Face-Slapping16 min read
Three Bowls of Noodles, One Burning Truth
ButterPicks19 views
The grandfather clock in the living room struck twelve and the heavy chime felt like a fist in my chest. I sat on the sofa and checked the time by habit. "Ryder should be back by now," I told the empty room.
"He's always late," I murmured, and the house answered with silence.
I am Emily Koenig. I grew up inside a clinic of herbs and steam, raised by my master—Declan David—who treated me as a daughter and taught me his whole life. "Medicine first," he used to say. "Hold to the formula, but keep your hands kind."
Ryder Kennedy courted me like a storm. "Marry me," he said once in a hotel corridor, breath warm on my cheek. "I'll fix everything for you."
I married him because he was clever in business and soft with me. He drove me to work. He bowed to my master and smiled for my sake. We built the factory together. The company became ours and then his idea made it soar. "You should be the legal face," Ryder said. "People respect Declan's name. Put Declan on paper, Emily. It'll be safer."
"Okay," I said. "For the factory. For Declan. For us."
Declan, who called me his child, sat in the clinic with me and watched me grind powders. "Be careful," he would say. "Trust machines but trust your fingers more."
Then one month my period did not come. I bought a test and almost fell to the floor when two lines showed up. "Ryder will laugh," I thought. "Ryder will be so happy."
I set my phone to that silly ringtone I loved and sat on the sofa like a child waiting for a smile.
The ringtone came from a number I didn't know.
"Who's texting at this hour?" I said aloud, thumb hovering.
The message read: "206 Zhongshan Street. Come. Now."
"Wrong number," I thought. "Or someone needs help."
Then, another message: "About Ryder Kennedy."
The world narrowed. I called the phone that mattered. "Ryder, answer—"
It went to voicemail. "Sorry, the person you're calling cannot take your call," a recorded voice said.
I drove quicker than I thought possible. My hands shook. My head filled with small pictures: Ryder's grin, the way he smoothed my hair, the way he told Declan to rest. The factory's sign loomed like a dark tooth: 206 Zhongshan Street.
The black gate was not locked. My fingers went numb as I pushed it open.
"Who sent the message?" I muttered, but a small thought pricked me: the security guard at the gate that Declan once helped—an old man—might know. He had been a beggar once, Declan had healed him. Maybe he was the one.
There was a light on in an inner office. I crept toward it. My footfalls were careful, because I'm used to listening—for leaves of herbs, for a patient's breath, for a pulse. This time I heard breathing that didn't belong to the room. I heard laughter and a voice I knew like the shape of a wound.
"Ah—yes. That's perfect," a man's voice moaned.
I pressed my ear to the doorframe because my chest was made of ice. The sound that followed stopped my breath. It was Ryder's voice.
"He can't know," the woman laughed. "Not yet. I'm three months."
"Of course not," Ryder said. "When Declan is gone, everything will be mine. Emily will give me the shares. She always does what I ask."
I saw no one and yet I heard entire rooms. My knees gave way. "No," I whispered, fingernails digging into my palms until they bled.
Inside, Ryder lay with a red-haired woman who smelled of cheap perfume and silk sheets. I had a picture in my mind from another life—how he had taken his vows seriously—how he had claimed to be a man of honor. Nothing matched. The woman had a beauty that made her dangerous in a different way: long lashes, a mole at the corner of her eye, a laugh like a coin falling.
Ryder's words slithered through the thin door.
"Wait until Declan dies," he said. "Then ask Emily to transfer the shares to me. She believes me. She believes everything I say. We'll have everything."
I had been raised to soothe, to measure, to cure. I had never planned for fire.
"Open the door," someone behind me whispered.
It was the old gatekeeper, Cedar Crow. He had seen me on the subway once, when I had carried a bundle of medicines to a street clinic. I had set him on his feet once with a poultice. He had sat behind the gate for years and watched the factory's comings and goings. "I couldn't let you come alone," he said. "I couldn't bear it. He used to bring you here, and now he's—"
"Show me," I said. "I want him to look at me when I catch him."
I pushed the door open.
Ryder's face went blank, then furious, then fast. He threw a silk robe on and patted at himself as if polishing a lie. The red-haired woman shrieked and hid under the blanket like a child.
"Emily," Ryder said, smoothed to honey. "What are you doing here?"
"Ryder," I said. "Why are you with her? What did you just say?"
He put his hands up as if to block sound. "I can explain," he said. "This isn't what it looks like."
"It is what it looks like," I said. "You said Declan must die. You said you'd take everything once he's dead."
Ryder laughed like a man trying to keep his footing on a moving floor. "Keep your voice down—"
"Why would you say that?" I asked.
"Because—because—" He fumbled for a reason. "Emily, you don't understand business. You never did. I did all the hard work. Shouldn't I get something for it?"
"You said you'll wait until he dies," I said. "You planned this."
Ryder's eyes hardened. "Declan is old, Emily. He cannot run the factory forever. You signed the shares under his name for trust. When he dies, things change. That's how the company survives. I love you. I take care of you. Why are you—"
"Because you lied," I said. "And because you put a plan to let him die in front of my face."
"You're hysterical," the woman in the bed said, crawling out with pale hands. "Calm down, Emily. He loves you. He told me—"
"Shut up," I said.
I did what the gatekeeper and a dozen small, angry truths forced me to do. I had prepped for this in a way no one expected. A hand trembled, and my phone was in my grasp. I started to call.
"Emily, don't do this," Ryder said. "Don't—"
I hit record.
"Hello, this is the police," a voice said later in my memory, but in that room, Ryder's face changed from silk to stone.
"You won't take my shares," he hissed. "You don't get to burn me with your dramatics—"
It got worse. He pushed me to the ground. "You bitch," he said, hands on my throat. "How dare you ruin me?"
I fought for each air fraction, and when he lifted me like a rag the room spun and then I saw something else: a table with many scented candles, a stack of romance magazines, the silk curtain. Fury, which had been a small, hot beast in me all this time, grew teeth.
"You want to kill Declan," I said. "You want to take everything and sleep like a king."
He laughed and spat down at me. "And what will you do? Call Declan and cry?"
He pressed a hand around my neck harder, and the world became white at the edge. I kicked my feet and the table clattered over, sending a burning candle into a silk curtain. Instantly, flame licked like an animal. The perfume made the fire greedy. The curtain fell onto the carpet.
"Get off me!" I gasped, and for the only time I remember, I did not feel sorry.
Ryder stumbled for the door. "Stop! Stop! Fire—" He tore at blankets. The woman—the one he loved enough to plan a new life—screamed "Help!" as she clawed at a nightstand.
Cedar Crow, who had been outside, called the emergency line. Men with torches came because a neighbor saw the light. The factory alarms sang like a funeral.
I held to Ryder's collar and tried to pull him back. He punched at me, blood stinging and bright in my mouth, and then he broke free and ran. We all did, everyone stumbling into the black night and into shouts. I watched the office become an oven. The flames found fuel in magazines, in sheets, in the lie of secrecy.
When the police came, the room had become a furnace. They pulled what they could. By the time they could, the red-haired woman had died, and Ryder—my Ryder, the man who had kissed me in wedding photos—was ringed in smoke.
They tried to drag him out, but his legs failed. He clawed at the door and then slid down, coughing, his face raw. Cedar Crow was vomiting in the street and shouting, "He betrayed you! He betrayed the master!"
The firemen did their job. I stood on the pavement and watched the two bodies in the orange light. People gathered—neighbors, night drivers, people who lived for the gossip of another's ruin.
Someone held a camera up, insistent and bright. "This will go round soon," a voice said. "People will know." Others clapped. Some cried. A woman wrapped a blanket around me and wouldn't look me in the face.
I was not proud of the flames. I was not proud of the way my hands had become instruments. But the smoke cleared the air like a comb.
The police later asked questions and played back my recorded file. "We have his words," I said. "He said it all."
They told me a reporter had uploaded the recording. A public exposure followed. At a shareholders' meeting a week later, the boardroom filled with people, faces I've known and faces I had never seen. A giant screen hissed and then showed his voice, his confession about Declan's death, his plan for the shares, his contempt.
"Turn it off!" Ryder's voice begged from the witness stand—he was unable to stand, his skin still marked by smoke. "Stop—" He looked at me with a crazed pleading that made my heart twist.
I walked to the podium.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, and every camera wanted the answer.
"For the company," he said. "For our future."
"You called Declan an old man and a stepping stone," I said. "You called Declan—" I read his words out loud, every recorded syllable, because the truth had to be heard by everyone in the boardroom: the partners, the employees, Declan's own students who had come. Hands covered mouths. Phones lit like constellations as people filmed.
Ryder's face went through the old cycle—pride, calculation, fear, denial. "You edited that!" he cried. "That's not me—"
"Do you deny saying you would wait until he died?" I asked.
He went quiet. Cameras recorded the moment his denial failed.
"Answer him," whispered someone near me.
"I said what I said," Ryder muttered. He dropped onto a chair like a man surrendering.
People in that room shifted. Some hissed. "He did it for money," someone said. "For power." A woman pulled out a phone and began to live-stream.
"How does it feel?" another voice asked. "To be the husband who betrays his wife and plans to murder the man who raised her?"
Ryder's face crumpled in a way that no one would pay for again. "I didn't mean—" he said. "I never meant for anyone to die."
"Then why did you speak so coldly?" I asked. "Why lie? Why the mistress? Why the baby?"
He slumped forward and put his head in his hands. "I—" he began and then started to sob. It sounded like someone trying to make a small animal forgive them.
Then the pattern I had seen before happened again: he pleaded, denied, begged. "Please," he said. "It wasn't like that. I love you—"
People recorded him on their phones. Hands rattled like a dry tree. The murmurs grew sharp and then loud. "Shame!" someone shouted. There were calls for him to leave the company, for his removal, for prosecution. The board stripped him of all titles before the end of that day. Colleagues who had once feted him turned their backs.
The spectacle wound into his downfall. He lost his chair; he lost his friends. He was too visible. Cameras and the internet eat reputations quietly and thoroughly. He went from swagger to begging.
Finally, he sank to his knees in the middle of the boardroom, the very room where years ago he'd spoken about numbers and growth like a god. "Please," he said to me. "Please. I didn't mean—"
I turned away. People clapped. Some applauded the truth. A few older women in the audience cried because they had known the slow ruin such men bring. Phones flashed. Someone made a short film out of his ruined pleading. It ran for days.
Yet the flames had come first. The fire had already decided fate.
Declan—my master—who had been weak and dozy for a while because of age, never recovered from shock. He lived long enough to sign one paper: a trust that made the factory safe in my name. He died like an old book closing, with my hand in his.
I stood at his bed and whispered, "I will make it right."
The village from my childhood—no, not that village, my world of lab trays and powders—suddenly felt huge and empty without him. I had lost love that I had trusted with every bone. I had lost a hand that had medical magic and given it to trust.
Then the world broke again.
One night I fell into darkness like a tired animal.
When I opened my eyes, I wasn't in the city. I wasn't in my apartment with a burned photograph. I woke with mud in my hair and the taste of river on my tongue.
"Little one! Wake!" a water-stained voice called.
I looked up. A woman was crouched above me, clumsy hands and white hair like a tired moon. She called me "Seventh" in a way that made me blink. My mouth moved, and a different name came out because my new body—no, the body I had woken into—kept old names.
"My name is—" I started, and then let myself breathe in this strange air.
I was fourteen. The maps I had in my head from the factory no longer fit. The room was clay and straw and a single window with a wooden frame. My clothes were patched.
"You're soaking," my "mother" said. "What happened? You jumped into the river?"
I sat up in the small bed and looked at my hands. They were young. They were not the hands that had lit candles into curtains. I tasted river mud and remembered—my body had been another girl's. The girl's name was also Emily—how unlucky is that?—but in this life she was the seventh granddaughter of a stubborn old woman who wanted money more than family.
I had crossed the line into another lifetime. I was the woman who had once wanted to die to avoid marriage.
I remembered my other life—the factory, the fire, the boardroom shame. It was all a skin I wore for memory. My new life belonged to a different decade, a different war of survival. I had Declan's blood in my veins once more, but not his presence. The scent of herbs lingered like an old prayer.
"Listen," my new mother Lydia Booth said, "we can't let them make you marry that Wang boy. They already collected money. They want to sell you like a goat."
"I will not be sold," I said, and the words were not only teenage stubbornness. A woman who had seen the burn of betrayal had sharpened them.
They took me home. The house was the product of a family controlled by a woman—my grandmother, Emilie Cantu—who had teeth for bargains. "You're fourteen," she said the moment she sat down. "You will bring us a dowry."
"Not anymore," I said.
From the moment I returned, I started to think like the Emily I had been before: medical logic, plans and contingencies, systems where there seemed to be only chaos. I learned that in this time Declan was unknown and Ryder's voice was only a memory that cracked in my head like a brittle twig. I had my own history now and a chance to save these people from the cruelty they had not yet learned to fight.
"What's your name?" a young man asked me on the third day in the mountain, when the wind smelled like raw earth.
"Emily," I answered, but they called me by the childhood nickname in my new life: "Seventh." He grinned.
"I'm Coen Clarke," he said. "I come from the city. My head is full of books."
Coen became a friend and then a confidant. He had been a sent-down youth with a gentle skill: he knew how to protect ideas. He listened to me, and when I told him about a doctor in need—an old man with a leg infection—Coen jumped up and ran to find herbs.
"You have hands," Coen said once. "I see the way you move. Why do you hide it?"
"Because showing keeps women from safety around here," I said.
"But you don't have to hide now," he insisted.
I began using the little miracle I had: a strange personal space that arrived with me. It was impossible to explain. "Little White"—a cheerful pocket assistant—lived inside it and had the manners of a kindly robot. "Hello, owner," Little White said with a bubbly tone the first time I went into the space.
"A space?" I asked, and the space explained: time runs slow there, the soil is rich, there are seeds and a storehouse like a small market. "We can grow things fast," Little White said. "We can trade them, and the system upgrades with points. We need points to upgrade."
"Points," I said, and smiled because I recognized systems. The factory had been a system once. Now the space was my laboratory.
I used the system to plant useful herbs. Little White taught me how to seed. The soil was magical: roots grew fast, leaves doubled in days. I learned a skill: "automatic plant sense," a soft voice in my head that told me where medicinal plants hid in the mountains. It was like having the rhythm of the forest whispered into my palms.
"Where are you going?" my mother Lydia asked when I packed a basket.
"To gather supplies," I said. "And to help a teacher whose leg is infected."
She looked at me like someone seeing a new moon. "Bring something home," she said.
I went up the mountain and found summer grass and ginger and gentian. Then I found Coen sprawled in the weeds, pale and bitten by a snake.
"Coen!" I cried. "What happened?"
"I tried to get herbs for my teacher," he said, voice like a thin rope. "I was stupid."
I dug in my bag and bound his wound, and with nothing but my mouth and cold courage I drew snake venom from his arm until his lips got the color of life again.
"You saved me," he said when he woke. "You have hands like my teacher's. Will you—will you come see him? He is sick and proud and stubborn."
I followed him down to a crooked house where a man, Raul Brun—no, the village called him "Granddad Sun"—lay hollering about his luck.
"Don't call me sad," the man croaked. "I've served my country. I have seen too much to be done in this world. But thank you, child."
I dressed his wound with my new herbs. The old man's knot of pain eased. He looked at me as if he had seen the sea open for the first time. "Little girl," he said, "you have something. You will not die here."
I used the space to steep a potion for the old man. The jars in my storage room were like a small bank. Little White boiled herbs and kept them warm. I left a root-smelling tea with Raoul—his color shifted to color.
"Will you come back?" Coen asked when I left. "We need hands like yours."
"I will," I promised.
My life in the village bloomed like the plants in the space. I dug, I planted, I collected, and I traded. The system gave me points. A man from the county—Cody Fischer—bought some ginger, and soon after a notice went out: local officials wanted to know who helped an injured veteran. That was when the world opened like an animal mouth.
I went to town to sell herbs and seek help with my mother's plan to split away from the house that had never treated us like family. At the county center, I met a woman, Kelly Cunningham, who ran social work with a steady hand.
"Children belong to the future, not to dowries," she said when she learned my story.
She called her offices, and suddenly I had an ally who could lean on officials.
My small seeds and the protection of old friends—the compassion of Raoul, the steady kindness of Coen, the unexpected warmth of Kelly and the fierce guarding of a county elder, Cody—built a safety net. The market paid well for ginger and three-year root. I came back with a satchel heavy enough to lift my mother's chin.
"Five hundred," the county elder declared with a smile when he bought a wild ginseng root. "For that? Take it. Tell me where to find more."
We had money, yes, but more than that we had a plan. My mother Lydia whispered, "You want to split away, don't you? You want to be free."
"I do," I said.
"Then we will," she said, and in the flicker of the lamplight I saw her courage burn.
Weeks passed. The space rewarded me. The plants grew like wonders. Little White sang when parcels assembled. In the evenings, I would stand on the back roof and watch the moon cut shapes across my palm, thinking of Declan and the burnt house, of Ryder's plea in a boardroom, and of the room in Zhongshan that smelled of silk and betrayal. The memory of the fire gave my will a blade.
The village learned to whisper that I had a magic place. Some called me a healer. Others called me witch. I cared less. I had a method and a purpose.
Then one day the world asked for justice again. A rumor crossed the county like a sparrow: a man in town had groomed a wife and then plotted to take a friend's fortune. The rumor had used my recorded voice. It rolled toward the same man: Ryder.
He was gone, but his echo was loud. When the factory board found the recording and watched the footage of his plan, they requested a public hearing. People came because they needed villains to be seen falling. I went because truth had killed a small part of me and I wanted to watch the rest be seen.
"Why did you plan this?" a woman asked him again. She was Emerson Matthews, a board member who had once defended honesty. He was seated and smaller now.
Ryder's face told the old story: "I wanted what I believed I deserved."
"Do you deny your words?" someone else asked.
Ryder tried to shift, to charm, to plead. The room recorded it all. Someone had prepared the public humiliation like a trap. They played his recorded words. The crowd watched him change from man to something smaller. "You—" he said. "You don't understand—"
He went through the cycle: smugness, shock, denial, rage, collapse, crying, begging. Around him a chorus played: cameras filming, hands clapping, whispers. "He deserves it," someone said. "He has blood on his hands," another added.
When he fell to his knees and curled like a child and begged me to come back, the board rose as one and had him removed. They stripped him of role and name, and the world took pictures.
The punishment was public, and long, and I read the faces of the witnesses: astonishment, anger, someone who made a silent vow, a woman who had once believed his lies.
People recorded him on phones. They filmed his decline like an animal being taken. He begged. "Please," he said. "Please, Emily, I didn't mean—" His voice lost power. People around him moved closer: some to jeer, some to hold back, some to make sure the law touched his want.
I answered with silence. "You will not take anything from Declan," I said. "You will not take anything from the people you used."
Later, in black nights, I thought about the two punishments—the fire and the public hearing. They both fit like two pieces of one broken mirror. The world burned him and then the world watched him fall. Both were true. Both were exact.
After those days the village life changed: my mother and sister—Imani Huang—moved with me. We split from Emilie Cantu's hold and built a smaller house on a small plot. Coen's father winked and said, "Good luck, kid." Little White hummed in the space and the trade system gave me more tasks to grow and produce. Each task gave me points. Each point meant more space and more safety.
I did not forget Declan. If anything, his face visited me in quiet hours to remind me mercy does not mean forgetting. I tried to be kind to my mother, to the old man who had once been a beggar and now watched me with quiet pride, to the hundred small people who believed I could do more than survive.
"Why did you set the fire?" someone asked in the months that followed.
"Because he chose a path," I said. "And I chose not to be a victim of it."
"You could have called the police first," they said.
"I did call," I said. "But some truths do not wait for patience. They wait for light."
The space grew. The county approved our claim. My life knit into useful things: a small clinic, a garden, a house of our own. I learned to use money without fear. I learned to use power without cruelty.
Coen and I walked sometimes along the river and watched the moon make silver trails. He would say, "You moved like someone who carries storms and order at the same time."
"I carry enough," I said. "I carry flames and seeds."
At night I still hear Declan's warning: "Trust your hands." I close my fist and remember those words.
One evening, I made three bowls of noodles in the little kitchen. The warmth in the room felt like a small reward. Little White hummed in the background. "Three bowls," I said. "For us."
Coen laughed. "You always eat like that."
I placed one bowl on the table, the second for my mother, the third saved in the space. In the glow, I touched the space. It was not a miracle without cost. It was a tool. It was my second chance.
I am Emily Koenig. I survived a man who plotted to steal life by burning the hands that raised me. I survived my own decision to answer fire with fire. I came back to another life and used a strange little system called a space to replant what was broken.
The public punishment was cruel and clear. Ryder went from swagger to kneeling, then swallowed by the legal system and safe in its own small justice. The flames took his mistress and destroyed his body. The boardroom took his name. Both punishments watched his collapse like a tide.
Now when I wind the little gear of the space's clock and feed seeds into its warm soil, I think of Declan's hands and the three bowls of noodles. I think of Cedar Crow at the gate and Coen's brave small heart. I think of Little White, who whistles like a child who knows the taste of soup.
"One day," I say softly while the steam curls like a small white flag, "I'll write everything down. For now, we mend."
The crowd that once filmed him is gone. The factory grew steadier under new rules. My fingers learned not only to make remedies but to measure when to stop and listen.
When someone asks me whether I would do it again, start another fire, break another silence, I think of those nights in the burning light. I think of Declan's small smile the day he signed his trust. I think of my mother smiling over a bowl of noodles that is not a luxury but a miracle.
"I would," I say, because some acts of justice must be public, and some acts of mercy private. I would do what it takes to keep my people alive.
Outside, Little White beeps. "Seventh," it says, "there's a new task."
I look at the little glowing screen and the field and I smile. "Let's plant."
The End
— Thank you for reading —