Revenge12 min read
The Little Yellow Flower
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They called me "silly" and they always smiled when they said it. I let them. I learned how to make my face small when the men came through the yard, how to keep my hands busy with the twine for the little yellow flowers.
"I like the new sister-in-law," I told myself and chewed the dry bread until it cracked.
"Sillynut," my brother snarled from the doorway. "Don't you know when to shut up?"
"She makes beautiful rope," I said, pushing the bread into my mouth faster. "She braided one for me."
My brother, Adrian Snyder, had come back with money and a woman that winter. He ripped her down from the cart like you would take down a pig. The man who had brought her, old Baltasar Robertson, laughed like it was a bargain.
"Two hundred and fifty and she's yours, Snyder," Baltasar said. "A fine one, all right."
Cassandra Voigt lay on the bed when they dragged her into our room. She was so pale. Her shirt barely closed and her hair was wet with sweat.
"Don't be silly staring," Mariana Boone said when she saw me at the doorway. "Go play outside. Your brother has work."
"I want to see her," I said anyway. My smallness didn't matter; I stayed by the door.
"You'll get in the way," Adrian snapped and whacked me with the stick he held. "Go!"
I went, but the sounds came through the wall. Cassandra's high frightened cry. My brother's low swearing. The way men move when they think no one is looking.
Later, when the room was quiet, I pushed the door open a little and peered in. Cassandra lay very still. Her dress was torn; there were red marks on her skin.
"Did he give you candy?" I asked, because after bad things my brother always gave me candy.
Cassandra looked at me with water in her eyes and did not take the candy. She pointed instead at the rough letters carved into the wall. I couldn't read, but I knew the feeling—those marks were the only things anyone left in that room that meant anything to the people who were taken there.
My brother turned the house into a line of business. Men came and left with pockets filled; sometimes they paid for new women, sometimes they bought things for themselves. The old men—Garrison Ali, Rodrigo Cuevas, Isaiah Vega—came often. They said I was dumb, but I watched. I learned where they put the money, what times they came.
Cassandra tried to run once. She tugged me by the sleeve and said, "Come with me. We'll go to town."
"Where's my shoes?" I asked stupidly.
She gave me one of her shoes and took my hand. We ran until the cart was there and she pulled herself onto it. For a beat I felt light. We were leaving. Then Adrian found us, grabbed us from the bus, and pulled us down into the yard like animals.
"Shut up!" he screamed when Cassandra fought back, and the stick found her. People gathered to watch. My mouth tasted like bread and fear.
"Please," Cassandra sobbed to me later. "If I make him happy he won't hurt so much."
"But he hurt you already," I said. "Why would making him happy make it better?"
She smiled like it was a secret and braided a small string for me like a sun.
Days bled into each other. Cassandra's screams faded into quiet. She smiled in a way that made my belly churn—she laughed at my brother's jokes and lay in his arms as if the hurt had never happened. When she grew still and pale in the shop one morning I didn't know what to think. "She's better now," my mother said.
When Cassandra told me to come with her to the town again, I went. She gave me the shoe again and said, "Stay with me, little one."
She pushed me inside an underwear shop and whispered into the owner's ear. Then she grabbed my hand and dragged me out. "Come."
"Where is he?" I asked on the cart. "Why isn't he here?"
Cassandra's hands trembled. "We run. You call me sister. Call me 'sister' and hold my hand."
On the bus, I felt the air of possibility for the first time. For a moment a future opened where I could have a different face, different bread.
The bus braked. Adrian was there like a shadow. The cart's driver didn't look at me; everyone had a look that said this was normal. Adrian dragged us off, and the laughter of the men cheered him. Cassandra bit his leg when he pulled her.
That is the way a lot of things happen in a small place: everyone knows and no one asks until it is too late.
Summer came. Cassandra got pregnant. The men stopped coming for her, and then they came for me. I stopped being chosen and started doing hard labor all day. I didn't mind the work as much as I minded the memory of how she had looked at me when the baby came—so hollow, like a skin stretched over a stone.
The night Cassandra called my name and begged me to lock the door I did it because she begged me with her eyes.
"Lock it," she whispered. "Take the baby out. Pull. Pull hard."
"Why? Why" I cried, because the thought of touching a body that was wet and slick and full of blood made me small. "You'll be okay."
"Don't let them take it," Cassandra said. "If it's theirs, it's not mine. Do you understand? Please."
I did what she asked. I pulled and I pulled and the baby came out, screaming. The door burst open. Adrian grabbed me and kicked me away. He picked the baby up, gloated like a man showing his prize, and shoved me against the wall.
Three days later, Cassandra sat up. Her voice went thin when she said, "He's not mine."
That night, she said, "He shouldn't be here." She left again and again, and each time the men who had once come for me found new reasons to come.
Then the winter of the feast came. There would be a full-month party for the baby—a thing the village did when a boy was born. They set the table, invited neighbors. I thought about food and about that rare sharp joy that sits on my chest when someone gives me a sweet. I did not know why the room smelled of metal.
When the feast began, people lifted their glasses and drank water from the same well. People laughed. I watched them eat the rice and the fish and thought of the little yellow braid Cassandra had made me.
They fell fast. It was not the slow sickness of a long season. They choked and then lay still on the snow. One after another, the men who had come to our house to take what they wanted fell with mouths open. The color drained from their faces. I ran from table to table, trying to get people to vomit, to keep them awake.
"Why?" someone screamed.
I bent down over Baltasar's chest and he stared at me, eyes glassy. "You..." he croaked. "Why would you—"
I didn't know why my hands didn't stop; I grabbed at a small shape on the table and held it to Baltasar's mouth, but it wouldn't come up.
Later, the sirens came. People thought I had done it on purpose. They held me and called me a murderer. I didn't understand the shape of that word then. I only knew there was a ringing near my ears and the smell of copper.
I woke in a white room with a man in a white coat bending over me. He had tired eyes.
"You remember now?" Ezekiel Teixeira said.
"My name is..." I started.
"Do you remember where you were? Do you remember the house? Who the brother was? Who the women were?"
"I remember everything," I said, and the truth slid out of me like a stone.
"I am—" I lied when they asked me if I was the simple one. I said whatever eased the heat in my chest. "I am..."
They called me a fool. They said the shock had broken me. I confessed fragments because the pieces were heavy in my mind.
"She said she was sorry," I whispered. "She said she didn't want him to keep on."
"Who said?" the doctor asked.
"Her. Cassandra. She told me to pull. She told me to save the baby." I felt like my throat was full of cotton.
Weeks later, men in uniform led in a woman who looked like she had been washed and scrubbed and then left in the sun too long. Her hair was thin, her jaw knotted, her hands trembled. They called her Juliette Bishop. She sat in the room and kept looking at me as if through me.
"You are Juliette Bishop?" Conrad Shimizu asked.
She laughed a small broken laugh. "Would it make a difference?"
"Do you deny being the trafficker?" Conrad said.
Juliette's eyes darted to the window like a rat looking for a hole. "I had to. I had to do it. We had no way out."
The trial was public. The town square filled. People came not just from our little place but from the county. News vans—one with a cracked antenna—parked at the edge of the field. I did not plan to be there, but I went because a part of me wanted to see faces I had loved give their verdict.
"She sold girls," a woman shouted. "She sold them to our men and made money!"
"Burn her!" another man bellowed. For a second the crowd hissed like a knife.
The mayor tapped his watch. The judge said nothing yet. They paraded Juliette up the stretcher of shame, and the crowd framed the scene like a photograph—some people with phones up, others with hands covering their mouths.
"Look at her!" cried Mariana Boone. "She smiled while she watched them go!"
"She smiled?" Juliette's mouth twitched. "I didn't smile."
"Why did you take them?" Conrad demanded, voice loud so the cameras would catch it.
Juliette's eyes finally met mine. For a sliver of a second I saw a woman who had made choices and who had been made by other choices. "Because streets can be hungry," she said. "Because there is nowhere else for girls like us."
"Is that an excuse?" Baltasar's son roared from the back. Garrison Ali spat at the ground. Everyone's face changed. They wanted blood. They wanted to see justice that tasted solid.
The punishment we demanded was not counted in any book. We wanted the whole hollow machine to be seen and broken. The prosecutor read the list. He read names. One by one he read the names of girls who had vanished, who had been sold, who had been taken from mothers and fathers and returned broken or not at all. People in the crowd craned forward at each name.
Juliette's face grew thinner. First she was sly. Then she was surprised. Then she went pale.
"You told me they'd go to the city for work," one woman shouted. "You promised them work!"
Juliette's hands bunched. "I had no choice, okay? I promised and the buyers—"
"You sold my Niece," a man said and his voice cracked like a twig. "She is dead because of you."
Juliette's denial turned to frantic pleading. "Please, please, I—"
Then the worst part came: we showed proof. Men who had been complicit had their faces turned to the sunlight. A reporter thrust a file full of messages and receipts into the judge's hands. A photo of Juliette smiling in a hotel room was held high. The judge's eyes flicked over the images as if seeing a map to a cellar.
"Look at them," someone in the crowd said softly. "Look at how you laugh."
Juliette's expression collapsed. At first she denied everything; then her voice shrank to a whisper and she reached for excuses that sounded like prayers.
"She sold little girls as if they were feed," said Rodrigo, his voice a low thud. "She made men think she was saving them."
"Is that how you sleep at night?" a woman asked. "Do you hear them?"
Juliette began to shake. I watched every fold in her face. She went from furious to pleading to empty. Children in the crowd started to cry. Phones were held up; a mother recorded the scene like you'd record a fox in a trap.
"Why did you do it?" the judge demanded.
"I—" Juliette's hands clawed at the air. "We had no money. We had debts. They promised—"
"Enough," the judge said, and his voice showered the square like cold rain. He ordered Juliette tied and taken to the center of the square. He did not sentence with law alone; the town would give its own punishment as witness. They wanted exposure, they wanted faces of accomplices dragged into the light.
They made her stand and speak. They asked each family to read their testimony. I watched a woman who had been taken, now standing on her own legs, call Juliette by name and spit out the order that had sent her away. The crowd watched Juliette shrink. People whispered, some cried, many grabbed their phones. Juliette went through a dozen stages: steady arrogance, broken denial, a flash of hate, then raw defeat.
"Please," she said at last. "Forgive—"
"Forgive?" shouted a man whose sister lay in the hospital. "You sold my sister like a coat!"
An old neighbor just beside me—one of the men who had once come to our house—began to unravel. "I didn't know," he kept saying at first. Then he looked at Juliette, then at himself. The crowd turned on him. A woman took a small stone and threw it at Juliette's boot. It was a shameful sound.
Juliette began to scream then. The screams were not loud—that was the worst of it—but the shape of them, the way they traveled, made people step back. "I can't—it's not all me—"
"You're the one who set their names in motion," said a voice near the judge's bench. "You started the line."
She was led through the crowd like a condemned bird. People spat. Mothers shielded small children. A teenage girl in front recorded Juliette's face up close and then walked away shaking.
For more than half an hour the square watched. Juliette's expression changed as if each person in the crowd were a mirror and the mirrors were reflecting the truth back at her. She went from remembering deals with buyers to listing names—names of rich men, names of buyers, names of those who raised their hands and did not ask. She named a few and their faces flushed. Barges of shame ran through the square like cold current.
By the time they loaded Juliette into the car, I realized my stomach had been hollowed out. I had expected a different satisfaction. I had wanted her to be small and terrified, and she was that—but the smallness in her was not only guilty; it was also the smallness that hunger makes in people. I thought of my brother, of Baltasar, of the way men had traded on the bodies of girls.
After Juliette's public humiliation, arrests were made. Men who had been in deals were dragged from their homes. A list of accomplices grew. There was legal punishment and there was the town's verdict. I watched as some faces crumpled and others hardened. The crowd had wanted to see the villain punished; they got more: a map of how bad things had been.
For the first time I felt the architecture of the cruel world we lived in crack. It took a long time for the echo of that square to stop buzzing in my ears.
Later, as I sat in a hospital bed, Ezekiel Teixeira leaned close and asked, "Do you regret it?"
I turned my head away because regret is a strange thing. "I regret some things," I said.
"Like what?"
"That I let it go on so long. That I believed smiling at someone could protect me. That I thought sugar could fix the hurt."
Ezekiel's eyes were soft for a moment. "What did you do that night at the feast?"
"I put poison in the well," I said quietly. The words were small and flat when they left me.
He did not leap away like I had expected. Instead his face stilled. "Why?"
"Because nothing else had worked," I said. "Because they kept taking and taking. Because I thought if I couldn't live with it, maybe the world could not either. Because I couldn't find the law to answer me."
"Do you understand what you did?"
"I do." The truth tasted like iron. "I killed people. Some of them had names I loved. Some had hands I trusted. I didn't choose only the bad ones. I chose blind. I chose everything. I thought that if they burned, maybe I could take those who hurt me with them."
Ezekiel put his hand on my arm. "You wounded a lot of people."
"I know," I whispered. "But I wanted them to feel my hurt."
In the weeks that followed, things settled into a sick pattern. Juliette received harsh sentences. The court read out how deals had been made. Men were arrested; some ran. The village tried to stitch itself back together. People put flowers on graves and cursed my name in the same breath. They said I had become like them.
I had not expected the taste of freedom after the poison and the arrests to be so hollow. I had imagined vindication, or at least rest. Instead I got a quiet that sounded like a locked door.
One evening, as snow fell thick and silent, I walked to the well. The little braid Cassandra had made for me was in my pocket. I took it out and untied it. I put the thin string around my finger and felt its roughness.
"Why did you do it?" I asked the empty air. My voice sounded like a child.
A passing neighbor, someone who had lost a cousin that night, stopped and looked at me. "You and I both," he said. "We survived. Some of us will never be the same."
I thought of my parents—gone, waiting in a house that would never be the same—and of my hand pulling at a small new life in a room full of blood and cold.
"My name," I said finally, because names hold. "They called me silly. They called me by another name too. I have been many."
He only nodded.
In the end, there is no neat ending. The men who had hurt us received punishment in front of everyone. Juliette's fall was public and loud. The law did something, and the town's anger did something else. I walked away carrying the knowledge that I had burned a bridge that could not be rebuilt.
The little yellow flower I wore that winter—Cassandra's braid—stayed with me. It is frayed now and smells faintly of river water. Sometimes I take it out and look at how the threads cross and knot. It looks small and foolish. It looks like the braid that tied so many choices together.
"Do you ever think about running again?" the doctor asked once.
"I have no place to run to," I said. "Home is two graves and an empty mud house."
He did not answer, but he touched the little braid and then walked away.
Years later, on a morning when frost made the ground hard as glass, I walked past the square where Juliette had been shamed and watched a small girl pick up a bit of torn paper and hand it to an old woman. The old woman smiled like a crack in a stone. The little girl had a braid in her hair.
I did not stop. I kept walking until my shadow was thin and my breath came out like a small cloud. The little yellow braid was warm in my pocket. I let it stay there.
I do not pretend that justice fixed what was broken. But when the crowd forced faces into the light, something shifted. Not enough to call it mending; only enough to know that the names of the missing were no longer whispers. They had been said aloud. The square had forced the story into sunlight.
"One day," I thought, watching the girl with the braid, "someone might learn to make something different with string."
I put my hand over the braid. It was only thread, but I clung to it.
The End
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