Officials chewed on the ethics of rationing heat armor and how to appease a frightened population.
When people tried to steal from us again—a petty attempt at night—the plant ate only their shame. Their punishment was not always the teeth; humiliation works in different ways. Sometimes a person whose name you had once known becomes an example, stripped of comfort in public, kneeling on the hot stone until he repented.
The world had narrowed to the bright line of survival. We bartered and guarded and shared when we could. I kept feeding Petite, and the system gave me tools: the ability to purify water, a list of where seeds would germinate best, a small map of trade routes. I sent suits to a children's clinic and in return got two months' worth of formula milk for Chloe.
The years did not have many. The time was small and intense. For every day of gratitude there was a day of loss. I knew men who had lost their jobs and then their names. I knew a nurse named Olivia who had once been a lover and then wasn't. The world had a way of making casualties of intimacy, because when life becomes scarce, affection can be seen as a cost.
When the system said "upgrade," I handed it shiny pieces and watched the rooms expand in ways that felt like blessings. We learned to live inside a changed sun. We learned to be kind to those who had not yet learned better. We learned to watch the bully and not become him.
One afternoon, years of heat and cold in my hands, I sat with Chloe on my lap and watched her finger the plant's leaf. "Mama," she said, innocent as a clean coin, "when we are old, will the sun go away?"
I looked at Marcella and at Akari, at the little suit on the chair and the stack of tin cans, the packed space and the plans for more. "Maybe," I said. "Or maybe we will learn how to make shade."
"Will Petite guard us forever?" Chloe asked.
"No," I said. "But she will guard a little while more. And then we will teach another to guard."
In my pocket the system pulsed like a heart. "Upgrade available," it said. "Warning: further expansion requires more resources. Potential rewards: stable water, a functional farm, commercial access."
I closed my eyes and imagined a place where a child could play with a plant without anyone hungry enough to smash an ankle or steal a tent. I imagined a town where gold was something no one had to trade for breath. My fingers found the ring Marcella had given me in a corner, and I turned it over.
"I will," I told the system. "One more trade."
"Bind accepted," the system sang. "Upgrade commencing."
Outside, the day was always hot or colder than the first morning. The world had been shaken and eaten and given back a new plan. We had found small mercies inside a cracked planet.
I am Wilma Denis. I am mother to Chloe Said. I am sister to Akari Davies. I hold small enough space to keep my family warm and cool and strong enough to take what is necessary. I have a plant that eats thieves and a system that counts in gold and promises and I have no illusions that anything I do alone will save everything. But the little decisions—feeding a seed, trading a ring, making a suit for a child—are how we make the world a place where a child can still call us Mama and expect the name to mean protection.
It is not a heroic ending. It is a series of small, stubborn acts. It is public and private punishment and forgiveness and trade. We eat. We sleep. We watch the sun. We trade gold for shirts and the planet goes on making choices its own way.
One night, after a long day of bartering and feeding Petite and answering questions from officials, I sat in the cool dark of the kitchen in my expanded little space and whispered to Chloe as she slept, "One day you'll be able to sleep without ever fearing the light."
Chloe's hand found mine and squeezed. "I know, Mama," she murmured in a child's sleep-voice. "You made it safe."
"Maybe," I said into the dim. "Maybe I just bought us enough time to learn how to make shade."
The End
— Thank you for reading —