Revenge18 min read
The Girl Who Counted Stones
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the wagon smelled like wet wood and old hay.
"I don't belong to them," I said, even though I was four, and my voice came out small.
They laughed and tied my hands to my lap, thinking a child could be fooled by rope and a new name.
"You'll learn to call yourself Dahlia Luna," the woman said. "It sounds pretty, doesn't it?"
I watched the woman’s fingers, the way she turned the coins over in the dim light. Her laugh was soft and sharp both—like a blade and a ribbon. She called herself Bella Torres.
When they shut me into the pigsty for the first week, I learned who they were without anyone saying it.
"Stop that crying," the man barked from outside the tethered door. "We gave you food."
"Half a bun and a cup of water," she answered. "That's more than enough for a child who costs us money."
I kept my little body quiet most days, because shouting just made the ropes tighter and the nights longer.
"Call us mother and father," the man said once, leaning his face into the slats of the wooden stall. "Call us Anton and Emilliana. Call yourself Dahlia Luna."
"Okay," I whispered. "Okay."
Later, when they brought a one-year-old boy into the yard—wet, screaming, smelling of strangers—Bella Torres said with her bright eyes, "Here you go. You need sons more than daughters, right? He'll help with the fields. He'll be cheap labor."
Anton Vincent counted a stack of bills and handed them over without looking at the child.
"Good," Emilliana Berger clapped her hands. "Now you have both."
I stood behind the door and watched until they checked whether the boy had what made him a boy. Then they called me out and said, "Dahlia, you must be good. You must help with the baby. You can be useful."
"I will," I said. I helped because I had to. I learned to tie the boy's shoes, to unbox his tiny clothes, to feed him porridge when my own stomach was hollow.
"You're better than a hired hand," Emilliana said later, polishing the wooden table. "You cook, you sweep, you even mind the boy. When she grows up, she'll fetch a fine bride price."
"Fine," Anton said. "Good investment."
I kept the name they forced me to wear—Dahlia Luna—on the surface like a cheap bracelet. Inside, my real name was small and private: Su Qian. I never forgot it.
*
"School?" I asked when I was eight, because I wanted letters and numbers like a ladder to climb out.
Anton slapped me across the face hard enough to sting my skull.
"Ungrateful thing," he snarled. "You are debt. You are mine until you are sold."
Thomas Peterson, the boy they'd bought, had wet himself and stood by the earthen hearth, blinking.
"Leave her," Thomas said with a child's steady courage even then. "You can't hit my sister. You are a bad man."
Anton kicked Thomas into the mud.
"You little fool," he spat. "I feed you, and you speak like that? Get out of the way."
Thomas covered his mouth and began to cry. A red, raw sound. My chest broke, and I did the only thing I had practiced for—and I begged.
"Please," I whispered to Anton as if he were a judge. "Please, if you love me, let him alone. He will help you when you are old."
Anton hesitated. The threat of losing his labor to villagers' eyes kept him from pressuring further that night.
"Fine," he muttered. "As long as he behaves."
Thomas and I shared a roof, a thin mattress, and secret votes against the people who owned us.
"One day," Thomas told me while he tried to braid my long hair with the clumsy concentration of a child, "I'll learn lots of things. Then I will protect you."
"Promise me you won't tell anyone my real name," I said.
"I won't," he promised, and because he was small and honest it felt like a metal clasp closing over a secret.
*
When Thomas learned to walk, he followed me like a shadow.
"Little sister," he said with a mouthful of porridge and a grin. "When I'm seven I'll make you learn to read."
"You can't even tie your own sandal," I scolded, laughing. "First you learn to keep your shoes on."
We had small, careful joys. I learned when to smile and when to pretend to be grateful. I learned the rhythm of chores—wake, water, weed, feed the chickens, care for Thomas. I learned where Anton kept the small cash in the rafters. I learned the timing of Emilliana's temper. All of it, I learned like a map leading away.
"You're clever," Coraline Jimenez said the night she climbed the hill to our shack with a bag full of old textbooks. Her hair was a loose braid, her clothes threadbare but clean. "You have hands to heal. I'll teach you if you want."
"Teach me?" I blinked. "Why would you teach me?"
"Because I used to be a doctor," she said simply, and for the first time a stranger spoke with no profit in mind. "And because whoever taught me deserves to feel their lessons walk on."
She taught me how to set a bone with a bandage, how to find a fever without a thermometer, how leaves could be medicine and how some roots were poison. I wrote words in the dirt with a twig and learned to read them aloud. Each letter was a little door blown open.
"You will be dangerous when you learn this," Coraline said once, looking at my hands as if they were instruments. "You must be careful how you use it."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
She placed a warm palm over my knuckles. "You can save, but you can also plan. Knowledge is a tool. Tools are for work."
I listened. I decided to use that tool to make an exit plan.
*
Years compress in harsh villages. When I reached fourteen, they announced I would be given to Dane Schmidt, a grown son of the village leader, Gavan Montgomery.
"He has a good house," Emilliana told me, with the smile of a fox. "And a father who pays well. It will be a feast."
"You're selling me?" I said, because I still believed words could be held at bay.
"You're being married," Anton corrected. "It's your duty."
Dane Schmidt came to the fields like a child with a bucket. He smelled faintly of urine. He looked at me with simple devotion.
"Call me your wife," he said with the earnestness of a man who believed in being told what to do.
"Call me Dahlia," I answered quickly, because I was still practicing my lies. "Call me Dahlia, for now."
The villagers arranged the wedding as if it were a box to check. Guests, tea, the clumsy exchanging of a red cloth and a promise that was only a string of words.
That night, I sat on my pallet and counted the days—four years—until the "full time" when he would be satisfied and perhaps leave me to his house like a rounded stone someone had polished away. The plan I had been making took shape like a map.
I taught Dane small things while he laughed and watched—how to stand guard, how to plant feet steady, how to pick up a stone and strike the right place.
"Protect your wife," I told him one evening when the moon was a white coin. "If anyone threatens her, hit them in the back of the head."
Dane nodded, solemn as a boy. "I will protect you. I promise."
Every night, I handed him one of the bitter fruit I picked on the hills. He took them like gifts, his mind picturing me as a comfort rather than a worker. I bribed him with small sweetness until the act I wanted became an obedience he could not resist.
"Keep this between us," I told him. "If you do well, I'll make you a gift."
He did not ask what kind of gift. People like Dane never asked—they only followed the rhythm of reward.
*
The night I set the trap, Anton came home smelling of cheap rice wine, angry about a lost poker game. He staggered through the yard and found me near the well.
"You useless thing," he slurred. "You bring me nothing but bad luck."
I put my hand over my heart and pretended to cry.
"Dahlia!" he bellowed. "You witch. You want to cause me trouble."
He lifted the wine bottle to hurl it. That was when Dane struck.
"Stop!" Dane said with the bluntness of a child. He picked up the stone I had set at the path.
"You pervert," Anton cursed, and stumbled forward. Dane hit him on the back of the head once, then twice, and then again—hard and steady—until Anton fell like a felled sack.
I listened to the thud of his body and thought of how many times my own bones had shuddered from his blows.
"You killed him!" someone screamed from the yard.
"I didn't mean to," Dane sobbed, putting his face into his hands. The whole village heard him, as I planned for them to.
We took Anton to Gavan Montgomery's house, both of us carried by certain neighbors who liked an excuse to gossip.
"What happened?" Gavan asked, his voice low. He looked between the three of us—between the broken man on the mat and the child who held his head.
"You would have hurt her," Dane said, voice trembling. "She was in danger."
Gavan's face turned a color I had watched in my years of hiding—an expression that counts profit, not pain.
"This is private. We'll deal with it," he told the bystanders, but the bystanders were already looking at the footprints in the mud and the way Emilliana sat wiping her face with a handkerchief she had not used all week.
"She arranged for this," Emilliana wailed later when the village doctor patched Anton's wounds and declared he might wake and be maimed but alive. "She led my son into murder!"
"Look at him," Thomas said quietly from the edge of the room. "He did what I told him to. She didn't mean for it to go so far."
There was a hush, and then a small bitter chorus of voices—hatred feeding the air.
"You two are to be punished," Gavan said finally, though his eyes slid to the price he could demand for the "wedding" he had promised his own son. He wanted to keep his hands on the business that kept his house warm.
*
But the plan had worked in ways I had not spoken aloud.
Gavan had always been careful. He had a private well and a private ledger. He never drank from the public water.
"Why don't you keep a private well, leader?" I asked when I had pulled him aside at a busy time, pretending to be the meek girl who needed an audience for a favor.
"If you say something, I'll destroy you," he whispered, the village power in his voice. "You owe me, Dahlia."
"I know what goes into the well," I said quietly. "I know about the pills and the way you're selling children because you prefer making the village infertile."
His face flickered first with denial, then anger, then a cold calculation that I knew by now meant his voice would find a way to crush me.
"You'll be next to be thrown in a river," he said, but his hands trembled.
I walked away with no smile, because violence is not a pleasure; it is a tool you use when justice is too slow.
*
A month later, villagers began waking with itchy red blisters. A dozen faces swelled and itched like some terrible allergy.
"What's in the food?" someone cried at the celebration for the wedding that never happened. "Why are we burning and breaking out?"
Panic spread like smoke. People accused the kitchen. They accused Emilliana, who had a grudge against everyone.
I stood and said quietly, "I saw Bella Torres at the well. I saw her put things into the water."
"How do you know?" Gavan snapped, but the doubt was seeded.
"Because I watched," Coraline said from the edge of the room, her voice small but steady. "I have seen villagers' ailments before. This is not an allergy. Someone has been adding something to the well for months."
"You lie!" Bella screamed, her bright carnival smile lowering.
At my direction, a few men went to the well that night with kerosene lamps. They watched Bella walk there, as if a moth had been drawn to a lamp.
"She is dumping something in there!" they shouted and grabbed her hands. "You traitor!"
Bella's eyes went wide then narrow. Her smile slid. "You can't prove anything," she hissed, for the first time without the brassiness that had kept her safe. "Gavan will protect me."
"They will test it," I said, holding the vial of collected water in my hand. "We will take it to the county hospital."
The scene that followed—when Bella Torres was brought to the square and stood dripping and bright in the halogen lamps like a creature cut out of another life—was how a village makes decisions. The men yelled. The women clucked. Children stared. The smell of the river, the boiled rice, the animal dung and human sweat all mixed until the night was the color of iron.
"Why would you poison us?" an older woman spat, stepping forward. "Why would you hand us our children's futures?"
Bella's voice did not sound as confident anymore. "I was making business," she said. "I was—"
"Business!" the old woman laughed in a way that didn't belong to her age. "Business? You stole baby's lives!"
I waited for Bella's face to change. She started proud, then she tried to insist she was misunderstood, then she tried to bargain. The steps were clean and clear, practiced like a play.
"It was never like that," Bella told the crowd. "I am one of you. I took what I needed in dark times. We all do."
You could hear people move like an animal scenting a predator. Hands reached out. Phones came out. Someone took a video.
"They brought us children to sell, Bella," a mother yelled. "My own girl was taken. You were their broker."
Bella's face shifted. Pride fell away into fear. "You can't do this to me," she begged suddenly, like a child. "I gave Gavan money. I—"
"Why did you drown the baby in the pond?" someone called out. "Why did you let that child drown?"
Her face tightened as if the question had struck her chest. For a moment she tried to laugh it off, then her lips trembled.
"I didn't—" she said, then stopped. The crowd could smell surrender like wet cloth.
Someone dragged the footage of a child being thrown into the village pond into the light. The gasp that rose was not from only one throat; it was gasps braided together.
"She said it was 'business,'" Gavan muttered to me when nobody was looking. "She had methods."
"You covered for her," I answered. "You sent your men to pick the ones who could be sold. You kept a private well to break the village down—so you'd buy fresh stock."
The centuries-old rules of shame and honor twisted in the square. Men who had never known consequences found their names on other lips. Women who had stayed silent for decades finally dared to scream.
Bella's face shrank as the villagers spoke—accusations lashing her cheeks. She went through the motions I had watched so many times: defiance, denial, bargaining, then pleading.
"Please," she whispered. "It was never supposed to be like this. Gavan told me to—"
"Save it," the old woman said. "You will answer for the children."
They threw her out of the square to the edge of the pond and stripped off her outer coat. People spat. A few pounded her with questions. Someone forced her to sit on a bucket of water, pour it over her head, and stand there while the villagers circled.
Then Gavan's own men, the ones who had eaten the spoils of his rule, came forward and turned on their leader. "We worked for him," one said, "but Bella fed us the line. He knew too."
It was like watching a house of cards topple. Gavan's face went through the slow toll of a man whose coins had been counted and found false. "You can't do this," he mouthed, but no one listened. They were the jury now.
They formed a circle around Bella. The camera phones recorded everything. People clapped. They sang. It was a messy thing, public reckoning, half-victory and half-rage.
"Tell us who else," one of the women demanded. "Tell us their names."
Bella's eyes darted, trying to clutch at any rope. She had no choice. She named names—some true, some lies—anything to buy breath.
At the end of that long night, Bella was bound and taken not to a jail but to the well. The villagers wanted justice done where the babies had died. They forced Bella, angry and crying and shrieking, to sit on the lip of the well while one by one they emptied her pockets and placed small stones into a basket.
"These stones represent each child taken," the old woman declared. "Each one will be returned to the water."
Someone shoved Bella forward. Her feet slid. For a moment she teetered on the edge, and then the men pushed so that she fell into the shallow water, coughing and wailing. They lifted her out and pushed her face into the mud where she had once stood.
"What does she do?" a man asked.
"She took life," someone answered. "Now she will sit in shame for a little while."
I did not enjoy their ugliness, but I watched every second because it meant the village could not be taken by a single vile family anymore.
*
I had planned more than one punishment for more than one bad person.
Gavan Montgomery—the village leader—was not thrown into the well. His punishment had to cut deeper into power than the humiliations given to Bella.
"Your ledger," I said to Gavan in the market, where he could not speak without being overheard. "We will take it to the county. We'll tell them about the private well, about your arrangements with the sellers."
"And you think you'll get away?" he snapped. "You think they will listen to you and your band of traitors?"
"I think they'll listen to the woman who knows how to read records," I said. "I think they'll listen to the woman who can show proof."
I had kept paper. I had kept notes from Coraline, receipts, the odd string of purchases Anton had let fall from his pocket in late drunken nights. I held them under my sleeve like a secret weapon.
When the county investigators came, they did not come because of me alone. They came because a young man with a scar on his knuckle had tracked down a videotape, because Thomas had found a ledger in Anton's rafter, because Coraline had written what she saw. They came with the weight of a state's law and the horror in their eyes that matched ours.
They took Gavan in front of the whole village.
"This man," the lead officer said, holding up receipts and photographs, "has used the trust of this village to enact a plan to profit from infertility by stocking his houses with children and arranging sales to buyers. He changed the water and sold your futures. He will be tried by the county."
Gavan's face was ashen. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, and then his voice was swallowed by the crowd.
"You sheltered her," someone spat toward his home. "You let them take our children!"
It was not a mob that gathered at Gavan's door. It was the recorded evidence. It was the steward of law. For the first time, the leader who had been untouchable had to explain himself to others who had eyes to watch.
The investigators read out receipts: money transfers to traffickers, purchases of chemicals, payments. Gavan stood rigid, then began to bargain—not for himself but to save whatever property he could. He asked people to back him, to stand with him, to declare that it had been a single woman's conspiracy.
"No," the old woman said, stepping forward. "We have lost too many children." She spat in the dust at Gavan's feet.
Gavan's face crumbled from anger to fear. "I didn't mean—"
"When you realize the life you have ruined," someone called out, "what will you do? Beg?"
He tried to call out, to explain that he had kept the village functioning, that one must make choices. The faces around him had their own stories now. They no longer needed his reasoning.
The investigators took Gavan away with a sense of careful hands. He would answer the law. That was a different kind of fall than Bella's, a fall into the system we had all trusted yet feared to use. It had teeth. It had paperwork and jails and a slow, grinding end.
Watching him lose his authority felt like fire slowly eating a paper roof. It made the village ventilate the smell of rotten money.
*
As for Emilliana Berger—my adoptive mother—her punishment did not happen all at once. She had been the one to sign me over. She had scolded me and hit me and laughed while I worked.
When the villagers learned who had helped me, they didn't spare her the public humiliation.
"She sells her own," someone said during the court sessions, meaning the days when the community watched Anton and Emilliana and their greed boiled into a legal storm. "She didn't pity what she made."
Emilliana's face went from pale to red as the testimony rolled on. A woman who had once beaten me with a broom now answered for the many deeds she had committed.
They made her sit at the edge of the market square and tell everyone, aloud, about each child she had known to be sold. She cried and blurted names, then rationed trite apologies.
"This is not enough," a woman yelled. "You took our house of children and made it a market. Now you will have to sit and listen."
They forced Emilliana to stand in front of a line of mothers who had lost babies and to apologize, each apology costing her a small coin the villagers took from her purse. Each coin paid some small legal fee. Each coin bought a doctor's visit for those who needed urgent care.
Her expression slid one stage at a time. First defiance, then denial, then shrinking. She tried to bargain, then to strike, then to implore.
"I didn't mean to—" she said finally, voice broken. "I just—"
A mother with a scarf covered in tears pressed a palm to her face. "You will live with this," she said. "You will know what it looks like to lose what you made."
Emilliana's punishment was long. It removed her from the center of the house and forced her into a kind of service. The courts took her management rights. The women took her status. It was a slow unmaking that served as a cautionary tale: those who profit from misery often end up with the task of changing the pots in the kitchens they once ignored.
*
The worst man I ever watched was Crew Schreiber. He had no art to his cruelty—only bluntness.
I had found out, by accident, that he had thrown a newborn into the village pond. I had watched him do it with tools in his hands, like an ordinary farmer removing weeds. The world blurred for me.
"Why did you do it?" I demanded one day when a crowd had him within reach. He was drunk, safe in the company of men who wouldn't look too close.
"It was business," he said, shrugging. "A baby costs more than a child who survives. We'll sell a living one if we can."
The first stage of his punishment was public exposure. We had the photograph he hadn't noticed someone take. It was a low-shot of his hands, the infant’s blanket, the water closing like an eye.
"Look at that face," a woman cried, holding up the picture. "He drowned a child."
Crew's color drained as the phone screens lit his image. He went through the stages I knew too well: clenched bravado, disbelief, denial, hasty apologies, then fevered fear.
"This is a witch hunt!" he sputtered. "You're all lying!"
"Do you deny it?" someone shouted.
"I—" Crew stalled, then began to cry like a child being slapped. "I'm sorry. I didn't—"
"Save it," another said. "You will face the law."
They stripped him of his land holding, of his tools. The men who had shared his evil walked away scowling in a way that said they were not proud but could not change. The legal system did what it could: it convicted him on multiple counts of reckless endangerment and manslaughter. The villagers gathered at the courthouse to see him removed.
Before they loaded him into a van for transport, a group of the mothers who had survived—and the ones who had lost children—forced him to come to the pond. They made him kneel on the wet stones while they told him what it was to be a parent: the fear, the nights, the naming of a child. They made him listen to every loss pronounced like a bell.
Crew's face changed in that circle: he went from bravado to brittle denial, to pleading, to collapsing. The camera phones recorded him as he begged the women for what he had no ability to give—mercy.
"Please," he cried. "Please show me mercy."
"No," the oldest woman said. "You took our mercy."
He flinched and then stood and was taken into custody in front of us all. This punishment was different from Bella's humiliation at the well and different from Gavan's legal downfall. Crew's was a moral unmaking—forced to listen to the grief he had unleashed until it had ground his pride to sand.
*
The worst and the best of the story blend because no single scene is the last. Coraline died quietly, small and brave, in the hollow of the hill where she had first helped me up into knowledge. I buried her with a stone I carried up a slope with Thomas.
"She called you beautiful," Thomas said, placing the stone. "She said you were a 'beauty to save.'"
"She taught me letters," I said, and the words were heavy and true. "She gave me ways to make the hurting stop."
"I'll teach you to read everything she taught me," Thomas said.
We made a small pile. No words were carved into the stone. I left it blank. That blank stone is the weight of things we carry that do not need names.
The county found my parents in a long search. They had not slept for years. When I saw them in the county hospital corridor, my chest felt like it would break.
"Su Qian?" my mother asked, voice cracking, eyes red.
"Yes," I answered. I put my face into her shoulder and cried like the sea.
"I never stopped looking," my father said, pressing my hair back. "We searched every market, every road."
"You came back for me," I said, amazed that my voice had a rough edge of something like forgiveness. "I came back."
We took Thomas—no longer Thomas Peterson alone, now Thomas with a family name that could grow or not. The police were careful with paperwork and compassionate with us. They called social workers because Dane needed a place and a pattern in which he would not be used.
In time, the courts sentenced those who had sold and those who had bought. Gavan and Crew received heavy sentences. Emilliana and Bella faced long trials and the scorn of their neighbors. Some men who had quietly benefited lost land and status. The village became a quieter place, where people had to stand and explain their actions.
"Does it make you feel better?" someone asked me once, months after the trials, while I sat on the hill and watched the village lay new seeds.
"It does," I said honestly. "It makes me less afraid."
"What about the others? The ones who are still hurting?" they asked.
"I help them," I said. "With Coraline's books. With knowledge. With herbs. With an eye to the world."
Dane Schmidt ended up at a state care facility for those who needed structure. He would never be a husband in the way the village had meant it. But he had a place where he learned to plant beans and line up pans, and sometimes, because I had a weak and complicated part of me, I left him a small basket of fruits on the day of his birthday.
"You kept your promise in your own way," he said once, staring at the apples, eyes clear and soft. "You did good."
"I taught you to hold a stone and hit where it mattered," I said.
"I learned to protect," he answered. "I learned to be brave."
We had saved more than a few. Some were left behind or broken in ways we could not heal. But many walked out with us.
At the end of the long season, I stood at Coraline's little stone, where the blank face had been polished by rain and wind.
"I kept my name," I told the wind. "My mother remembered me. Thomas is with us. I will make the world remember the ones who were stolen."
The stone sat silent, a small witness to the woman who taught me how to write.
"Will you ever forget?" Thomas asked one evening as we sat on the ridge and watched the sun drag its gold across the ridge.
"No," I said. "But I will use what I remember to build."
"Good," he said. "Because I will be with you."
We walked down the hill together. The village looked smaller in the distance. The pond still rippled. The well still held water.
"One day," I murmured, touching the blank stone with my palm, feeling the cool of the rock like a punctuation mark. "One day, I will plant a tree here."
"Make it a strong one," Thomas said. "So the children can climb it."
"I will," I answered.
That last act was my vow—not of revenge, but of repair.
When the county closed the last documents, when the last ledger was entered and the final witness paid for a ride to a new life, I kept the small ledger of my own.
"Your true name?" my father asked, seeing my list of plants and people's progress.
"Yes," I said. "Su Qian. But in this book, I'm Dahlia when people need a tender name. I use both."
He smiled like someone who had learned the secret that goes with being human—the need for many names.
We planted the tree the next spring above Coraline's grave. Thomas tied a clumsy ribbon to the first small branch.
"To Coraline," he said.
"To the children," I said.
And when the ribbon fluttered, the stone below it gleamed a little, a blank spot filled with a promise: we bury the dead and plant the living.
The End
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