Sweet Romance10 min read
My Rabbit Lantern and the People Who Raised Me
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I was born under a late September sky in a village that seemed to tuck itself into the ribs of the mountains. I remember the cold brick wall of my first home like a shape of comfort I never quite claimed. I was Amelie Cruz — or at least that paper says so now — but my name, like everything about me, was decided by hands that did not stay.
“Keep her,” my mother said once, with tears she refused to show anyone else. “I can’t carry another fine for a birth. You look after her, please.”
“Why can’t you keep her?” my grandmother asked that day, not hiding how the smallness of me displeased her.
My mother looked down at me in the blanket and whispered, “I can’t risk my job.”
I am telling you the truth — those were the exact words. I still carry them like a pebble in my shoe when I imagine what it felt like to be small and unwanted.
“Give her to me,” a voice said then. It was calm and steady. “I will raise her.”
“That’s impossible,” my father said, but his face went slack. He was tired from work and from fines.
“Bring her,” my aunt insisted. “Today.”
So I went with Erin Roth, with her laugh like the crack of warm bread, and her husband Arlo Kristensen, who smelled of earth and always had a shy, patient smile that made me feel I had been found.
“Daddy,” I called the first time Arlo lifted me.
He laughed so loud the sound filled the yard. “Hey, what did you say?”
“You’re funny, Amelie,” Erin told me later, cradling me on her hip. “You can call him Papa if you want.”
“Papa?” I tried it and the word slipped into my chest and settled like a small bird. It stayed.
We walked into their cave-like house. “You’ll be one of us,” Arlo told my parents. “We’ll love her. You don’t have to worry.”
“You promise?” my mother asked, frantic hope folding her voice.
“We promise.”
For the first years, I lived plural lives. I had the smell of someone else’s house and the sound of someone else’s morning bell. Erin fed me right, bought condensed milk so the baby bottles were sweeter without sugar, and sang work songs that made the long days pass quicker.
“Stop sulking,” my aunt said when I watched the path back to my mother’s house as though it had hidden doors. “You’re not a burden.” She wiggled her fingers at me. “You’re our girl.”
I had playmates. I had Devin Svensson, who was quiet and steady and a little older, who would sit under the pear tree and make a fort of stones. “I’ll keep strangers away,” he would say, and he meant it.
“Amelie,” Devin would call in his low voice, “don’t go to the big shed alone.”
“You’re my hero,” I told him, rolling my eyes.
“You better not tell anyone,” he said, as if heroes wanted secrecy.
“Who’s going to believe me?” I teased.
I learned quickly there were people who made small lives heavy with words. My grandmother — Soledad Reynolds — had the coldest mouth I had ever heard. One day she slapped me in front of the big chest because a cousin had hidden in a box and I had helped him.
“What did she do?” my aunt asked later when my cheek shone like a bruise.
“She hit me,” I said.
“That woman is cruel,” Arlo said. He was not loud, but his jaw tightened, and that tightness made me feel safe again.
Aunt Erin said, soft and careful, “Never be ashamed. You are not her shame.”
Grades came and went. I learned reading on borrowed newspapers and later on the little coloring books from the market. Devin and Ivy Hoffmann — my sisters — taught me the words their teachers loved.
“Amelie,” Ivy would say, “sound it out.”
“I’m trying,” I would answer. “It’s like catching a sparrow with my ears.”
“You’re dramatic,” Ivy laughed. “But it’ll help.”
On a winter festival, Devin brought me to the lantern fair in the county town. I remember the rabbit lantern first — small, pearly, and brave. The seller asked a riddle about words I half understood. I guessed “a thousand for a single word” and won the rabbit lantern. Mr. Zhao — I mean Mr. the seller — laughed and said, “You must read a lot.”
“Books make clever,” Devin said. He beamed.
That rabbit lantern became mine in a way nothing else had: my piece of wonder I had earned. I kept it on my shelf. It blinked when we lit the candle and soothed me into sleep when the nights were too full of questions.
“Keep her close,” Erin said. “Light it when you miss home.”
The village was small, but people still picked fights with our family. Beverly Estes — fat-lipped, loud, and sharp-tongued — called me names at the market.
“You’re an orphan sent to the filth of our town,” Beverly spat once when King Kyler Pena and I were buying apples. “Your own folks didn’t want you.”
I had never felt such heat in my face. Kyler stepped in front, bristling, and the world tightened in the space between two breaths.
“Back off,” he said. “You’ll take answers, not ledgers.”
Beverly shoved him and the rest of the afternoon turned angry and noisy. She tore at the rabbit lantern’s paper once, just to make me see what it felt like to be small and helpless. Arlo found her before she could go further.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“You don’t get to tell me,” Beverly shouted. She liked crowds and used them like armor. She spread whispers about who I was: “left,” “shamed,” “no family.”
Later, when the villagers gathered for the spring cleaning festival at the square, that same crowd became the audience for what I needed most: justice.
“You call my girl names,” Arlo began. He was not the fighting kind, so everyone turned to look. The lantern stalls twinkled and vendors paused.
“I can say whatever I want,” Beverly said. She was worked up to a public spectacle. “Everyone knows where she came from.”
“Enough!” said Mario Wheeler — the old man who was the village head. His voice had authority the way a bell has resonance. He had raised a quiet household, but he did not like bullies.
People murmured. “She’s not wrong,” someone said. “We all heard her.”
“You heard lies,” Arlo replied, voice steadying into steel. “She is a child. You will not speak of her like that.”
Beverly sneered. “And who are you to stop me? Your wife keeps a stray.”
At that, Mario Wheeler stepped forward. He had a slow, careful habit of measuring men with his eyes. He looked at Beverly, then around the crowd, and said two words that shifted the air: “Respect her.”
She flinched as if struck. The crowd pressed in, because once the village head set a tone, the town followed. “You owe the child an apology,” Mario said. “Here, now.”
“No,” Beverly snapped. “I’ll apologize when—”
“Shut up!” Devin cut in, and his voice was sharper than usual. People heard the protective edge in him. “You don’t get to poison her. Say it.”
She tried to laugh it off. People hissed. Arlo, standing near me, kept his arm around my shoulders like an anchor. The theater of the square turned fully against Beverly. She had made enemies by being cruel for too long.
“Apologize, Beverly,” Mario repeated, and the entire square drew a breath and leaned on his words.
Slowly, humiliatingly, she bowed her chin and said, “I… I’m sorry.”
“You mean it?” demanded Ivy, who had come with the others.
“Yes,” Beverly mumbled, but the tone was wrong. It was practiced, teeth grinding the syllables.
“That’s not enough,” Mario said. “You stand here and say why. Tell us why you did it.”
She looked around at the faces and the rabbit lantern on the bench that I had placed there so it could catch the breeze. “I… I’m tired of people saying I’m small because I don’t have what others do. She was a target.”
“You picked a child,” said a woman in the back. “You picked on the weakest.”
“You speak for the weak now?” Beverly laughed thinly, and then suddenly broke. Her mouth trembled. The mask that anger had been peeled away like a bonnet, and what was left — a small, frightened woman — was suddenly real and human under the crowd's attention.
“Look at her,” someone hissed. “She’s always been like this — loud, ugly, protected by money and anger.”
“Apologize properly,” Arlo said. He did not raise his voice, but his words landed with the weight of a stone.
Beverly’s face changed. She was not proud in that moment; she was exposed. People who had tolerated her nastiness for years became a chorus of witnesses. The faces I had seen at the market — vendors, mothers, men who’d worked with Arlo in the fields — turned on her. They recited the episodes: the old woman who had shouted at the children, the insults at market, the times she’d pushed others for the sake of a small spectacle. Each memory she had caused lay like a new piece of evidence.
I had to look away because the intensity of the moment made my chest ache.
“You have to understand the weight of your words,” Mario said. “They can build a man or break a child. You have chosen to break.”
“Forgive me,” Beverly said, her voice a rag. “I didn’t know I was hurting so much when I hurt others.”
“Then you will make it right,” Mario said. “For three months, you will work at the community garden. All your wages will pay for the children’s books at the school. Each morning you will stand in the square for half an hour and read aloud the stories you used to sneer at. You will spend one evening each week at the children’s table and teach them nothing but patience and kindness. And you will never again speak about Amelie as if she is less than any person here.”
The crowd breathed and murmured, and it felt like someone had taken a heavy cloth off a window.
Beverly staggered as if punched. She hadn’t expected consequences — only shock. Her eyes turned to me and for a second the bravado cracked to show fear. People who had days earlier whispered to her now could not bear to meet her gaze.
“You’ll do this because you must,” Mario said. “We don’t want your breaking to spread.”
The humiliation was public and complete. She had to accept tasks that made her open and accountable. She pleaded at first, bargaining with words, but no one accepted the pleas. Arlo kept his hands at his sides but I could read his calm as a wall; he would not be moved.
“Crowds will watch you,” Ivy said quietly. “Neighbors will keep watch — not to shame you more, but to ensure you don’t forget.”
Beverly’s reaction changed like a person peeling off layers. At first there was fury — red and hot — and then disbelief that anyone would not simply let her be. She sputtered denials. “I didn’t— I was defending—”
“You were bullying a child,” someone answered. “That needs fixing.”
Then she tried to laugh. The sound was short and brittle. Then denial again. The crowd pressed in, and I saw her beginning to crumble, first stubborn and then absorbed into the embarrassment and the rawness of being judged. She was not physically punished, nor was she beaten; the punishment was public, direct, and human: work, restitution, and facing the people she had hurt. The catcalls and whispers stung, but the worst was the eyes — those steady village eyes cataloged everything she had done.
When she finally sat on the stone step and covered her face with shaking hands, there was a sound like a damp cloth pressed to the earth. Around her, life resumed: vendors closed and opened their stalls, people spoke in lower voices, and children laughed as if the heaviness of adults could not hold them. She left that night with the clear terms in her ears, and I watched her vanish down the lane, shoulders bent under a fate she had chosen for herself.
Later, behind the privacy of our gate, Erin said softly, “It’s not cruelty to demand accounting. She will learn.”
I hugged my rabbit lantern to my chest. It had survived. “Did that feel good?” I asked Arlo, who had come and stood beside me.
He bent, kissed my forehead, and said, “It felt right.”
The aftermath changed Beverly in small, human adjustments. She came to the children's table, awkward and guarded. She read from the pages and stumbled over words and apologized with every mistake. The children, for their part, were curious and forgiving — they wanted teachers, even if the teacher’s name was once a curse.
During this time, other wounds mended slowly. My maternal grandfather — Mario Wheeler in his respect — began to show warmth. He stopped flinching when I came near. He would tap his cane and ruffle my hair and drink thick tea on the bench while I ate sweets he'd secretly left for me.
School changed when I moved to the county to study at ten. The town—bigger, brighter—has a teacher who loved words: Catherine Watson and Marianne Dixon had once taught in the same building. They watched me with patient interest.
“You like stories?” Catherine asked on the first day, as we sat in her office. Light from the window warmed the rabbit lantern I’d wrapped in cloth.
“I love them,” I said.
“Then you’ll learn fast.”
I did. I read everything in sight. I tutored quietly and studied so hard my eyes would sting. My grades surprised my family and my old fears, and Devin — always steady — shifted from sentinel to pride. Ivy and Catherine both boasted about me in a way that made me blush.
“Keep your feet on the ground,” Arlo would say. “But reach your hands.”
And I did. I learned how to be loud when the world needed to be told the truth, how to stand for myself, how to hide the scar that still tingled when I remembered the slap. I kept the rabbit lantern on my desk in county school and lit it on the nights I missed the cold mountain sky. It was my talisman.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Erin and Arlo hadn’t promised my parents. I think of that early breath when I said “Papa” and felt someone answer. I think of Beverly Estes learning the shape of work and apology and the way a village can right itself when enough people agree.
Years later, when I came back for a visit and walked to the market, I saw Beverly helping at the lettuce stall. She smiled at me, small and uncertain but genuine. I nodded, and her face changed as if she’d been given a second chance. She bowed her head and said, “Amelie, I mean it.”
I said nothing grand. “Good,” I replied. “Grow.”
She did. The village learned, too. They learned to protect small things. They learned to hold people accountable and to make restitution when harm was done.
The rabbit lantern is still with me. It has a slightly browned edge where Beverly had ripped it and Arlo bought me a new one afterward, but I kept the old paper because it reminds me that what nearly snapped can mend and still be beautiful.
“Amelie,” Erin said once as we sat under the pear tree where Devin used to fort, “you belong everywhere you love, and everyone who loves you belongs with you.”
I smiled, held the rabbit lantern, and said, “Then I belong to a lot of people.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s the kind of wealth that doesn’t disappear.”
I kept the lantern lit as I studied, as I walked the county streets, and when I returned to the mountain and sat on the old stone by the gate, people passed and nodded. Some of them were the ones who had watched Beverly’s punishment. Some were the children she later taught. Some were my family.
The nights I lit the rabbit’s candle, the rabbit’s little ears threw a soft shape on my wall, and the world seemed smaller and kinder. I am Amelie Cruz, and once a child who nearly did not stay — now I hold a light. And every time I light it, I remember the day a village chose to name what was right and let the wrong be fixed in front of everyone.
The End
— Thank you for reading —