Face-Slapping11 min read
Three Days' Deadline and a Cat with a Tally
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up with someone else's face in my palms and a phone that buzzed like a trapped bee.
"You're trending," the screen said.
"Pregnant, father unknown," the headline glared at me.
"Mom—" I tried, but the word was a cage.
"Get out." Florence Hoffman said it like a verdict.
"You should be ashamed," Ruben Collins said without looking at me.
They both used my old name as if it were property. I held my bleeding forehead and let it settle: this body belonged to Imogen Clay, an actress who'd lived a life of cheap spotlight and worse rumors.
"Are you pregnant?" Florence demanded, white-knuckling my phone.
I looked down. The woman I became had milk-smooth skin, a public face, and private ruin. I felt both like an intruder and a thief in a skin that had been stolen before.
"I—" I said, and my voice sounded wrong in my own ears. "Why would you—"
"Why would you what?" Florence cut in. "Why would you drag our name in the mud? You're shameless."
Her tone was clinical. Her loathing was a currency everyone in Ruben's circle accepted. Leah Fischer sat nearby like a prop—smiling the right smile, the daughter who learned the value of obedience.
"I'm leaving," I said. "Fine. I'll go."
"Go, and never come back," Florence said. "From now on, this family only has Leah."
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Yes."
I left with my back a little straighter. Florence's breath against my shoulder said a hundred years of small cruelties. I walked into the thin light of late afternoon, then heard a voice like silk and saw a cat the color of midnight.
"Lower your head."
I bent, because cats ask like that and you oddly obey. The cat blinked at me. "I am your manager."
The cat's mouth moved like a child's puppet. "You have one day left on your life points unless you draw a card."
"A cat is my manager and I'm being told to draw a card," I said.
"Draw," it insisted, putting five cards before me. "N, R, SR, SSR, UR."
I took one at random. The cat's eyes dimmed. "N. You got an N. You've been given a refund coupon for life. Now buy time."
"How?" I asked. My bank told a more brutal truth: $520. Fifty-two-oh. Not ten thousand. Not even five hundred. My life meter was a joke that demanded currency.
"Ten thousand a day," the cat said cheerfully. "Pay ten thousand, you live a day. The 'Underworld' wants its bookkeeping clean."
"Ten thousand a day," I repeated. "Who robs the living for ledger entries?"
"Management, sweetheart," the cat said. "Draw again? No. You work for it."
"Fine."
We set up a street stall under a bridge that smelled of rain and old rumors. I sold two talismans with a voice that had been taught to charm cameras and stage lights: "Transformation charm. Invisibility talisman. Ten thousand each."
People either laughed or deleted my number. One rich man did not. He paid, and when a pack of men I vaguely recognized as trouble shuffled toward me, the man stuck the talisman to his forehead and turned into a little black cat—then leapt into my arms, purring like a broken alarm.
"You can't stiff me," I said. "Pay."
He did not answer. He simply turned back into a man—Glen Henderson—then caught me off-guard, pinned me gently to the ground, and murmured, "Keep still."
"Are you seducing me or threatening me?" I hissed.
"Both," he said. "You sold me a charm. Consider payment due in kind."
"Then pay four hundred thousand," I said, because my hands had learned how to bargain over scars.
He laughed, handing me a card anyway. "Try touch."
He left like a shadow and like a debt. I checked my account: $400,000. My breath went light. My life meter ticked up enough for another week. The cat-manager—whose name, by then, had become a tiny, grudging comfort—nuzzled my palm and said, "Gifts come with claws."
Days unfurled like bracelets. I learned the laws of this reborn ledger. You don't get a second chance unless someone somewhere decides you deserve it. Apparently the universe had misfiled me—my rebirth was flagged as "illegal." That explained the cat and the punch-in-the-face bureaucracy of the Underworld. Blythe Christian spoke to me through a phone line that smelled faintly of spice and perfume. "Underworld billing," she said. "You owe for several violations. Three hundred thousand and five twenty. Please pay in full."
"What violations?" I asked.
"You opened the Shura Dream—cost: 100,000 for the trees, 10,000 for the bike, 1000 for the tin bowl. You also failed to intervene when a suffering woman was beset—fine: 200,000. And you modified a mortal's fate without permission—that is a major offense. You have three days."
"Three days?" I echoed. "Or I die."
"Exactly." Blythe smiled. "We hope you leave good reviews."
I learned quickly that having a celebrity's face did not make anyone love you. It made them want to cash in. Ruben Collins gritted like a man chewing on coal. He had called me home by the lie of "family meeting," but only to watch me be a scapegoat. He had risen on stolen advantages; he would swallow more if he could. He was coward and accountant rolled into one. He did not know what I knew now: that the fox-souls of animals rose like debtors, and they'd been bought and sold by Florence's fashion habit—fur coats, fox-scarves. She had stitched herself into currency.
"She will die in three days," I said out loud as if rehearsing a scene. "She will be wiped out by the same curses she sowed."
Florence's eyes widened. "Don't you dare—" she began.
"Watch," I said, calm as concrete. I had a plan that smelled faintly like revenge and tasted like justice.
The first step was public. If a family insists on theatrical cruelty in private, I would give them theater back with better lighting. A charity gala would be the stage; Ruben's ego would pay for the tickets and Florence would preen beneath a truth-teller's spotlight.
"You're insane," Leah hissed, but she was half a pawn and half frightened map.
"No," I said. "I am practical."
Weeks earlier I'd learned to pull money with my fingers. One day of signing, a second of cunning, a little help from Glen Henderson's unexpected generosity—who, suspiciously, called me "my child’s mother" like some worn promise—and I transferred five million into an account from which I could operate. I paid for truth to be an expensive entrance.
The night of the gala the air smelled like roses and old timers. I walked in as if I had always belonged, in a dress that could not be mistaken for forgiveness. "Imogen," a host murmured. I smiled.
"You're early," Glen said from near the back, and I knew he was watching me like a man who counts heartbeats.
"You'll be in the front row?" I asked.
"Front row." He nodded, and his hand brushed mine briefly—it was an anchor.
Florence was luminous. She stepped onto the dais, praised causes, took pictures, drank applause like oxygen. The cameras loved her. Leah smiled like a supervising angel, but even Leah's smile had a tremor. Ruben's jaw had tightened into a machine.
I clapped with everyone. Then the program staggered to what they called a "moment of dedication"—and my five million bought us the dedication.
"Tonight," I said into the microphone, "I will offer you an exhibition."
"Who is she?" someone hissed.
"She's Imogen," Glen replied aloud to whoever cared. "Yes."
I had filmed everything ahead of time—Florence's calls, Ruben's ledger entries, Oleg Friedrich's later bargaining in the hospital room. I rolled video: Florence's messages boasting of family image control, of pushing me away; Ruben's recorded conversations agreeing to pay for silence; the stolen ledger with names, prices, and the line item "fox pelts: supplier: Florence Hoffman." The screen behind Florence chewed up her glow.
"That's false," she said at first—smug, a practiced dismissal, the kind of reaction she used every time she'd slapped my face in the past and expected the world to wink and forget.
"Is it?" I asked. "Watch."
The footage slid into an even rawer frame: Oleg Friedrich, his robe and false piety, counting offerings and promising Ruben the "body to harvest" for rites. The camera cut to the proof—an exchange in the hospital corridor. "The child is correct," the footage ran his voice. "You will give me what I desire." He smiled as if the world were a ledger with terms.
Florence's smile flickered. "This is edited," she insisted. "This is—" She stepped down from the dais like a queen stepping off a chessboard that had become a trap. "This is defamation." Her voice wobbled somewhere between threat and prayer.
"Defamation?" I echoed. "Or confession? You really are an elegant liar." I let the microphones draw her words into the open. I had hired a proper tech to pull the old hospital feed—public record now. That was the trick: bring the private ledger into a place with witnesses.
The crowd went still, at first, as if someone had turned off their hearts. Then a hundred little noises happened at once: the rustle of gowns, a woman gagging, a man making a choking sound, a photographer laughing like a machine breaking. People reached for their phones. A dozen hands came up, filming. A camera man ran forward for a better shot. "What is she saying?" Leah murmured, panic slipping through.
Florence's face changed as contagiously as weather: smugness thinned into disbelief, disbelief melted quickly into outrage, and outrage collapsed under the weight of a thousand lenses.
"That's a lie!" she shouted. Her voice climbed to hysteria. "They edited that. My family, you can't believe—"
"Someone call the hospital records," someone shouted. "Check the timestamp. This is insane."
"Is this true?" a woman near the back cried. "Is she—did she—"
"I didn't—" Florence's composure cracked. Her hands came to her mouth, and for the first time she didn't know what to do.
She had made a life from projection. The public had accepted it because it was prettier than the truth. But truth loves the loud and unskilled; give it a microphone and it does the rest.
Florence's change followed a ritual: smug to stunned, stunned to denial. "This is photoshopped," she said, and her voice sawed thin. The old admirers in the room, the socialites who'd dressed like peacocks, shifted. Phones clicked into higher gear. People tweeted. Comments exploded in live streams.
"Do you deny taking fur from animals?" I asked. I kept my voice small, calm. That stillness felt like the blade I had refused to carry.
She spat the word lie, then shifted into bargaining: "It's a misunderstanding. I—I'm charitable. They misrepresent me. They'll—"
No one wanted to hear a promise now. The cameras caught the quiver of her finger, the moisture at the edge of her eyelid. Lena—a friend of Leah's—snapped a wide shot and uploaded it instantly.
Florence clutched at Ruben. Her fingers dug into his sleeve like a drowning person grabbing a life ring, but Ruben merely stared at the screen. He had been using other people's lives as collateral for a long time. The lights on his face blurred.
"Everyone, please," Florence said wildly. "Think what you're doing. My family—" She looked into the crowd for an ally and found the lens of a teenager's phone—a lens that would not forgive.
The crowd's reaction was sudden, electric. First came the camera flashes and the clack of pressing record buttons. Then came murmur and accusation like warming waves: "How could you?" "She used fox pelts." "That man—Oleg—he conned us." People hissed. Some stood back, stunned; others leaned in as if they'd been waiting for permission to hate.
One woman stood up, brave or cruel, and said, "You made people buy your image. You profited from corpses of animals. And our charity—" She spat the word "charity" as if it had betrayed her. "You made our names a cover for your greed."
Florence's shoulders buckled. She went through the stages with a clarity that was almost painful to watch: smug to shock to denial to raw pleading.
"No," she said, voice small. "Please." She took a step forward toward me and then fell to her knees like a marionette whose string had finally been cut.
"Please," she repeated, but the room had already been divided into a thousand small courts. Phones lifted higher to capture every angle. Someone laughed behind us, full and ugly. Someone else coughed and tried to be discreet. A dozen feeds lit up with her kneel.
"Don't—" she begged. "Please—"
"Beg?" I asked, and it was not charity in my voice but a ledger entry. "Beg for what? For leave from your own deeds?" I felt a strange cold relief as the night pulled more witnesses into the orbit of truth.
"You're mine," she said suddenly, trying another script. "You belong to us." It was the old language of ownership, and its last echoes sounded shallow in the room. "You can't—"
"Everyone," Lea whispered, the single word cutting through Florences plead like a scalpel. "Stop." But crowd noise didn't obey Lea.
I held my hand up and let the silence gather like an audience. "If you have a moment," I said, "listen to her story." I played the tapes that listed dates, bills, and receipts: stolen pelts, paid hush money, arranged hospital "mistakes." Oleg Friedrich's audio that described the "favorable terms" was there in cold voice.
Florence went from furious to catatonic. Her denial dissolved into shredded pleas. She cried into her palms. The phones recorded every tremor of her voice. Her public reaction followed the sequence the rules demanded: triumph, then startled, then denial, then collapse. Her face turned from practiced porcelain into something human and raw.
"Stop recording," she rasped. "Please—"
"No," said a woman in a glass dress, sharp as a stiletto. "We will not unsee." She stepped forward and took Florence's hands like a midwife. "You will answer. This is the world we live in now. Public neighborhoods watch. Public hands keep receipts."
People began to applaud. Not for Florence, but for the truth. Some clapped as if a performance had reached its inevitable end. A few staggered back, faint with the strangeness of seeing real consequences.
Then Florence looked up at me with everything stripped. Her face was wet, and she tried one last trick—she blamed me. "You made me do this," she said. "You used me." She said it the way people sometimes say the wrong prayer.
"No." I shook my head. "You used me."
She staggered and then, in a final seam of humiliation, she crawled forward and put her forehead on the stage's edge, a public bow—no, worse: a plea. Cameras leaned. The clacking of record buttons rose to a clamor.
"Please," Florence begged, the word small and private, and yet the world had already written her judgment. Phones uploaded, the net devoured, and in the weeks that followed the clip would float in feeds like a parasite—she would lose contracts, friends would turn their faces. Leah tried to touch her hand and was swatted away, as if the mother-daughter bond had been a cheap lace that unraveled under scrutiny.
Ruben collapsed in a corner, not kneeling but crumpled, a man who had never been asked to account for the weight he had used as leverage. Oleg fled, and later the law would be called in. The scene had everything: a crowd that recorded, some who scoffed, some who quietly filmed with a kind of domestic cruelty, and many who were silent and ashamed.
After the gala, Florence's fall was not a single spectacle but a slow evaporation. The charity returned donations, sponsors pulled logos, and her favorite boutique sent back hangtags. The video of her kneeling trended for three days. She called for lawyers and begged for forgiveness and then begged for privacy. The eyes had tasted blood and would not look away.
"You're finished," Leah whispered once, later, but the old anger had thinned to something like regret.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe she's merely exposed."
But justice in this world had both a ledger and a theater. The ledger turned pages: payments were traced, underworld fines calculated, and Oleg Friedrich vanished into courts and nightmares. The theater gave us the public confession—Florence's stages had finally turned on her.
I did not celebrate. I had paid five million for a truth rare as a comet. I had bought witnesses and time. I had kept the cat in my pocket while the cameras did their long work. I had trapped a man who traded souls into a net of his own making; Oleg would pay with nights full of his own invented terrors, damned by a magical law I could evoke. He screamed in the nights that followed like something that had already met its own reflection.
Leah avoided my eyes in corridors for a while. Ruben called with a new tone, somewhere between apology and arithmetic. He offered me money again as if wealth had been the only teacher. "Imogen," he said, "this is complicated. We can make it right." His voice was a specific kind of humble—transactional.
"No," I said. "You can make me paid." I named a number. He gave it. The ledger closed one way; another had opened.
Glen came to me once and said, "You titrated the world finely. Why?"
"Because it had to be done," I answered. "Because I had to buy days."
"How many now?" he asked, and I told him. He smiled like a man who had bargained with fate and not lost.
Days grew routine again—talismans, small markets, the Underworld's invoices: petty and cruel. I bought back time for a child I had not chosen but felt for like an ache. I bought the chance to be a mother who could plan mornings. And when night came, often thunder would rattle, and I'd hold Glen's hand like an anchor.
"Do you think she'll pay for all of this?" he asked once.
"She's paying," I said. "With the things she taught me: how to hide, and how to be relentless."
And when the thunder came, I would cuddle into him and say, "You sweet?"
He would press a thumb to my lips and say, "You sweet."
Even the Underworld calls have become mundane—Blythe's little voice reminding me to keep my receipts, to post one review for the service she provided. The cat still sleeps on my freezer at odd hours, warm and unrepentant, and I still keep the little water bottle where the foxes were handed into a tiny prison, rust-stained and taped with red, a joke and a reminder all at once.
If anyone asks the end, I will point to that bottle. "This one," I will say. "You will recognize the sound it makes when you wind it. It says: pay attention."
The End
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