Face-Slapping15 min read
"They Sold Me for Silver — I Sold Them the Truth"
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"Get away from the door!" I feel hands on my ribs and I snap awake.
"I'm not—" I cough. The room smells of dust and old wood. My head is a thunderhead of memory and pain. My name feels wrong and right. I remember a library, a car, a dark sky—and then I remember none of that matters now.
"She's breathing!" someone yells.
"Who is she?" a man's voice asks. It's thin and scared.
"That's Megan," my mother cries. Her voice is as rough as dry corn. "Megan, open your eyes. Don't you scare me like that."
I push up. My body is small, starved. My ribs press through skin. I see my mother's face, bright with lies and hunger. I see my brother Chance standing behind her, fists clenched. I see Ely Cuevas, the old village healer, backing away with his small black case.
"You can't blame him," Ely says. "I checked—she had no breath when I came. I didn't touch her—"
"You go!" my mother screams at him and clings to his coat like a drowning thing. "You can't leave her if you leave we are cursed, you—"
"Isabella, stop!" Chance shouts, but his voice is soft around her noise.
I sit up. My hand finds the place where someone had pressed my chest. No marks. I look at Ely.
"Ely," I say, because the name is there like a book title. "Tell me what happened."
Ely gulps. "You were dead. One breath—the crowd said you were dead. Then you sat up."
"Why is everyone yelling?" I touch my throat. It is thin. "Why do they think I died?"
"Isabella fed you bad herbs," Chance says. "She says she was trying to help. She says she—"
"Don't!" Isabella hurls herself at Ely again and thumps his leg. "Don't you dare! He was here, he saw her, he can say she was gone. He must pay."
"Pay what?" I ask, voice like old rope.
"Compensation," Isabella sobs. "Twenty silver. My son was almost beaten to death for stealing. We needed a cure. You—" She points at me like I have teeth. "You died because of her."
Ely looks at me, then at Isabella, and his face turns black. "She didn't die in my hands. She didn't have breath. I left with a promise to sit with her. I left because the crowd—"
"You're lying!" Isabella screeches. "You hid the truth."
They pull at one another. People push and cry, and then I stand and I speak.
"Stop," I say. "Listen."
Silence snaps like a trap.
"Tell me how to stand," I tell Ely. "Tell me if I am alive because of medicine, luck, or because I was always meant to not die."
Ely's eyes are small and kind. "You were hit by a car long away," he says. "I saw you before, but not like this. You woke up—alive. This is a miracle."
"A miracle?" I taste the word. I remember asphalt and a librarian's badge. I remember a clean, dry sky. The world has given me another life in a small, stinking place.
"You must be hungry," Isabella snaps. "Drink. Drink the well water."
I drink the cold water she gives me. It slaps my stomach awake. My mother touches my hair like she owns it.
"You'll go with me," she says. "We will get money. We will get your brother back. If you don't, your brother will be beaten until he cannot work."
I look at Chance. He looks at me like I'm a shield and not a person. He has a bruise above one eye. He looks like he could break.
"Who took him?" I ask softly.
"Cael Owens," Chance spits. "He runs the place that holds anything worth a coin. He is the only one with gold."
"I will go," I say. My voice is flat. "But I will decide—"
Isabella cries louder. "You're my flesh. You live because of me. You will do as I say."
I swallow. I will move. I will learn. I will not be a thing to trade.
*
They sold me the next day.
The village head, Enoch Escobar, stood with a paper and a stamp. My mother pressed ink to my thumb like this was only business.
"Fifteen silver," Enoch read. "Signed. Clear. No trickery."
"You will be treated well," Clementine Ashford said. She held my hands and spoke like a promise. Her husband, Matthias Lucas, watched with a hard, thin face. They led me to their house, a tall yard with walls and fruit trees. The place smelled clean and secret.
"This is my home now," Clementine said to me. "You will tend my son, Rowan. You will help. You are our guest."
Rowan sat under a curtain. His eyes were red around the rims. He did not move much. He smelled like old medicine.
"Why did you buy me?" I asked, because our trade had voices.
Matthias said, "You are a worker. You can earn."
"Rowan is not a toy," Clementine said. "He is sick. He needs help."
I nodded. A bargain is a bargain. I had to live. I had new access to food and shelter and, more dangerous to those around me, knowledge.
"You will sleep in the back," Clementine said. "You will cook, you will clean, you will learn how to make his baths. If you do this right, you will be kept and fed."
I learned quickly. Rowan's illness was like fire under the ribs. When the fits came, he thrashed. He vomited black like old ink. He was two things at once: fragile and terrifying.
"Why does this happen?" I asked Clementine one night as I warmed broth.
"It is poison," she said. "Long ago, someone put a thing in him. It never left."
"Who helped before?" I asked.
"An odd doctor came. Isaiah Kozlov. He tried to help. He took money and left. We are poor again. It takes silver to buy a cure that works."
"I can help." The thought came fierce. I had been a librarian in my other life. Books were my bones. Names of herbs and roots filled the shape of my mind like shelves in a dark room.
"You can?" Clementine's eyes were bright.
"I can learn the medicines," I said. "Tell me what to do."
Clementine looked like she had been waiting for this. "Good. Start tomorrow. Do all he tells you."
Isaiah was a strange man. He arrived with a hop and a stern mouth, and he smelled of the road.
"You have talent," Isaiah said to me on his first day. "You learn quick. Stay with me while I stay. I will show you how to boil, how to steep, how to press."
I learned to cook medicine until even the night seemed boiled into a thin pitch. Rowan sat in a tub nearly every night. Three times the bitter drink, three times the bitter soak. He screamed and I held him. He became more human, less a stone.
"Why do you care?" Rowan asked me once, voice gone like a child's.
"Because someone taught me to not leave people to rot," I said. "And because if you die they will sell more girls."
He looked at me like a person seeing a second sun. "Then don't let me die."
I did not. My hands were small but careful. I learned every herb's face and weight. I learned where a wild root grew and what it meant when the leaf pointed down.
When Isaiah left, he signed a small, clumsy letter for me. "You will do right," he scrawled.
I stayed. I stirred pots and read pages of medicine in my head. I walked the hills. There were herbs everywhere.
One morning I found wild ginseng and a small, bright lingzhi. My chest did a small, stupid hop. These were not for soup. These were gold.
"Bring them to town," Clementine said. "Sell them to the shops. Do not haggle them cheap."
I walked to the town with Rowan's name heavy in my mouth. I went to a pale-faced shopman named Ely—no, Ely is the village healer, not the city man. I went to a pharmacist named Alberto Ahmed in the market, then to a finer shop owned by Ely Cuevas's old friend Matthias Lucas? No. I chose a steady man, Ely Cuevas of the market—no, that name matches the village; it's messy. I will go to "the counter at the square" and find a man named Ely there. He is honest and careful.
"Wild ginseng?" Ely touched the root. "Wild lingzhi? Where did you find these?"
"Up north by the old creek," I said. "We need money. We are poor. Take care."
He looked at the root, then at the fungal cap. "Two hundred silver. Not a coin less."
I almost fell. Two hundred. I thought of the night my mother wanted twenty. I handed them over.
"One hand to you, one written note to the buyer," Ely said. "One for the town ledger."
I walked back to the house with money heavy in my cloth. I gave five to Chance. I gave five to Clementine to buy Rowan's herbs. The rest? I kept some. I kept more than I should have. I hid it. Knowledge will not be held by the poor for long.
When I brought back the money, everyone in the house looked at me like I was the sun.
"You did this?" Matthias asked.
"Yes."
"Where did you learn?" he asked, suspicion and respect braided.
"I read and I walked," I said. "The hills give us a harvest if we know how to look."
That did not stop the village.
Word moved like wind on straw. A week later, a basket of little roots and shoots I had started from seed was stolen. They took seedlings from our beds while the moon still had teeth.
I discovered it at dawn—holes where sprouts had been, soil loose, prints in a hurry.
"Who would do this?" Clementine hissed.
"Someone who thinks I will not notice," I said.
"You should tell Enoch," Clementine said. "Make it official."
"No," I said. "If it was a hungry thief, we can find him. If it was our people—"
"Who else would steal a sprout?" Chance said.
"You saw who was in the square today." I looked at the faces of the family. "They will sell them in town. The only buyers who can give any price for young stock are the old shops. They must have sold them."
I walked to the market. I had sold roots before. The men who buy will know if someone brings in a row of the same seedlings in the night. I went to Ely at the counter. He looked at me with the careful eyes.
"Someone stole from your bed," Ely said after I told him. He rubbed his chin. "They will show these to the buyers. We can find out."
"Find out," I said.
Ely made calls. Words moved. A string of people checked their stock. The shopkeeper at the far end, a man named Matthias—no, that causes confusion again. The message was simple: who bought young plants this morning?
A woman in a plain hat, Z for a name? The list of names confuses. The buyer was a woman from our village, quick to pocket a coin.
"Bring them back," I told her. "Bring back what you bought."
They refused.
"Then we show Enoch," I said.
They laughed. They mocked the fact we were newly rich. "What will you do, library girl? Buy a judge with your books?"
I did not laugh. I had two hundred silver in my cloth and a head full of names. I wrote a list—quieter than a knife and sharper.
"Meet me at the square at noon," I said to the woman with the hat. "Bring the plants you bought. Bring everyone who bought."
She sneered but she came. Others came. Word had flattened the street into a crowd.
"What's this?" Cael Owens said, big and bright with the kind of false grin men use when they think they can step on people. He shoved his chin forward. "Atrial nonsense? Let the girl talk."
"She claims your market bought stolen stock," someone said. "Show us."
I stepped forward. I had the town receipts Ely had made me copy. I had the ledger. I had the strings of promises and the weight of two hundred silver. I had proof: all buyers who bought that exact sprout that morning had signed. I named names.
"These receipts match the seedlings sold from our field," I said. "You bought stolen plants. You will return them or you will return the money."
The crowd buzzed. Cael laughed and then his laugh stuttered. He knew his men had taken things. He knew the market sellers had bought, hoping the poor would not speak. Now the poor girl spoke.
"Return the plants," I told him. "If not, I will tell the county."
"What can the county do?" Cael sneered and stepped close to me. "They'll laugh. They will buy me a drink."
"You threaten me?" I asked. My voice did not shake. The crowd watched. Chance and my father stood behind me, weak as reeds.
"Sixty silver," Cael said. "I'll buy the plants back now."
"Two hundred," I said. "That is the town price when the goods were fresh. Plus wages and damage. Two hundred."
He laughed at me, loud and stupid. "This girl does not know numbers."
I put the ledger on the ground. "Ely will confirm." Ely stepped forward and nodded. The crowd whispered.
"Fine," Cael barked. "Pay me two hundred and I will hand it over."
"Pay you?" I said. I turned to the crowd and pulled my cloth open.
"Is that real?" someone gasped.
I had saved money. I had the coin. I dumped it on the table. It clinked and sun-bounced. The metal lit the crowd like a sudden truth.
"Two hundred," I said. "Return it all, right now, and publicly."
Cael's face collapsed like a man who had slept on a rock. He had earned his coins by fear, but a coin cannot buy back a lie when the world watches.
"Publicly!" I repeated.
"No—" Cael started. "You can't—"
"You will hand it back and apologize," I said. "And you will—"
"—kneel," the crowd suggested as if a chorus. "Kneel in the square and apologize."
Cael's shoulders tightened. He thought of the men who would mock him, of the eyes that remember everything. He looked at his followers. One by one the men turned away. Their wives had been watching. The market had phones in pockets. The scene that would burn him was ready.
"Fine," he spat. "Fine."
He dropped to his knees in the dirt. The crowd pressed in. People pulled out their phones. The light of screens lit a face blunted by shame.
"Cael Owens, you stole from the poor," I said loud. "You bought their lives like toys. Say now why you did it."
He tried to huff and make the lie swell. Then a woman he had wronged in secret came forward and spit in his face. "You beat my boy," she cried. "You took my grain when my cow died. You will not have this day."
He turned, red and small. He could not hold his stance. He shouted, he cursed. He begged—He begged in a high voice, shame asking for mercy.
"This is over," Enoch said, stepping in with official tone. "You will return the money. You will do work for the village. You will pay what you owe."
Cael collapsed in tears like a child. He wrapped his face in his hands and sobbed—so loud that the markets leaned in. People recorded. The wife of his friend shoved him; she had always been looking for a reason to leave him. Later that week she did. She packed a little bag and left with the neighbors.
It didn't end with kneeling.
Cael's small stall was taken over by the council for default. His savings were seen and rescued by a cousin who cut him off. The men who had joined him stopped answering his calls.
At the square's end I looked at every face and saw a dozen small triumphs. The stolen seedlings were placed at our door. Some were broken, some were whole. I held the best and planted them back myself.
"Do not plant everything," Clementine said. "You have to grow them right."
I planted, I tended, and as they grew the medicine grew deep. People came to our gate—not to mock, but to offer work. For the first time in my life, I had a choice.
And I learned a new, cruel lesson: a good deed can be attacked through the ones who should keep us safe. My mother came back like a shrill wind, hungry and false.
"Give me the silver," Isabella hissed one morning when I handed out wages to the men who had helped repair the field. "You owe your own family."
"You sold me," I said. "You signed the paper."
"You belong to King and contract!" she shrieked. "You think you can buy your life with herbs and slick talk? We lost boys because you left me no gold."
I walked out with the ledger and the town's copies. I took our receipts to Enoch and to the shopkeepers. I showed them how Isabella had lied and sold me to keep a sin of her own. The town murmured and then circled like a storm.
"She sold you?" Enoch asked, stunned. "You—this is a deed. Where? Who witnessed?"
"Her thumbprint," I said. "The ink is here. The signatures are on the paper." I pulled out the old paper Isabella and Enoch had signed. The paper was thin, pale, and it trembled in my hands like a trapped bird.
"She lied." Clementine said quietly. "She said she could not pay. She sold you."
Isabella's face scrunched like an apple. "You come to take my son now! You come to take my money!"
"You sold me," I said again. "You chased away the healer. You fed me poison and then you cried. You tried to sell my life for coins."
The crowd around us grew. People began to talk about all the times they'd been cheated. They talked about old debts she had never paid. They coughed up the truth like pills.
"Isabella Lynch," a neighbor said into the crowd, "you took the silver and then you tried to keep living like nothing happened. You sold your daughter for fifteen silver pieces and laughed."
She dropped to her knees. Maybe she was begging; maybe she was a play-actor. I do not know. The crowd chanted. People took up stones and then dropped them when Enoch frowned.
"You will return one hundred fifty of that money," Enoch said at last. "You will give up that two-room shack you have and you will work for the blind man for a season. You will not have any voice in village trade."
"That's not enough!" Isabella wailed. She clutched at the hem of her dress like it could anchor her. "I will die! Who will feed me?"
They filmed her pleading. Men who had once lent her seeds stood and spat. "You lost our trust," one old woman hissed. "You sold a child like livestock."
She collapsed. People took video. The shame spread.
Isabella begged Enoch for mercy. Enoch shook his head. "You chose to sell her," he said. "You are to make amends."
That was not enough either. The town needed finger and spectacle.
I had one more prize to show. The ledger. I put the ledger on the table in the town hall and asked Enoch to read.
"In this ledger, several buyers bought seedlings the night the theft happened," I told the room. "They will either return the seedlings and pay for the damage, or they will stand in the square and apologize. And Isabella will listen as well."
Eyes swivelled. A woman sneered. Men refused. They had thought the poor would not verify. They had not expected me to hold proof.
The punishment was long. They were called to the square. They knelt. They had to name the times they'd cheated, to speak their wrongs, to hand their coin to the ones they robbed. They cried and they cursed. Two men were asked to clear the stone road for a month. A woman who had betrayed a neighbor had to carry the neighbor's water for a season. Cael's friends left him. Isabella's name was put on the town notice: "Shall not be trusted."
They lost face and means. They were shamed. Isabella lost the house she had so puffed about keeping; it was given to the town poor store. Cael lost his business. The butcher who bought seedlings was forced to pay a fine equal to what he had bought. People turned their backs.
The crowd clapping felt like little hammers on my ribs; I felt raw and whole.
Rowan grew stronger. The black coughs came fewer. He smiled when the sun hit his face. He took a stick and learned how to hold it like a boy who is finding his own arm.
"Why did you fight for this?" he asked me once when we sat under the peach tree.
"Because if we do not claim our own life, no one will," I said. "Because a girl who can read is worth more than a silver piece. Because your life mattered."
He looked at me like I was a bright thing. "If I get better, what will you do?"
"I will not be someone's coin," I said. "I will be mine."
And so I was. I grew a quiet market of herbs. I taught other women to grow parts of the medicine. We sold enough to buy more seed. We hired a woman to mend clothes. We paid Chance and our father a small wage for keeping land tidy.
Isabella lived in the old goat-shed. She came sometimes, pleading to touch a hand. I let her try one time, palms flat, no words.
"You sold me," I said once, after winter had come and gone. "You sold me for five silver for a night. You cried. You still cried. Why?"
She wept without sound. "I did it so my boy would live," she said. "I thought I had no choice. We had no money. I wanted him alive."
"You agreed to the paper," I said. "You signed."
"I know," she said. "I signed."
I took one of my herbs from the jar and placed it on her palm. It was tea for a fever. "This will calm you."
She drank. Her voice came back like a tired old song. "Forgive me," she said.
I thought of the village square, of Cael on his knees, of the market phones and faces. I thought of my ledger and the two hundred silver that had changed a house.
"I will not give what you took back," I said. "But the seeds you want—go and plant your own. Work. Pay. Earn back what you stole from yourself."
She did not beg again. She stayed away mostly. When she came by, she left a small bowl of porridge at the gate. It was neither apology nor pride. It was meal.
Rowan walked without aid in the spring. He ran a little, slow as music, but the sound of his feet was enough. He was not fully healed, maybe never would be. He was his own boy. He drew crooked pictures and showed them to me.
"What will you do with all that money?" he asked once, finger on a crude sun.
"I will build a small place where girls like us can read," I said. "I will buy books. I will teach. If I can keep a ledger, then I can keep names out of mouths like wolves."
"You will tell stories?" Rowan asked, eyes bright.
"I will tell the truth," I said.
The last thing I did before the next winter was this: I burned the paper with my mother's thumbprint in the yard, folded the ash into the soil at the root of our peach tree, and planted a seed over it.
"That paper held my old life," I told Clementine and Matthias and the people who helped. "It will not own me."
Ely came with a small cup of bitter tea. "You have done what few can," he said.
"Did you ever think I'd come back from being dead?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "People don't come back by chance. They come back because they refuse to be small. You refused."
I looked at my hands. They were callused now. They smelled of bark and herb and sun. A small raised scar ran along the inside of my wrist, a white bite that never quite healed. Rowan had bitten me years ago in fever, and it left a mark like a secret.
I pressed my thumb to that scar.
"This mark will mean I survived," I told them. "It will mean that I bit back."
Matthias laughed and the sound was soft. Clementine hugged me and I felt the warmth of a home that was true.
At the market, whenever someone asked me how the girl who'd been sold became the one who made the town stop, I would smile and say:
"I read the ledger. I spoke the truth. I planted a seed."
And when they asked what was the hardest part, I would touch my wrist and say, "Someone had to take off the old mark and make a new one."
The new mark was not a bite. It was a scar that came from a needle when I learned to stitch medicine into a body. It was my badge.
People still whisper about Isabella in the square. Some will not forgive. Cael left town and his stall sits empty. The market remembers him like an old storm. And the girl who was sold grew roots in a place that once wanted to make her nothing.
"Are you happy?" Rowan asked me one summer evening as we shelled beans.
"I am alive," I said. "That's enough for now."
The peach tree dropped one small, sweet fruit into my lap. I ate it and let the juice run down my wrist and into the scar.
I felt the burn of memory and the quiet of rain both pass through me.
I put my hand on Rowan's shoulder and he looked up and smiled, a crooked boy with all his days ahead of him.
"Promise me you'll teach others to read ledgers," he said.
"I will teach them to read everything," I said.
We sat there, the four of us—Clementine, Matthias, Rowan, and me—under the tree that smelled like new things.
Outside the village, the road stretched open and strangers came and went, but whenever anyone asked under the wood and fruit, they would find a girl's name in the mouth of everyone who had known her: Megan Huang who woke from the dead and would not be sold.
The End
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