Face-Slapping14 min read
My Second Life as Winter Girl: The Gold, The Space, and the Village Verdict
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I opened my eyes to straw, low beams, and the smell of smoke and old grain.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
Someone laughed softly.
"You're home, Cataleya," said my mother.
No. I corrected myself in silence. I am Cataleya Suzuki — back from a life I'd earned with blood and orders, and yet my name on the lintel read wrong. I felt the room like a borrowed uniform that didn't fit. Stale air, a warped roof, the faint iron taste of river mud. My head throbbed with the memory of water closing over me and a hand that pushed air into my lungs. That hand had belonged to a boy with a calm face and ink-black hair — a face I could not yet name in this life.
"You're awake," my sister said, voice thick with something like hope.
"Are you sure?" my mother said, fingers trembling as she touched my forehead.
"Of course," I answered. I had to. I had nowhere else to be.
"This is Cataleya," my mother said to the room. "She'll be all right."
They called me Winter Girl in whispers — the house had been full of whispers when I arrived, the smell of incense and boiled herbs thick in the air. My first thought was a sharp, bitter ache: I had been somebody else before this. I had been trained to be invisible, to move through danger, to survive on less than a trickle of water and a sliver of hope. I had built a life of contracts and wealth in steel and silence. What I did not expect was that that life — the one with a workshop that smelled of oil and a locked surgical table — would come with me in pieces.
"Who are you really?" my aunt asked. "You look different."
"I'm me," I said. "I'm Cataleya."
She frowned, uncertain.
They told me how I had fallen into the river and how the family feared the worst. They spoke of doctors and old healers, of money and arguments. Words like "waste" and "liability" floated in the air like flies. I listened and learned.
Old man Nolan White sat in his place like a weathered statue, one eye on me and the other on his eldest boy. His mouth closed into a line that meant he would prefer silence and calm and a life where his family behaved like a single bell that chimed only on other people's terms.
"You should be patient," someone said. "We do not waste on a fool."
"Fool?" I thought. I remember being precise, efficient, lethal. Fools do not last long in my world. I chose my battles. Now, I chose to smile.
"Don't let him say such things," my mother — Fernanda Carroll — snapped, gentle fury lighting her face.
"Money is money," Drake Bridges said, his voice thick with entitlement. "Our family is not a charity."
"Your family?" I thought. The word felt sour in his mouth.
They argued about doctors, about who deserved what. The heirs and inheritors fought like animals over a crumb. I watched, silent, letting the old life and new fuse like two maps laid one on top of the other.
"Bring the man from the next village," Dolan Nichols said. "He charges little."
"Little or none, it's better than wasting coin," Drake Bridges replied. "We won't drain the house for a fool."
"You had better not force this on us," my grandmother — Judith Davis — said, voice low and strong as an old stove. "We will find a way."
I listened and did the only thing a soldier knows how to do in a house of chaos: I calculated. My hands were small and callused in the other life. Here my hands were small for washing pots and pulling weeds. But a hand that had kept me alive could still steady a starving house with the right moves.
Days came and went. People spoke. I learned names: Sofia Moretti, who was tender and fierce and watched me like a hawk; Dream Bradley, who braided grain into songs; Leticia Dominguez and Leslie Berry, who tended the fire; Kaylin Nichols with the quick step and quicker words. They were my sisters in this life. Felix Allison and I traded looks of mutual exhaustion — he was the quiet, steady hand of a younger uncle who worked the fields.
One morning I stood at the threshold as Drake Bridges' wife, Aurora Sandoval, came to ask for the money to go to the town physician. Aurora's lips were bright with anger masked in sweetness. She held the house's demand like a shield.
"Thirty coins," she said. "We need thirty to fix our child's belly."
"Thirty?" my grandmother repeated, incredulous. "We have already spent so much."
"It's for our child," Aurora answered with slow venom. "It belongs to my child."
The house erupted. Old arguments, sharp tongues, and secreted grievances spilled like stored grain from a torn sack. I watched my mother’s face. She held worry like a stone.
"Why did you let them take more?" I asked as if to the air.
"We have no choice," my mother said. "We cannot make him angry."
"Make him angry." I remembered the way a nameless hand once moved me through ruins and the cold precision that had saved lives. I set my jaw.
I learned things about my new life quickly. The family was split bitterly: the eldest son, Drake Bridges, who took because he believed power entitled him; the younger sons, Dolan Nichols and Felix Allison, who were quieter, fairer; my grandmother Judith Davis who kept the ledger tucked away like a secret; my mother, Fernanda Carroll, who worked and mended and loved in small, necessary ways.
Days hollowed into a pattern of chores, small joys, and one thing I couldn't shake: the memory of my old room, my workshop, the locked cabinets of sterile tools. Once, alone, I closed my eyes and reached for it like a child's ghost hand gropes in a nursery for a lost parent. The world didn't answer — but something else did.
"Space," I breathed. It was ridiculous to whisper such a thing in a mud-walled house.
Then, in the quiet between afternoon chores, my mind slid like a key into a lock and a hallway opened where there had been only wall. I found myself standing inside a room I knew with a certainty that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with muscle.
It was my workshop. The steel bench gleamed with tools I recognized. The storage racks held bandages and compact med-kits. A sealed case of compressed rations sat behind a door labeled in a language I no longer used openly. I laughed until I cried.
"A space?" my mother asked, peeking in as if I had asked her to pass a cup of tea.
"I'm not making this up." I held up a compact food bar and a surgical pack, pressing the air like it could be felt. "It's a thing. It listens."
"It listens," my grandmother said, as if she believed more in the world than she let on. "Use it when needed, Cataleya."
The space changed everything. It felt like a god's coin tossed into a trapped life. With it I could hide food, bring out just enough coin to keep my family warm, trade tools for small favors. I could be invisible and plentiful. I felt the old life returning: the steady ease of having options, of controlling a piece of fate.
But fate is a trickster and villages are small.
Not long after I learned to draw the space like breath, the house's miseries bloomed into a spectacle. Aurora Sandoval's daughter, a pretty but cruel girl named Kaylin Nichols, was bitten by a snake while searching the graves for herbs. The wound swelled fast. Breath came with difficulty.
"Take me to the town!" Aurora demanded, voice high. "Take my child to the physician!"
Old loyalties showed their teeth. Nolan White did not hesitate.
"Get me the bag," he barked. "We go."
They left with haste, and the rest of the household watched the house close its fist like a trap. I stayed. I had a reason to not go: to hold the seam that would let us split clean when the time came. And for a night, the house's center changed. A tree I had not seen was pushed.
When the village had its little fire and confusion and the old healer from the next village mended enough wounds to say they'd keep on the living side, a new trouble began: accusation. Voices rose about money. Whispers of a golden nugget floated like a spark through dry straw.
"A dog-head gold," someone said, as if the name were a charm. "A bright gold chunk. Worth a fortune."
"Who found it?" they asked.
"My Cataleya?" Judith said, like a promise.
I only smiled, and inside I kept the secret like a blade: I had seen gold in a grass nest that day when a girl was bitten and I had taken it quietly. My mother had hidden it in the safe place in the bed. We sat on it like a hen on future warmth.
News is a flame. It burned quick. The eldest household — Drake Bridges and Aurora Sandoval — learned of "gold" and thought their due had been secreted. They came like a thundercloud.
"You cannot keep that," Drake said, eyes hard as a grindstone. "Share it."
"Share it?" Judith laughed with granite at her ribs. "You made us a joke for years. You call for our rights now?"
"A family's coin must belong to the house," Drake said, snarling. "Half for me."
"No," my grandmother said, voice precise. "It belongs to the finder."
The village gathered. Houses leaned from windows like curious teeth. The argument that followed was not private. Words were flung like stones.
"You found a gold piece yesterday!" Drake shouted. "Give it to me."
"Give it to me?" my grandmother said. "You robbed us of heat while my sons starved. You want to take our hope now?"
"To the priest! To the village judge!" Drake bellowed.
Old loyalties unrolled into public view. The village decided a meeting would be called. The clan elders were summoned. People came with rumors like pitchforks. I watched.
"Why would you let him pick you apart?" my mother whispered to me.
"Watch," I said. I had always been patient when the next move needed a clean strike.
At the ancestry hall — the place where our family had once honored their dead — the people gathered like witness stones. Nolan White stood rigid, Drake Bridges at his side. Aurora Sandoval's face was a practiced mask. The elders took seats like judges.
"Now speak," said the village leader, Foster Ahmed, who had the look of one who had sighed too long for his years. "We will hear."
Drake stepped forward, his voice loud. "My father and I have been wronged. A piece of gold was found. It belongs to the house. We demand half!"
Judith stood up. "It was found by my grandchild."
"By Cataleya Suzuki!" I said, loud then. "I found it. I took it into my mother's care. We used none yet."
"A trick," Drake spat. "You want to hide it and keep it from us."
"Is that true?" Foster Ahmed asked.
My grandmother reached beneath her shawl and took out a dusty ledger. She placed it on the low table and opened it with steady fingers. "I kept every cent in these pages," she said. "Every seed, every sale, every coin. I ask the elders to read."
Silence fell heavy as a linen shroud. Readers took the ledger. Pages turned. Numbers matched. Names met their debts. The room smelled of ink and old sweat.
"These are the accounts," Judith said. "Here is the proof."
Foster Ahmed read aloud, each line a bell: receipts, loans, years of thrift. And then the final number — a small hoard of only a few coins left.
"This house was not poor by accident," she said. "It was because the food table was taken. The seed sold. The help seldom called. Let every person here decide."
The elders read. They frowned. They matched facts to faces. The truth, dry and heavy, was difficult to ignore.
"Drake Bridges," Foster Ahmed said quietly, "there is evidence of callous taking and neglect. You and your wife argued to keep the house from repairing a child's wound for the sake of your pride. You call that righteousness?"
Drake opened his mouth, then closed it. Light from small windows cut across his face. For the first time in my life here, I saw him without armor.
"You think this changes things?" Aurora asked, throat tight. "We were acting to protect family assets."
"Family assets?" Judge Foster repeated. "You mean your comfort at the cost of others' lives?"
The crowd's murmurs grew. Men shifted. Women crossed their arms. The ledger was the mirror that made men wince. Drake Bridges felt it. I could see it in the way his jaw tightened and the way his mouth began to tremble.
"Enough," I said with a calm I borrowed from another life. "The ledger and the witnesses tell their story. If you wish judgement, we will have it publicly. If you refuse compensation and apology, the village will decide penalties. This is not only between father and son. It is between what we are willing to tolerate."
"You dare?" Drake's voice cracked.
"Yes." I answered. "I dare."
The leader held up one hand. "Let us hear what is fair," he said, looking at faces.
"What is fair?" Drake asked, and the room leaned in as if the next word could split a stone.
"Public restitution," my grandmother said. "A public apology to the household. Repaired damage. For a start, pay for the medicines, the rest to go to the family who were wronged. And a sign of humility."
Drake parried, then lied. He tried to shift blame. A hush gathered like fog. I watched his face unfasten.
Then, with the elders' consent, a schedule was set: Drake and Aurora would stand in the village square at the market hour. They would have to speak their guilt aloud, repay what could not be repurchased with words, and accept the elders' sentence if they refused. The crowd's interest went from curiosity to hunger.
The day of the public reckoning was bright with the kind of clear sunshine that shows dust and secrets equally. People packed around the square — tradespeople, elders, children with sticky hands. The drum of the town elder calling for order was like a heartbeat. Drake Bridges and Aurora Sandoval arrived, their faces colored with the certainty of men who had known comfort until they did not.
"Remember," I said to my mother as we stood together, "this will change them or bury them."
They were led to the center. A small crate was placed where they could stand. Foster Ahmed, dignified and tired, read the ledger out loud once more.
"Drake Bridges." he pronounced. "Aurora Sandoval. You stand charged with long-standing neglect and the purposeful concealment of household distribution, leading to harm. You refused to allow proper care for a vulnerable child and insisted on preserving perceived entitlement. You now will answer in the open."
I heard the string of words like an indictment and felt the crowd hold its breath. Drake brushed his sleeve across his eyes like a man wiping dust and then laughed.
"This is theater," he shouted. "I will not be made the joke of the village!"
"Then say it," Foster said, "tell the people what you did, why you did it, and who you were protecting."
Drake's face changed — not the smooth arrogance of before but the small cracks of a man who realizes the ground is moving beneath his feet. For a moment he stood as if in a wind.
"I have done what any son would," he began. "I have protected. I kept the house whole."
"By refusing care to a child when asked?" came a voice like a stone being tossed.
"No." Drake's throat moved. "I—" Then he faltered. Pride began to uncurl like a broken rope.
"Aurora, you speak," Foster urged.
Aurora's mouth was dry. She swallowed. "We did what we thought would keep the house safe. I begged for coins but they—" Her voice broke. Tears formed.
The crowd took them in. The elders asked for names of those who would testify. One by one, voices stepped forward: old neighbors who had seen the way food was rationed; women who had overheard arguments about "silly daughters" and "wasteful sons"; men who had seen fields left untended while a house grew fat in arrogance.
"Look at what you've done," said an old widow, bent but honest. "You starved your kin to keep your table warm. You said a child's life was less than your gold."
"That is a lie!" Drake screamed, and the shouting pushed outward like a storm. But the ledger's ink had already weighed down his words.
The elders conferred, then returned to the crate. "For the harm done," Foster Ahmed said, "you will do public apology and compensation. You will give up two shares of the town threshing of this year. You will stand in the morning public market with your head uncovered and recount what you refused to do and why, and you will accept the village's labor sentence for three months to repair what you neglected. You will kneel and beg the household's forgiveness."
The crowd listened like a tide. Drake's face, usually red with contempt, went pale. He staggered and for a moment looked like a man who had been punched in the stomach.
"Beg?" he whispered. "Beg... in front of everyone?" His voice broke like dry wood.
"Yes," Foster said. "If you refuse, the elders will hold you to the law of the land. You will lose the right to inherit any household titles and the village will refuse trade until restitution is clear."
For the first time, Drake saw the cost of his arrogance. Pride began to leak from his every pore. His chin trembled. He tried to say it wasn't true. He tried to deny. He searched for allies in the crowd and found only faces lined with judgement.
"Is there anyone who speaks for him?" Foster asked.
Silence. Then a child, one of Drake's nephews, stepped forward, hands small and trembling. "Uncle?" he said, voice unsure.
Drake's shoulders shook. The movement of a man coming undone is not dramatic in film; it is subtle and ugly and human. He glared, then scowled, then his anger peeled like paint. He dropped to his knees first.
"Please," he said, voice cracking, "forgive me. I am sorry." I heard the sound change from arrogance to crumpled manhood. He could not hold it together; the village watched him as if watching a storm suddenly go soft in rain.
People mentored mercy from their own stories. Aurora sobbed openly now; she took his hand with a shaking grasp as if to anchor him to a human line.
The elders decided the public labor and penance would start at dawn. The villagers would supervise the repairs and they would see the man’s humility in the work. The crowd cheered — not meanly but with a relief as if the ledger had finally been read.
Afterwards, as Drake Bridges lowered his head and began the first of his tasks, the scene remained: men and women taking out their phones — some already had them — snapping pictures, witnessing the shame. People whispered, some clapped, some turned away. Drake cried, then tried to stand tall but was stopped by the presence of the elders. He fell back into the work, axe in hand, his face a map of new knowledge.
Later, in the hush after the square emptied, a hush different from shame — the recovery hush — fell on us. My mother took my hand.
"You were brave," she said simply.
"I used a ledger and a village and the truth," I said. "I used what we had."
Judith rested her hand on my head. "We will be quiet now," she said. "We will heal. But never forget — a ledger remembers. A village remembers. People remember."
That night the house ate meat for the first time in memory. The rabbit we had kept gave us comfort: a warm stew that would feed more than one. We laughed, ate, and felt the hairline cracks in our lives begin to mend.
But the village had not forgotten. Drake Bridges’ public falling was stored in everyone's talk. He had been made small in a market full of neighbors. Men who had once glared at my grandmother's back now looked her in the eye. Children who had run by and mocked now waited to ask for a kind word. The village turned, as villages do, toward balance.
I kept the space. I kept the leverage. I stored a few more items that would help: a bandage kit, a small pistol-case I could not open, some dried rations, a notebook of old surgical diagrams that belonged to the life I had left. Every small thing was a thread affording us a way forward.
There were nights I dreamed of cities, of contracts and surveillance and quiet rooms where the only light came from a single, unblinking lamp. But when morning came, the laughter in the kitchen and the smell of stew were mine. The space — my old workshop — waited like an ally that needed little thanks. I would give it only two things: respect and use.
In the weeks that followed, we changed slowly. The ledger gave us a line of truth. The gold — judiciously sold and used to build a small house near the field — made a shelter for my mother and my uncles. The rest went to buy tools, seeds, and the beginnings of a business.
Drake Bridges worked with us as the elders had demanded. The town watched him carry stones and mend fences. He carried his guilt in the open and so his scorn became softer. People took pictures, recorded his apology, and the clips circulated beyond our village like a stone thrown into a still pond.
I stood in the doorway of what would be our new home and thought of the old life that had followed me: a toolkit, a surgeon's eye, a soldier's patience. I had a new mission now — not contracts across seas, but a small war for dignity inside a house and for justice in a village. My space was my advantage, and I would use it well.
"Will we be safe?" my little sister Dream asked me at dusk.
"We will be better," I promised. "We have truth. We have work. And we have each other."
At the very end, when the village fell into the hush of stars, I placed one last object into the space and shut the door behind me: a small carved piece of the golden nugget — a token of the life I had found by accident and then seized on purpose. It fit neatly into a corner among bandages and screwdrivers.
I closed the lid and whispered to the old room I had once called a workshop: "Thank you."
The room did not answer, but the things inside seemed to hold their breath and wait.
And when I lay down that night in a new house that smelled faintly of rabbit stew, I knew this story would be remembered by one unmistakable touch: a dog-head gold that started a small revolution, a ledger that told the truth, and a woman — not meek and not loud — who used both.
The End
— Thank you for reading —