Face-Slapping10 min read
I Packed Bean Sprouts and a Red Coat and Ran
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I am Juniper Fischer.
"I can't breathe," I told the ceiling. The room answered with cold.
My face felt like it had been pressed into an iron pan. My mouth was split and swollen. My hair stuck to my forehead in wet clumps. The light through the little window made a strip on the floor, but it did not reach inside me.
"Juniper?" a voice from the yard called. "You awake?"
I didn't answer. I didn't want to be heard. I couldn't move my fingers. Blood dried under my nails. I was small and thin and my bones hurt.
Rex Martini had left the house at dawn. He was always back a different man from the one he left as. He smashed things with words and with his hands. He said wives were ornaments and that I should know my place. He said I invited attention. He called me names until my ears rang.
"I was only helping a man fold a tarp," I tried to tell him that night. "He asked for a hand."
"Really?" Rex had laughed like a storm. "Notorious help. You grin like you're selling yourself."
"I didn't do anything," I kept saying while he hit me. The fridge hummed somewhere where no one cared. Down the lane people ate and laughed. No one came.
The first time he hit me hard, we had only been married six months. I ran to my mother's house and knocked until my knuckles bled. They told me to go back. "All couples fight," they said. "Just be sensible. Your brother will be fine." So I went back.
I hid a pair of scissors under the pillow after that night. Once, when I saw the scissors, I thought if I could not breathe another day I would make one final choice. But my daughter woke up and cried, and the sound tore the dark away. I could not. I would not give Eloise to those who would treat her as less than a child.
"Mom," I whispered on the phone one night later, voice like a rope. "Come get me. I want to go home."
"What's wrong now?" my mother said, but she did not come. Her voice was a list of reasons I was a burden. Her lessons of endurance were nails. She told me to forgive. She told me I should be grateful.
Rex locked the door that time. He smashed my phone with his fist. He pushed me onto the cold floor and stepped back to look at me as if I were a broken thing he could toss away.
"I'll be the reason you can't breathe and you will see who comes running," he said. "You deserve it for being soft."
"I deserve nothing," I said. "Eloise deserves everything."
When I tried to stand, he shoved my head into the plaster wall. I tasted metal. I had a plan in the back of my head—quiet, horrible, desperate. I found the half bag of poison under the shelf of the back room. I tore it open. I put it to my lips and then the house sang a child's cry and my hands shook.
"Mommy!" the small sound made me drop the pack like a stone. I did not want to die and leave Eloise with them. I wanted to grow old, even slowly. I wanted to be enough.
He left that night in the rain. I kept my clothes on, packed a red wool coat I had saved for my wedding into a bundle with a small stack of notes and the only card with money I'd kept secret. I wrapped Eloise against me, the way mothers hold blankets.
"Go," I told no one. I pushed through the gate with my little bicycle with two big baskets on the back and the baby strapped to my chest. I rode until my thighs burned and my lungs begged. I took a bus to the city the same week my brother Elliot Perry was studying law at the university.
"Elliot?" I said when I found the campus. The weather left bruises across me and the scarf could not hide everything. "Elliot, it's me."
He looked at me like he saw a stranger. "Juniper?"
"I need a place to sleep," I said. The word came out weak and raw. "I left Rex. I can't go back."
He wrapped my bag and the child and moved me like a brother who suddenly knew a truth he had not wanted. "Come inside," he said. "We will talk in private."
Atticus Torres was there because Elliot introduced him as a friend. He was the one who made lawyers look not scary. He sat across from me in that tiny restaurant and said words like gentleness, like a blade that could cut but also heal.
"Have you been hit before?" Atticus asked.
"Too many times," I said.
"Do you want to press charges?" he asked. His voice was steady, clear.
"I am scared," I said. "I don't want to see him. I just want to be free."
"Then we do what we can," he said. "Bring me your notes. I'll help."
I thought of the red coat in my bundle—my wedding coat—and the way it had once meant a future. I wore it now like an armor and a memory.
"How will I pay?" I asked. "I have little money."
"You won't pay now," Atticus said. "You pay later if you must. Right now, we get proof. We go to the hospital. We get records. We make a file."
There were people who said, "Sue him and see what happens. Women like you," and they meant it to sting. Elliot frowned a lot. He tried to be helpful. He worried about consequences. He worried, as brothers do, that the world will judge his family.
"You think I can do it?" I asked Atticus one night as I held Eloise and fed her, the warm milk steaming in the dark.
"You already did it by coming," Atticus said.
I started selling bean sprouts at the market. It was simple and it was honest. I soaked beans in big buckets, watched pale shoots push like hope through water, and sold them for what little profit I could make. My hands learned a rhythm; my heart learned to measure time by customers and by the way Eloise laughed when I put her on my back and she would pat my shoulder.
"You shouldn't be here alone," Atticus said the first time he visited the alleyhouse where I slept. He stood awkward in the doorway like a nice man in the wrong place.
"It's cheap," I said. "It's enough."
He crouched and looked at the baby. "Eloise."
She batted at his long hand. He smiled, which was the first time I saw him weaken.
"We can move you to a better place," he said. "I have an empty little house. It's old but dry. Rent is a hundred a month. I can get you help moving."
"You would do that?" I asked. My throat closed with something like disbelief.
"Yes," he said. "But you help keep it up. You cook, you plant a few things. You keep it alive."
So I moved. He helped me carry my two big baskets of bean sprouts and the red coat into a quiet courtyard that smelled of jasmine and dust. He pushed in the wooden pump and water ran clean.
"You will be safer here," he said. "You will have a place where Eloise can run."
The days blurred into sameness. I sold sprouts, I cooked, I watched Eloise learn to stand. My hands stopped trembling so much. The red coat hung on a peg like a flag of a past life. The cheap bed creaked under the weight of sleep.
"I will file the papers," Atticus said. "But it will take time. Evidence, witnesses, the judge. It will be messy."
"I don't want blood," I said. "I want a legal end."
He nodded. "We'll start with what we have. Hospital records, the photographs, statements."
The court date arrived like a weather front. Atticus stood beside me like a solid thing. Elliot sat in the gallery like a brother finally choosing. The prosecution was careful. The defense from Rex's family was loud and mean. But I had proof. I had a file with hospital photographs of a split lip and swollen eyes. I had the T-shirt he had torn. I had the receipts for the medicine he refused to pay. I had nothing of money back then, but I had a story.
Rex showed up in a dark suit and a cold look. He called me slanderous names. He said he had been a provider. He accused me of lying for money. He tried to walk out like a man taking his rights.
"You think I am a liar?" he demanded in the hallway before the judge came in.
"No," Atticus said. "We think you are guilty of what she says."
He laughed. The court had more people than I expected. The gallery filled with town residents. Someone I used to serve at the market stared like she knew me as a woman, not as trouble. Cameras flashed. Phones recorded. People mouthed words. The judge banged the wood.
"Rex Martini," the judge said, and the word felt like an axe.
Rex had a look like a man who had not expected to be seen. He had been a secret cruelty, and the court brought him into the light.
The trial did not feel like the beginning. It felt like a reveal. Atticus read passages that showed patterns of violence. I kept quiet. I kept Eli—Eloise—close. Atticus showed a photo of me the night I had tried to disappear. He held it up.
"She saw her child's name in the medicine bag and chose to live," he said.
"She left," Rex sneered. "She walks off and comes back to score money."
"That is not true," Atticus said quietly. "If this case is only about money, it will end here. If it is about safety and rights, then we proceed."
Rex was arrogant until the evidence cut him like cold water. He grew pale. He tried to deny every message, every witness. He tried to charm the people in the bench. His voice went from loud to stuck.
"Rex, were you here last night?" a neighbor asked. "You came with a woman to my store. You left late. People saw you drunk."
"What about the messages?" Atticus read text messages where Rex told a lover crude things and called me a payment and asked her to wait.
"Burn!" Rex called out, lunging for the defense table. "Those are lies!"
People in the gallery gasped. Phones came up like little suns. A woman who sold eggs in the market whispered, "I had no idea. I thought she was a bad wife."
Rex's face shifted—smug to puzzled to angry.
"Wait," he said. "This is false! This is false! I am married, we have a home." He stammered.
"No," I said, louder than I meant to. "You beat me. You locked me in. You stuck your hands on my throat."
He looked at me then. He slid from heat to cold. He blinked. "She lies! She lies to make me look—"
"A lot of people have names for this," Atticus said. "Domestic violence is a crime."
The crowd leaned in. A woman in the second row stood up, trembling, and said, "My sister once told me to hold on. I should have called the law." A teenager filmed with his phone and whispered, "This will go viral."
Rex's face crumbled. The first crack was disbelief. He laughed too loud and then it slipped into denial. "This is a setup," he shouted. "She has always been ungrateful."
"Sit down!" someone in the gallery hissed. "Shut up!"
He was still proud and then suddenly he was nothing. He tried to turn and find an ally in the crowd. There were only faces with phones and eyes. People who once trusted him now watched with a new angle.
"You are a liar and a coward," one of Rex's old friends called. "You should be ashamed."
Rex took a step back. His tailored jacket shook. The words left his mouth in a new order: "I didn't—" then "Don't do this," then "Please—" and finally, "I was wrong! I was wrong! Forgive me!"
He crouched like a man expecting the floor to swallow him, and his knees gave out. He dropped to them on the hard courtroom tile, and his lips moved like a child. "Please," he said. "Please, Juniper. Please."
No one moved to help him. Cameras hummed like insects. People whispered. Some clapped. Some recorded. No one would comfort him. He was a man who had tried to own a broken person and had been exposed. He was a man who had turned small cruelties into a habit.
"Get off the floor," the judge said. "Security."
He crawled toward me like a spider, begging, but my hands were on Eloise' small belly. I looked at Rex and heard his voice like a sudden wind. He had shifted from power to rubble.
Atticus handed the judge the folder of our evidence. "We rest our case."
Outside, the market vendors clustered and debated. Phones posted and clattered. The video of Rex pleading spread like heat.
"Watch it," Atticus said softly as we left. "People will judge. People will publish. That is part of the punishment now."
"Is that what you wanted?" I asked him. I felt strange as I watched a crowd decide the fate of a man who used to cross my porch. He had been a private monster and now he was public.
"No," he said. "I wanted safety."
The crowd's reaction after the court was a strange tide. Some cheered softly. Some spat on the ground. Some recorded, some cried. A woman whispered to me in the lane, "You did the brave thing." A man who had once bought bean sprouts from me wrapped his scarf over his mouth and said, "You deserve peace."
Rex's fall had been like a tooth that had no bone to hold it. He moved through denial to collapse. He tried to pick up the old script—deny, then deflect, then accuse—and at last he begged. The crowd had watched every step and recorded it. He had turned his name into a headline.
"She will get a restraining order," Atticus said the day after. "We will make sure you and Eloise are safe."
He was right. The judge ordered Rex to stay thirty meters away. He had to attend counseling and pay fines. We also asked for the wedding money back; the judge called it a civil matter and split the difference. I did not want his money. I wanted the certainty that the law could block him.
A year after the trial I came one morning to the market and hung the red coat on the peg in our small courtyard. The coat was patched now. I had worn it through cold and worse. I nailed a small brass token to its collar so I could always find it in the dark.
Eloise danced among my legs, a little sun, and we smelled bean sprouts steaming for lunch. Customers came and went. A neighbor joked, "Juniper, your sprouts are famous now!" I smiled and handed a packet to a woman who had cried that day in court.
"You did the right thing," she said again.
"I did what I could," I said.
Atticus came sometimes, bringing a small bag with tools or a book. He helped plant a tomato seedling in the little flowerbed. Elliot came and brought bread to share. They were not a miracle, but they were a life.
One evening I tucked Eloise into bed and dusted the kitchen shelf. The red coat hung by the window like a small flag. I took it down and smoothed it with my hands.
"I don't need to wear it to be warm," I told the coat. "But I will keep it."
I closed the window and the sound of the pump wound down. Outside, the vendors shouted bargains. Bean sprouts hissed in a wok. My life was no grand story yet. I had a stall, a baby, a red coat, and a man who said he would stand by the law.
I laced the belt of the coat through my fingers and thought of everything I had left behind and everything I had chosen. My hands smelled like beans. My fingers bore tiny calluses.
In the morning I would wake and sell sprouts again. I would tuck a cloth under Eloise's chin. I would go to the courthouse if necessary. I would fight, quietly and plainly, for enough.
At night I sometimes thought of the bag I had once held at my lips—the poison. The memory stayed but it did not pull me. The child of sleep and of that bag was gone. I had chosen to live.
"If anyone wonders what saved me," I say to myself in the dark, "it was not a hero. It was a crying child and the fear of leaving her without a mother."
The red coat hangs on the peg. Bean sprouts steam in the dawn. When the market wakes, people will come and will say, "Her sprouts taste like reason." They will not know all the nights I spent awake. They will not know every bruise. They will only know that I sold good sprouts, wrapped Eloise to my chest, and one day I stood up in the court and spoke my truth.
I fold the cash into a small cloth and hide it in the seam of the coat. One day, if I need it, it will be there. For now, I go to sleep with Eloise's soft breath on my neck and the sound of the pump outside. The courtyard is small and safe. The red coat is a marker of what I refused to become again.
"You did good, Juniper," Elliot says sometimes, and for the first time his voice is only brotherly, nothing else.
"Maybe," I say. "Maybe it's enough."
The End
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