Face-Slapping14 min read
New Year, Broken Tracks, and a Father's Quiet Game
ButterPicks10 views
I never planned to become a planner of ruin. I planned for a quiet life. I planned for city office hours, for the children's laughter, for New Year dinners that smelled like soy and ginger. Then everything changed on a snowy New Year's Eve.
"Come, sit," my aunt said, patting the wooden chair beside her. Her voice was soft when guests were near, sharp when the room emptied.
"Sit where?" I asked.
"You and June must understand," she said, looking around to make sure no one watched. "Zander needs... a child. Take Kailani. It's better she grows up with family that can guide her."
"No," I said flat. "What are you talking about?"
She sighed like someone telling a long-accepted truth. "You will have a son next time. I know it. I had the master tell me. A daughter is harder. It will use your luck. Give Kailani to my Zander."
"That's impossible," I said.
She reached for my arm. "It's not cruel. Think about his loneliness. He needs a home."
June was across the table, busy feeding Kailani a dumpling. Kailani laughed, small and bright, and the whole room softened. If anyone else had said anything then I might have laughed it off.
Aunt's tone changed. "Please, Roman."
I almost laughed. "You're begging me to hand over my daughter. On New Year's Eve."
She began to cry. Then she dropped to her knees on the wooden floor and started to knock her forehead against the boards.
"Zander will drink again," she said between sobs. "He says if he cannot keep a child, he will not live."
"You're blackmailing me with his suicide?" I asked.
She cried harder, and then she told me different things: Zander had been wild for months, smashing plates, refusing to eat. He had sent messages, left notes, said he would end himself if he could not adopt. He wanted Kailani.
I wanted to throw something.
"Are you insane?" I hissed. "My child is not a settlement. Pick anything else."
"Think of using it within the family," she whispered. "Better to give her to kin."
I left. I told June nothing then. The family celebration continued. The lacquered plates, the red envelopes, the lantern jokes. I felt a hot pressure in my chest.
Later, alone near the rice sacks, I saw Zander's phone.
"Give me your phone," I said.
"Why?" Zander asked, more amused than afraid. He was twenty, a factory hand with greasy nails, acne, a paunch that looked like it had eaten too much stew.
"Give it," I said again.
He hesitated. He smiled then, a small dangerous smile, and handed it over. I thumbed his screen with a palm I tried to keep steady.
There was a folder called 'favorites.'
It took perhaps three seconds for my head to burn with hot, simple rage. Hundreds of photos. My daughter's small mouth in the sunlight. Her baby teeth, her first steps. Some taken with permission. Many without.
"Why do you have so many pictures of Kailani?" I asked.
"Because she's beautiful," he said easily. "Who wouldn't want to keep them?"
I scrolled. There were pictures I had never shared, pictures taken through windows, pictures of her sleeping. There were text files with ugly words.
"I will not let you near her," I said.
He shrugged. "You cannot stop the whole world from wanting what you have."
I hit him. It was not a calculated blow; it was a father's blow. He fell and laughed.
"Save your drama," he said. "She'll be mine. She'll be my daughter."
"Not in a thousand years," I said.
I should have walked away. We were in my parents' home, and violence has its costs. The elders broke us apart. I grabbed his phone and smashed it on the stones of the courtyard. The screen spidered. Glass and plastic tumbled.
My father scolded me. My mother hid her tears in her sleeve.
"You are hot-headed!" my father barked. "Think of your family."
June held Kailani close. The girl was oblivious to grown dangers. I felt like a bad actor in someone else's script.
I was wrong to think the matter ended. The next morning the family group chat exploded.
"Your daughter?" one message read. "How can you have a daughter and expect anything else?"
"She asks for trouble," another said. "Girls bring misfortune to a family."
My mother's face turned paper-white. My hands clenched by the steering wheel.
I wanted to take them away that moment. "Let's leave now," June said. Her voice trembled. "Go to my parents'. We'll never come back."
"It is evening and the road is bad," I said. "We leave at dawn."
Snow fell like small feathers. We drove slowly. I thought of Zander's mocking grin. Of the photos. Of how a man could want a child like an object.
"Do you think he would harm us?" June asked later.
"At least he tried to," I said. "But it's impossible to prove, and if he had planned something, maybe he had help."
"I don't want to think like that," June whispered.
I did think like that. I thought of a smashed brake line and of his skill at fixing cars. He worked alone in a dingy workshop—he knew engines, he knew bolts. He had access.
"Don't say it," June said, sensing my dark thought.
We drove. The car slid. Tires screamed. The guardrail was a thin, poor line between life and a cliff.
"Hold on!" I shouted, hands white on the wheel.
We hit a patch of ice. The car leaped. The front bumper hit, the world bucked, and the car rolled. Trees and sky spun and broke into noise. The next thing I remember is a ringing hush.
I woke in a hospital bed.
"Roman?" Marcel said. My father was there, with a mustard stain at his collar. My mother sat quietly, hands squeezed together, eyes raw.
"I'm alive," I said.
"You hurt your leg," Marcel said. "But Kailani..."
"She is okay," June whispered. "The seat—Kailani's safety seat—did its job. She is quiet, but she is alive."
The relief washed through me and cracked into anger again. Zander had wanted her. Had he tampered? Police said it was an accident. The report indicated brake failure, not sabotage. I held the page and looked at the numbers. Nothing conclusive. The world loves its gray zones.
A week later Zander came to the hospital.
He walked up to my bed like a rat, tall and graceless.
"You should have given me the girl," he said simply.
"Get out," I said.
He laughed. "You're alive. Lucky man."
"Why are you here?" I asked.
He shrugged. "To see if you were worth the trouble. To see if your luck holds."
"You don't scare me," I said.
"Not yet," he said. "But think of my offer. If you leave her to me, you'll live calmer. Lose a child, live a longer life. Is that so bad?"
"You threatened my family," I said.
"I told you I would die without her," he said. "I meant it."
He leaned close. "You work in Beijing. You won't want trouble. I can be patient."
He left grinning. The hospital corridor hummed with visitors. A young man in white sneakers slapped at his phone, and then he was gone.
That night June and I talked until midnight. Kailani slept in my arms. I made a decision that should have terrified me, and instead the decision felt like a small, deep, necessary fever.
"I will make them vanish," I said. "Not in blood, Roman, not that way. But they will not get what they wanted. They will pay in a way that everyone sees. They will fall apart in public."
June's eyes widened. "Are you certain?"
"I have nothing to lose," I said. "Everything I have is at risk already."
So I called three old friends.
"Eamon?" I said. "It's Roman. Do you remember the courtyard? I need a favor."
There was silence that lasted for a full, human beat.
"Roman? Are you all right?" Eamon asked.
"I need you here in two weeks. It's dangerous," I said. "You can refuse."
"You're not asking," Eamon said. "We're coming."
They arrived like sudden weather: Eamon Bright, Greyson James, Anton Maldonado. Men who had once shared classes and beer with me. Men who also, in their small ways, had become larger versions of themselves.
"What's the plan?" Greyson asked first, voice low.
"You will be rich investors," I said. "Buy the repair shop where Zander works. Move in. Make him think his luck has come."
"Economic infiltration?" Anton laughed. "How romantic."
"No," I said. "It's a trap."
We had conversations in a rented room, leaning over maps, writing numbers on paper napkins.
"You're risking everything," Eamon said.
"If Zander ever makes a move toward our child," I said, "he will be trapped. He will sign things he cannot undo. He'll take loans he cannot repay. He will also be shown what he truly is."
A month later, the three "investors" bought Lane Cox's repair shop.
Lane was a tired man who had been losing money for years. He signed without reading the fine print. To him, any buyer was welcome.
"Congratulation," Lane said, shaking hands with the men. "The factory's in your hands."
"Thank you," Eamon said with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
Zander noticed the new men immediately. They came to the shop, polite, a little foreign, offering tea and kind words. They asked Zander to join them for card games in the office. They praised him.
"It's just networking," Zander said. "Good, decent men."
During the first nights, he refused. Then, one evening, he walked into the office with a cheap grin on his face.
"One round," he said. "I'll sit."
The men were warm. They laughed. They offered cigars. They gave him small wins the first night. He left with his pockets slightly heavier.
"I told you luck would turn," he boasted to his mother later.
We watched with a patience that felt like teeth grinding. Zander began to be promoted. With the owners' help he became the legal face of the shop. He signed papers. We rigged the small wins to feed his confidence. He believed himself chosen.
One night they invited him to a late session. Cards. High stakes. He felt golden. He was offered a chance to be "the man" everyone trusted. He drank and bet and laughed.
"You're my brother," the lead investor said. "Take it, brother."
It was easy to push the hook deeper.
We had brought Hugo Lewis into the game. Hugo ran a local "finance company." He had deadly patience. He looked like a man who lent money and also chose who would live in a town and who would stay hungry. He liked deals where the numbers looked impossible and the profit looked delicious.
"Sign this when he needs the money," I told Hugo.
"I will make sure he signs," Hugo said. He smiled and accepted the contract.
Zander's wins became boons. His ego rose like a tide. He signed a paper promising to repay loans, a paper he'd never expected to read carefully in the flush of winning.
The night of the big trap began like any other binge at the office. They were three in the back room, and the door was closed. There was a small heater, stale cigarettes, and cheap liquor. Then they opened the partition and dragged me in.
"What's this?" Zander asked, surprised.
"You owe us," one of the men said. "You know the rules."
They stripped me nearly naked to humiliate me. I let them. I needed him to believe he had all the power. When the paper was on the table and Zander's grin was wide enough to split, he went for the final step. He offered to stake everything. He wanted to be made a boss, to be seen rising.
"Sign it," he said, trembling with greed.
"Are you sure?" Anton asked, theatrically.
He signed with a flourish. He thumbed his fingerprint and laughed before thinking. He never read the small clause that named the lender. He never saw the blank fields filled by Hugo's ink later.
"Put it in," Zander said to the men. "This is my moment."
Then they upped the ante: "One more thing," they said. "If you win, you can decide about the girl's custody. If you win, you claim the child."
"Impossible," I said. I tried to knock over the table. They held me down.
"You're bluffing," Zander said to me. "Scared already."
"You want Kailani as a prize?" I asked coldly. "Do you think I'm a fool?"
He laughed. "We are each other's kind," he said. "You and I. You have a wife and a house. You have things. What are you willing to wager?"
My heart was an animal that night. Then I did a thing I practiced in the mirror a dozen times before. I let him believe he had everything. I played the fool.
He put in a monstrous amount. He told them to trust him. He signed his name to a line that bound him to more than money. He promised our daughter as collateral.
"She is not a thing," I said softly.
He did not hear me. He was singing his own victory.
When the cards came down, his pair of kings lay heavy on the table, two royal faces, triumphant. He laughed, shook, dared the sky to stop him. He expected the world to bend.
I flipped my cards slow.
"Ace of hearts," I said.
"Ace of diamonds," I said.
It was simple. The aces were on the table. He stared. He realized he had been tricked.
He screamed.
The room changed: from predatory grin to stunned silence. Zander's smugness broke into disbelief, then into denial. His hands trembled. "You cheated," he said.
"You were never meant to win tonight," Eamon said, calm.
"No," Zander whispered. "I won. I always win."
"Look," I said, and held up his signed contract. "You signed for three million."
His mouth was a small circle. "That's impossible."
"Read it," Hugo said from the corner. He wore the same patient smile. "You signed an agreement. You borrowed a large sum against the company."
He looked at the men—Eamon, Greyson, Anton—then at his parents, who had been brought in earlier for the show.
"Where will I get that money?" he asked.
"You won't," I said. "Hugo will own your debt. He will collect it, in ways you cannot imagine. Your parents will be called, blamed, and stripped. No one will help you. Your name will be everywhere."
"You're bluffing," he said.
I left that night with my dignity on the table. The three men gave me a nod. Zander sat like a man broken on the inside of a machine. The punishment had begun.
What followed was slow and public. It needed to be, because the thing I hated most about them was their smug public cruelty. They would be humbled in the town square, in front of neighbors, in places where people could point and whisper.
The next morning, the town woke to a different sound.
"Zander Mitchell! Come out!" someone shouted in the lane. A crowd had gathered in front of his house. The sun was a cold coin in the sky.
"What's happening?" his mother wailed at the doorway.
A man with a recorder held up a phone to film. Others snapped pictures. Word moves like flame in a small town.
They brought out his hard drives and photos. They spread the porn pages on the courtyard table. The neighbors pressed forward, jaws open.
"Is this yours?" someone asked, voice high.
Zander stepped out pale. He tried a laugh. "It's mine, but—"
"Look at this!" called a woman who ran the bakery. "He took pictures of the child! He took them secretly!"
A chorus of gasps. A child in red mittens looked up and covered his mouth.
Zander's face changed colour. He moved as if to close the table, but hands grabbed the photos and shoved them into the camera light.
"Shame," one neighbor hissed. "Keep your filth to yourself."
"Who raised you?" another shouted.
He tried to cover his face. "It's not like that!" he said. "I—"
"Silence," someone said. A man with a stern face—an old friend of my father—stepped forward. "You will explain, now."
"I didn't mean—" he started. The word died on his tongue.
The crowd didn't beat him. That was not necessary. Shame travels faster than fists. A hundred tongues cut him. Phones recorded, neighbors whispered with the flat cruelty of people seeing a secret made real.
I watched from a distance. I told myself to feel nothing. My hands curled into fists.
"You're a pervert," one of the neighbor boys spat. "You should be jailed."
His mother sobbed. "My son," she whispered, as if she could find a child under Zander's skin. "My son."
"Where will we go?" his father asked, enraged and stunned. "What did you do?"
The humiliation crawled into every corner of their life. Friends who once borrowed sugar now crossed the street. The repair shop no longer trusted him. The men who had lifted him to a fake pedestal began to slip away like fish in a net.
That public unmasking was over five hundred words long in its effect. It was an audience of dozens and dozens who witnessed his fall. They saw him go from cocky to blank, from denial to fear, to that thin, animal whine of a man who realizes he has nothing left.
"You're not one of us anymore," said a woman who had once shared gossip with his mother at the well. "You are a thing people point at."
Zander's eyes lost light. He staggered and gripped the porch rail. "I didn't do anything," he said, then looked at his hands.
"You took my child's pictures," I said. "You wanted more."
"You can't—" he began, but his voice was too small. The neighbors filmed, shook their heads. His humiliation was complete in a way punishment often does not fully create.
That morning, his parents left the house to answer the demands. A man with tattoos came with a list. Another man knocked on the door and told them their debts had mounted. Vinegar-faced creditors circled with polite threats. The debt became real.
The devices were burned in the street. People gathered. I saw the embers and felt a small, terrible gladness. He watched the devices burn as if flames could erase the moment he had looked at my child in a way a child should never be looked at.
"What do you want?" he asked me later, when our eyes met briefly.
"To keep my daughter safe," I said. "To keep her away from people like you."
He had a new face then; it was broken into disbelief. He could not believe his luck had failed him. His small crimes had cost him everything.
He tried to bargain. He tried to deny. He claimed the photos were innocent, that the words were fabrications. He begged. He offered money. He threatened quietly to come after me.
"Please," he begged once. "I can fix it. I'll make it right."
"How?" I asked.
He faltered. There was no path back. The neighbors hissed.
And then, the final step. Hugo's men tightened the noose. High interest debts swallowed his wages. Lane Cox's factory ownership transferred to the strangers; Zander's name was on legal paper. New notices went on his door. The bank locked their account. The shame of the photos made every small kindness into suspicion. He became an object of scorn and caution.
He was pulled from his home and sent to work in a coal site—an ugly, dusty place where men cough and count down hours in the dark. No one watched him there but men better at cruelty. He worked long hours. He returned with callused hands and a hollowed face.
People pointed. Children whispered. "That's the man who took pictures," they said.
Once, he came to the market and a small boy hit him with a rotten apple. His parents apologized profusely, but the deed was done. He fell into a raw sink of shame.
He reacted. At first he denied. Then he broke. He begged for money. He rocked in a corner and muttered. He tried to throw himself at the feet of neighbors, begging them to speak in his favor. Most turned away.
On one afternoon, a woman who once praised his mother in the line at the noodle stall spat at him. "You should have thought of consequences," she said.
He dropped to the ground and curled up, like an animal caught in a noose. People filmed and phones flashed. He crawled toward his mother's house and banged on the door. His parents refused. They had been forced to sell the house piece by piece. Their furniture had been taken for debt. Their shame was complete.
Zander's reactions had been a full spiral: from swaggering confidence to disbelief, to outrage, to bargaining, to pleading, to collapse. Neighbors watched and recorded and pushed the story out into the city like a stinging wind.
But punishment was not the end. I wanted him removed from our lives for good. I wanted him to understand not only loss but also the long slow hunger that chasing quick pleasure leaves.
Hugo's men made sure the months were painful. They took the repair shop's profits. They made him an example. He became a lesson. Schools talked in whispers. He might never leave that county again.
Months later, months of that slow pressure, he came back to the small lane with a face like paper. I saw him once through the crowd as I took Kailani for a walk.
"Please," he said to me. He grabbed at my sleeve. He smelled of coal dust. "Forgive me. I—"
I looked at him. He had lost everything. He had lost his standing, his name, his home. He crumpled in front of us like a man who had been put through some terrible grinder.
"I cannot," I said simply.
He fell to his knees and begged. He wept in front of neighbors and begged for one last chance. The crowd watched. Some crossed themselves. Some spat. A few recorded. He begged to touch Kailani.
June held her daughter close. Kailani looked toward Zander with the quiet curiosity of a child.
"I will never let you near her," I said.
He looked at me. "You will regret this," he said, voice hoarse.
"No," I said.
He was left with nothing but the small, terrible understanding that his life had been reshaped in a way that would not make sense to him.
Time moved. I went back to my life. We moved quietly to June's parents' town for a while. I took odd jobs, rebuilt pockets of savings. My friends drank with me and made jokes. We tried to heal.
"What will you do next?" Eamon asked one evening.
"Work," I said. "Earn a life back. That is my duty to my daughter."
"You did it," Greyson said. "You made him pay."
"It had to be visible," Anton said. "If it was private, it would be rumor and pain. When shame is public, it is justice in small towns."
"You could have gone to police," Eamon said.
"I could," I said. "But the proof was not there. You cannot prove a wire cut or a loosened bolt after the fact without cameras on the highway. You cannot prove intent easily. People like Zander know how to hide. The only honest thing was to break him in sight of all."
Weeks passed. We kept our promise to the little family.
One night, years later, I hung a small photograph on our small apartment's fridge. It was a picture of Kailani wearing her blue coat, the strap of the safety seat visible behind her. She grinned with a milk-toothed smile.
June kissed my forehead. "You did the right thing," she whispered.
"Maybe," I said.
Kailani's laughter bubbled from the next room. She counted her toy animals out loud.
I looked at the tucked photo of the three aces we had once used—no one else remembered those exact cards. I smiled a quiet, private smile and turned the page of the calendar.
"One day she will ask why," June said softly. "What will you tell her?"
"I will tell her I did everything I could to keep her safe," I answered.
She nodded and looked at the photograph of the safety seat pinned to the fridge, its straps still buckled in our memory.
The End
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