Face-Slapping16 min read
The Jar of Wildflowers and the Half Pig
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I woke up coughing. The cough pulled something heavy from my chest and left me gasping like a swimmer who'd just found the surface.
"Mom—!" a voice cracked into the room.
"Mother!" another voice answered, louder, desperate.
I sat up and the world tilted: clay walls, a low roof that smelled of smoke and boiled cabbage, a blanket full of honest patches. Two young men were at my bedside, looking like sons and looking as if the sun had made them honest and hard. One was darker, broad-shouldered; one was paler, with a child's bright eyes that still carried mischief. Both were too handsome to be mine.
"Who are you calling 'mom'?" I said, because the sound of that word was as foreign to me as a wrong calendar.
"Mom, it's me. Don't you recognize your son?" The pale one—he had the soft eyes—grabbed my hand like he'd been waiting his whole life for it. "I shouldn't have made you mad. If I had listened, you wouldn't be hurt. I swear, I swear—"
The dark one half-pulled himself to his knees and shoved his face toward mine so close I could count the freckles on his cheek.
"Stop arguing," I croaked. "Both of you, stop. What year is it?"
They exchanged a look I couldn't read. Tears in the pale one's eyes. A fist clenched on the dark one's jaw.
"You passed out, Mom," the pale one said. "You scared us so bad."
"You did this, you hear me?" the dark one said, pointing at his brother. "He ran away to join the regiment. You won't stop him. They'll punish the family if he deserts."
"My head hurts." I covered my temple and realized the skin smelled faintly of kerosene and tobacco. Old woman hands—wrinkled, brown—felt wrong holding the bone of a life I didn't remember having. Memory is a traitor. Before I could stop myself, a single, foolish hope slid into me: a second life, not to waste on hospital beds and regrets. Maybe—maybe—this life would let me love, or be loved.
"Annette." The pale boy's voice had a name in it. I flinched. That wasn't my name—my name had always been different—but the way he said it made my heart disobey me and answer.
"Annette?" the dark one echoed as if testing the word in his mouth.
"Call me..." I considered the list of names I'd been given by a life that wasn't mine. I settled on the one that fit the face in the cracked basin: "Annette," I said. "Call me Annette."
The pale boy sobbed. "Annette—Mother, you must rest."
"Rest?" I laughed, a little wild. "Rest is for people who have nowhere to go. Tell me where I fell asleep."
"Three days," the pale one said. "You've been feverish. We stayed with you. We—"
"Stop," I said, and the room stilled like something had been tied across a doorway. "Listen to me. I'm not your mother."
"You are!" Both of them collapsed back, each certain.
"Let them be," a small voice said from the doorway. A thin young woman appeared, face pale as paper, hands still gripping the frame. "She woke up. Should I bring porridge?"
"Bring porridge," I said. "And a mirror."
She blinked, frightened. "You'll hit me if I wake you? I—"
"I won't hit you. Bring the porridge, please."
She hurried off. The younger son—Jack—stood straighter when I used that word; the other—Gus—bit his lip. They obeyed me like soldiers who believe the colonel has returned.
The woman who brought the porridge had eyes like pressed rice paper. "Annette? I'm Haisley," she whispered.
"Haisley Clark," I said before I had reasoned the name into being. "Haisley, you look exhausted."
She jumped as if I'd touched her. "I— I make the porridge. Please eat."
I tasted the porridge and felt life return like a slow tide. Small mercies matter. The house was poor but tidy. Threads and patches told stories of thrift; a jar of wildflowers—dandelions and ragged sprigs—sat in a recycled jar on the old cabinet, as if someone had tried to make a museum of what they could not buy.
"This is wrong," I told myself in the half-light. "You were supposed to be eighty and proud of your roses, not twenty-five and dead in winter."
But the mind is a liar and memory a map with blank spots. The life on this small street in this country that called itself Taoguo pulled me like a tide: soldiers, a village rumor about a mountain and a mine, and a man from the city who wore black and quiet as a storm.
"He's coming," someone said later that morning. A cluster of villagers gathered under the great elm by the road, eyes sharp as knives. "The boss."
We stood and watched a sedan that smelled of oil and news and the world beyond our valley stop at the lane. A man stepped out like a measured photograph—tall, ink-black hair combed tidy, a face cut like a coin. He had a small group with him—men with papers, and men whose eyes needed no translation.
"Who is that?" I asked out loud.
"The boss from the company," Flora, a neighbor, said. Her voice was always ready for gossip. "They say there's rare ore in Little Black Hill. Foreigners want it. They need houses."
The boss's name was Emmanuel Craig. He was polite to a fault. He spoke in a voice that made the syllables feel like money; when he stopped, people nodded because it felt safer.
"Do you have any rooms to rent?" he asked Reid Buck, our village head, who shuffled forward like he wore his politeness the way others wore waistcoats.
"Many," Reid said. "If the boss needs them."
"Rooms clean, three rooms," I heard Reid promise. I thought of the empty space—Jack's room, just vacated when he enlisted—and the ways one or two spare coins could change the look of this dinner table for the next few winters.
"You look," Emmanuel said slowly, turning his cold bright eyes over us, "for clean places. We are on a schedule."
"Twenty yuan a room per month," Reid said, as if he wasn't measuring anything but his pride.
Flora began clapping before anyone finished speaking. The village clapped like hens at grain. Opportunity has teeth.
The boss needed a translator. The man with the clipped beard—Cristian Olsen, the secretary—said aloud, "We need someone with language skills. Fifty yuan a day for a translator in the morning, twenty for a village liaison later."
Fifty. The number hit me like sunlight through a cracked window. My palms went slick.
"I can translate," I said.
"No one here can," Cristian said, and from somewhere near him Hunter Smirnov—the official translator, who smelled of expensive soap and ironed speeches—snorted.
"Who is she?" Hunter demanded in English to the foreigners, who glanced at me and then let a small smile spread as if the surprise was amusing.
"I'm Annette," I said in a tone that meant this was not a question. "I can translate."
They let me do it because they needed someone and because the idea of a village woman speaking fluent English sounded like a trick of light. I stepped forward, tongue remembering a language I'd thought I'd never speak again. When words poured out of me—clear, polished, the English of lectures and flights and screens—they looked at me like a coin with an unfamiliar engraving.
"You worked with a foreign translator in your youth?" Emmanuel asked.
"Long ago," I said. "As a girl. He taught me a few things."
The afternoon passed in a blur of new names. I translated terms that sounded like land and rust and engines, and Emmanuel folded them into business like a tailor does cloth. Hunter Smirnov sulked, and Cristian watched me with a calculator of worry in his eyes.
"Will you come tomorrow?" Emmanuel asked when the sun went thin.
"Yes," I said, without thinking. The truth was simple and dangerous: I could not refuse. The money would buy rice and soap and maybe even a small bar of chocolate for Lucia's cheeks. It would buy time.
Cristian handed me ten crisp bills as a down payment when I left. Ten big ones. I gripped them as if they were talismans and then, when my hand unclenched, I laughed until it bled into incredulous sobs.
"Take them," he said. "We will need you again."
That night, under the patched quilt with Lucia curled against my side like a warm pebble, I thought of the life I had lost and the one I now held like an uncut gem. It kept me awake.
"You were amazing," Haisley whispered as she brushed Lucia's sparse hair into two little braids. "I never knew you knew English."
"I learned things," I said, tasting the word “learned” like a promise. "I know how people who have money move. I also know how to make people see what they want to see."
The days that followed were simpler and louder. The mine was a promise at the mouth of the mountain with tents and uniforms and a rhythm that made the whole village move like a clock wound up.
"You'll work each morning," Emmanuel told me one dusk. "Fifty each day."
"No," I said. "Twenty will do. I don't need so much. Keep the rest—use it to fix the road."
He blinked. "As you wish." He liked people who made him see the world in small moral trims. People who refused money look like people who are either saints or sensible liars. He preferred both.
My translation work brought me to rooms with maps and light and unfamiliar coffee. It brought me the ability to buy a sack of rice, a lot of white soap, and—foolish indulgence—half a pig. When I asked the butcher for half a pig, his eyes went wide as if I had asked for the moon. He wrapped the meat in paper with reverence and love; everything in that paper was hope.
"If you waste any of it," Haisley scolded as I carried the package through the lane, "I will haunt you."
"You would do worse," I said, and she laughed, then looked away, a small ache in the mouth of her smile.
There were others who scowled when they saw our light grow. Pan the widow—Kaori Camacho—kept her lipstick bright and her presence like a winter measuring out a woman's life in stares. She had a sharp way of stepping between a man and his conscience.
"You're playing with fire," she said one morning when she saw me leaving for the mine with a decent coat Haisley had sewn.
"Fire warms," I said. "And sometimes it cooks the dinner."
Her hand went to the place where her jewelry would be but wasn't. "You don't belong next to him, Annette," she said of Emmanuel. "He will not look twice at you."
"Then he won't," I said, and meant it in a way that surprised even me.
But a woman like Kaori builds her anger like a winter storm. She had a way of hitching compliments so they bit. She whispered to others, made small cruel stories into a public thing until gossip arranged itself like teeth.
One morning, two serving women at the canteen—puffed with small importance and thin authority—mocked Haisley's patched sleeves and Lucia's little bare feet. "You want a bun? You can afford two if you stop stealing the staff's time," one sneered in a voice made of soluble contempt.
My throat went cold.
"You will not speak like that," I said, and walked into the canteen.
"Who are you to demand—" one of them started.
"Who are you to be rude to customers?" I answered. "We come here as people, not as shambles of rumors."
A crowd swelled like a tide. I said what had to be said: "This is for the people. We are not less because we carry different coins. If you speak to us like we are nothing, when your own time comes, who will speak for you?"
The room tilted. The two women retreated under the weight of their own conscience and fear of making a political wrong that could cost them their posts. People applauded like it was a sudden harvest. The vendor who'd always been kicked down by them pressed us extra steaming buns as if retribution could be warm.
That day, I taught Haisley to lift her chin.
She learned faster than any of us expected.
But small triumphs have a way of inviting larger storms. Kaori's thin smile became barbed. She wanted to place a man between herself and Emmanuel—some inch of future comfort—and whispered to men how lucky she was. She sought pity from reprobates and earned only the shameless.
"She thinks she owns the town," Kaori hissed one noon to a small circle of women. "She fits a man to her heart like wanting to fit a key to a lock."
"She just wants to eat," one of them said, and their laughter sounded like a scythe.
Bitterness is sometimes best visited upon its maker. I planned and waited like a woman who knows the geography of risk.
It happened at the market—because everything that matters happens in a market. Kaori stood by the road in her red dress, admirably ridiculous. She had spent a small fortune in makeup to make herself a story. She saw a judge where there was only a mirror and stepped toward me like a cat expecting me to lie down.
"Annette," she called, loud enough for the whole market.
"Yes?" I answered.
"You want to be near the boss so badly. Aren't you ashamed?"
"Not ashamed," I said. "Hungry. But not ashamed."
The market thrummed, and someone from the canteen—who'd lost face earlier—shouted something small and mean until the noise became a chorus. For an instant I heard only her voice and then remembered Haisley's words about refusing unreasonable requests. I had become dangerous because I had nothing left to fear.
"Do you remember the porridge you threw at my daughter?" Kaori said, twisting the story into a weapon. "This woman does that and then pretends she is noble. See what she is, neighbors."
"She lied," Kaori's ally said. "She wants to be pretty. See her face."
I had had enough. I took the nearest bucket—the market always has one for washing—and I tipped it into Kaori's face. The bucket was not clean. It was a handle of the village's chores; it carried some of our morning and a smell that made men look away.
Kaori screamed. The crowd surged. Haisley clapped like a child who had seen a magic trick. People took out their phones—everyone has a phone like a mirror now—and the image of Kaori flailing with a sari of muddy water around her became a little film that would follow her.
"You had a knife today in your look," I said calmly as she sputtered. "You wanted to be the storm. I returned it to you."
She stumbled like a top spun too hard. People murmured. Some cheered. I knew this would not end the matters between us; it would only move them into a public lane with witnesses.
I had learned long ago that people prefer a spectacle with a moral. They like the person who says too much and then pays for it, or the person who is quiet and then does something unthinkably brave. The market turned into theater. People laughed. People recorded. The two women who'd mocked Haisley vanished from my sight like rats.
If that was a warning, a dirt on the pavement, what came later was a gathering storm: the mine's big investor arrived—Elon Alston, a man whose name had been whispered in the years my original life had been stripped away—and with him came deceit in a business suit. He was handsome and arrogant and had once owned a hand in my old life of debt and rancor: a man who built fortunes by stepping on people when the law felt turned.
"Business is business," Elon told Emmanuel at a banquet months later, clinking a glass as if the sound could smooth bones. I translated with my hands folded, the interpreter between languages and between fates. The mine had become a promise of jobs and also a knife in the back of anything we owned. Elon had the habit of smiling while counting another person's losses.
The truth had teeth. I did not forget the way the old woman in the back alley of my past had told me the story of how her son had been ruined by a deal with a man who wore a tux and kept wolves for friends. I had found, in the crooked corners of memory and papers that smelled of finance, a trace of Elon Alston's methods. He had used women and contracts, small promises turned into legal thorns. He had left families with nothing but shame.
One night, while the village hummed in the cheap light of oil lamps, a chance slid into my lap.
"You have proof?" Emmanuel asked during an evening when men tasted their grief and thirst with equal appetite.
"I have proof," I said. "And I have witnesses." My voice didn't shake. "And I have the courage of those who had nothing left to lose."
"Stand up," Emmanuel told me after a quiet that held a thousand small storms.
I walked to the center of the temporary hall where mine officials and village heads had gathered to toast a future. The spotlights were too bright, and the cameras were already hungry. I unrolled papers like a conjurer. Contracts moved like snakes in the light. Photos slid out and the faces on them—women and farmers and men who had trusted Elon—stared.
"Is that legal?" Hunter sneered, trying to buy a moment.
"Is your conscience complicated?" I answered. "Listen."
I read aloud, slowly. "This contact is labeled 'advance for entitlement.' The signatures are here. The letters show payments that never reached the families. The woman in the photo—her house was taken after Elon promised to 'adjust titles.' The child in the corner—he went into the black market he does business with. He lost his means to plant. He went hungry."
A man in a suit laughed, a short unhappy sound. "People lie. Papers can be forged."
"Then come forward," I said. "Cross-check them. Ask any of these people. Their crops failed in the same month the 'advance' was taken. Their receipts are gone because the bank branches changed names."
Someone in the crowd whispered: "She has receipts."
I had more. I had recordings—voice notes left in a phone by a woman who had been too tired to cover her tracks. The voice was raw: "If he signs, they will take it. I'll get nothing but a promise." The file played; Elon's voice, cultured and slippery, asking for signatures, promising 'future frameworks' that always favored him.
The room tightened like a fist. Elon smiled as if he'd been hit. First, a pleased, avuncular smile—the sort of smile that says you have won. Then confusion as the facts matched his eyes. "Where did—"
"Where did you hide your conscience?" I said. "Where did you put the promises you broke?" I walked the long way around the table so that everyone could see him. "You brought foreign men to mine our mountain and promised families the sun. Instead, you gave them paper and took their winter. You took wives' savings. You took fathers' fields."
"That's libel," Hunter barked, and the crowd leaned forward like hungry birds.
"Then ask them," I said. "Ask those families."
A dozen hands shot up. "She is right," a woman from the outskirts said. "My neighbor's boy has no work. Their papers show money lost."
"Play the recording," Reid called. "We will judge with our ears."
Cristian, who had grown fond of me in the way of men who measure people in coffee spoons, hit play. Elon's voice filled the hall, cultured as poison. His mouth twisted, his fingers went white on his glass. He started to laugh, an attempt to decoy the knife. His laugh became a cough. The room turned on him like a hive.
"Shut up!" someone shouted. "Lie all you want; the village listens."
"You're ruining me," Elon said, but the sound of fear inside his words was audible like a bone snapped. "This is not fair."
"Fair?" I sneered. "You had years to be fair and chose profit instead. Now we will make you be fair."
He tried to stand straight, the posture of men who had never learned what it is to be small. He tried the lawyer-smile.
"These are unverified claims," his counsel said. "We have courts."
"Courts," I said, "start with people and paper. We have both." I tapped the contracts and stacked receipts. "We have your signature, Mr. Alston. We have witnesses who will stand where they stand and say what they say."
The murmurs became shouts. Men stood like stakes. A dozen villagers walked up and told their stories, names and dates, their voices steady as the earth. They spoke of fields sold in the night, of houses repossessed, of children sent away because the bread had gone. Each voice turned the light on a man who'd never needed to look at his hands.
His face went from that avuncular charm to pale, and then to a small dog who'd been cornered. He laughed, then shook his head, then began to speak in a ring of denial: "I offered fair terms—"
"No," a woman said. "You offered contracts we could not read. You offered the bright words of city men. You took our land."
He tried to rally, to point fingers at the men who'd worked with him. He sought to call the foreigners to his aid. The translates were still finding many words for righteous anger. My translation of his attempts to smooth things fell like dust. He had no refuge in truth.
I watched him lose the narrative. He had been the story of a prosperous man. Now he was only hissed facts. He began to shake.
"You're lying!" he cried, voice thinning into a whine.
"No," I said. "You signed your name on a paper that took a field. People have their receipts. People remember."
His reaction changed on an axis. First come the evils of arrogance: a smile, a wave. Then confusion and denial. Finally, the collapse.
He dropped to his knees right at the banquet table. His suit was expensive and suddenly ridiculous. The cameras panned in, gobbling the scene like wolves. Someone snapped a photograph. People recorded him on their phones. The man who had believed he controlled people had been mortally unprepared for them to stand together.
"Please," he begged, hands up, the posture of a child who had misbehaved and now needed a mother. "Please—don't—"
Around him, people murmured. Some clucked with the satisfaction of a stomach finally filled. Others took pictures. Someone clapped—an awkward sound.
"You took our winter," another man said calmly. "You will return it."
He crumpled like a letter left in rain. He crawled forward and pressed his face to the floor as if the dirt might forgive him. He tried to find a single human phrase that would buy a reprieve: apology, begging, the currency of shame. His voice was small and breaking. "I—I'm sorry. I—"
The witnesses were not all merciful. Some spat. One young man filmed; others pointed and whispered. A woman—whose field I had never seen—stepped forward and calmly ripped a sheet from the stack that had the scrawled line of his signature. She held it aloft like a verdict. Cameras caught the face Elon made in that instant: hero to villain in the space of a heartbeat.
"Is this enough?" the villagers asked aloud, not waiting for the law.
It was imperfect justice. It was a humiliation that would live on camera and memory—and that was the point. Punishment in public makes the lesson visible.
He went from swagger to collapse to denial to begging. He spat out phrases of innocence and then names of other men he claimed had forced him. People took out their phones, the village breathing in and out at the rhythm of his downfall. He begged in broken phrases; he promised to restore. He promised to sign deeds. He tried to trade his riches for the thing he could not buy: the trust of people who had learned how to count.
"No one applauded his apologies," I thought as cameras circled and villagers watched him beg. "If you took people's houses, your apologies are not currency; they are only noise."
They escorted him out with his suits wrinkled like crumpled dreams. The big lights followed, and somehow, in that noisy, righteous hour, for a few families we recovered the smell of bread.
Afterwards, as the villagers spoke and counted and planned to reclaim what they had lost, I went home and put the meat into the pot and let it simmer like an offering. Lucia sat on my knee and mashed rice into a fist. Haisley watched me, cigarette of worry burning in the corner of her lips.
"You were brave," she said. It wasn't a compliment; it was a fact weighed and confirmed.
"I'm tired," I said, tasting the steam. "But brave people are sometimes just tired people who cannot pretend any longer."
She smiled like a woman who had learned a feast of small sorrows. "You looked like yourself today."
"Which self?" I asked. "The one who once translated in a city? The one who dug out the lies? The one who poured the bucket?"
She laughed. "All of them. All of you."
The jar of wildflowers on the cabinet still held water that had turned faint as tea. Its stems bent like little flags. I placed it back beneath the cracked window where the light hit the glass and scattered triangles on the floor.
"Keep it there," I told Lucia one evening as she watched the petals tremble. "It will remind you that things we think are worthless can make a room warm."
She put a sticky hand on the jar and giggled. "It looks like my crown."
"Then you must wear it," I said.
I kept translating for Emmanuel when he asked, and I paid myself modest wages, twenty a day, because I liked that it made me less noticeable and more useful. I gave the rest away to people who'd been trampled and to Haisley and to the boy who worked the stalls. I taught Haisley to read the small print. I taught Lucia a few English words—"apple," "mother," "sun"—and she said them like magic.
In the weeks after Elon Alston's fall, the village reeled and mended. Some men were arraigned; some contracts were annulled. Justice is a messy stove that burns evenly only when everyone feeds it. The photographs and recordings had changed us: Kaori's red lipstick no longer hid what her gossip had done; she walked a little slower, as if the market's whispers had pulled at her skirt.
"You must stay wary," Haisley said once, holding a clean spoon to Lucia's lips.
"I will," I promised, thinking of the night I'd found my second life and the first thing I'd bought: half a pig wrapped in paper and hope.
The wildflowers in their glass caught a late sun and threw it into the room. I set the old, dented enamel bowl beside them—the bowl that had fed three and half a pig—and I traced the rim with a thumb that remembered the feel of a woman's cheek.
"The jar loves the sun," Lucia said as she fell asleep in the crook of my arm.
"Yes," I breathed. "And we love the little brave things that hold life when big things try to take it away."
When I finally leaned back and let the day's noises unspool, I put my palm on the jar's cool glass. The water trembled with small ripples, like memory waking.
I do not expect all my fights to end in such public finales. Some enemies will hide in paper and in polite smiles. But I learned this: when liars show their faces, gather witnesses. When greedy men kneel, let everyone see their hands. When a jar holds flowers that no one paid for, let it stand in the window and remind you why you fought.
I closed my eyes and listened to Lucia's soft breaths. The jar of wildflowers caught one last light before the sun dropped away, and in that small bright, I felt a life stitched from other lives and stubborn as a root.
The End
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