Face-Slapping16 min read
"I Walked Out of the Firewood Shed and Never Looked Back"
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"Slap!"
I remember the sound like a door shutting in my skull.
"Don't you dare mouth off," the old woman hissed, spitting words like stones. "You are cursed, you worthless thing. You will marry whether you live or die. Get her to the wood shed. Lock it."
I rubbed the burning line across my cheek and blinked up at the gray face leaning over me. Her clothes were patched and dusty. Her teeth were yellow and sharp when she smiled with cruelty.
"Who are you?" I asked even though the voice that came out wasn't mine. It felt like someone else's ribs were moving.
"You little Dalary," the old woman snapped. "You're nobody. Up you go."
Two men, rough as the countryside itself, hauled me to my feet. Their hands were heavy and familiar with breaking things. I let them push me toward the shed because it was safer than walking into a fight I couldn't win.
They shoved me inside. The stick jammed in the door from the outside. Darkness and straw. I sat on the straw and tried to make sense of the ache behind my eyes.
Three breaths in, a new memory slammed in: the hard light of a crosswalk, a van, a scream, then cold, then—another life. I had been dead. I had been Maxine Rousseau, thirty-two, living alone in a tiny city loft, running short live streams about makeup and small business hacks. A truck had taken me without warning.
Now I was sixteen with Dalary Dixon's body. I was in a northwest village in the summer of 1985. The household register in my new head told me Dalary's father had died years ago. Her mother had died before that. Her grandmother, Dorothy Bush, ruled the house like a small iron tyrant. Two uncles took what they liked. Dalary had been nothing but labor and quiet acceptance until the night they decided to sell her for six hundred yuan as bride price to a violent widower from the next valley—Goddard Duke.
I tasted the strange, fierce thing that rose up inside me: I did not belong to Dalary's debts. I was Maxine. I had lived by myself, paid bills, started businesses. I had built things online with my own hands. I would not be sold.
I waited.
Later I learned where the men had taken her: a wood shed with a single straw mattress and a door that did not lock from the inside. I learned the family routine—Dorothy's small, loud court of relatives who divided food by the inch and cruelty by the day. I learned how villagers saw it: family business, not for other people's pity.
Three days until Goddard Duke arrived to collect Dalary. Three days to vanish. Three days to take a ruined life and make it my own.
That first night I used the one advantage I had. In the past life, I had been strong—not because of fitness but because life had forced me to push. I tested my arms. The muscles were there. They felt like borrowed tools but they worked.
"Why are you awake?" a voice hissed through the door.
"Restless," I said. My voice was raw and small, yet it surprised me how steady it sounded. "It's too hot."
A hand pushed straw into the crack as if to keep me in. I slid my hand out and found the knife I had stolen from the kitchen earlier. The wood stick across the door might as well have been a wall, but wood fails if pushed little by little.
"One inch, then another," I whispered, and the pole hit the dirt floor with a small, traitorous sound.
By morning I had two sweet potatoes, cold and oily, in my pockets.
"Where are you going?" The two men in the courtyard shouted when they realized she was gone. One of them, Henri Beatty, spat the worst words at my back as I slipped through a gap in the fence: "You filthy thief! We will beat you to a pulp when we find you!"
I walked to the county center, to the big government building with the iron lock, and I saw the one paper I needed: an introduction letter. In 1985, no one left the county without it. I stole one blank and stamped something I had seen printed once in a government window. I did not know everything about official seals, but I knew how seals looked. I filled blank pages with official-sounding claims and signed a name Dalary had used. It would be enough for a trip.
I took two hundred yuan from the grandmother's money hiding place that night—Dalary had known, from silent years of service, where the corners were. I stuffed it into my blouse and went to the train station, with two sweet potatoes and a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
"Ticket to Easton City," I told the clerk. My voice did not shake.
The long ride to Easton City felt like crossing worlds. I kept my head down. I kept my hair dirty and drew darker brows with burned match soot. No one who had seen Dalary in the village would recognize her in the bustle of trains and cities.
Easton City smelled like oil and paper and money. There was food that was not salt and a market that went on forever. I ate a bowl of noodle soup like a penitent and then walked until my feet burned. I found a cheap lodging and I slept as if I had been given a second life on loan.
The market fascinated me. I picked up bags and pockets and noticed the slow patterns of what sold. Fruit vendors haggled like boxers; teachers in rumpled shirts bought packets of herbs; an old man with a stall of dried goji berries barely sold a handful each week. Goji berries. My late-night research and my old life knowledge whispered—there is always a market for something healthy. Easton University had professors who would pay for good goji. I bought a hundred and fifty jin on a guess and wrestled them on a borrowed tricycle to the station.
At the university ten minutes later, I set up a simple sign: "Darning County Goji—2 yuan a pack, two liang each." I used the old sales voice I had heard in documentaries. I practiced warmth in the mirror.
"Try these," I said to a woman in a neat blouse. "Darning goji is different. It's small and sweet."
She frowned. "Two yuan seems high."
"But it lasts," I said. "Ten seeds in the morning, ten at night. You will feel better. Professor Zhang recommends them."
"All right—I'll try one," she said and bought a pack. Then another woman bought. Then a professor bought a pound. By the end of the day, the whole hundred fifty jin was gone. I walked home lighter than I had in months, with 740 yuan in my pocket and the start of a plan.
"Why not sell cheap and fast?" my brain from Maxine asked me at night as I counted bills. "You can do better. You can brand, package, and control supply."
So I did. I bought paper and sealed small bags of goji in two-liang packs. I learned a little about the market—who liked what and how to make them want more. By the end of two weeks, I had build a small stack of money: fourteen hundred and fifty yuan after costs. Enough for a deposit and some rent in a better place.
I moved into a small three-floor apartment building on Mingqing Road. The landlady was Marianne Gerard, a woman in her forties with kind eyes and a dry laugh. Her daughter Lila Carpenter, in college, looked like someone who should not be in a shabby house but was: braided hair, quick smile, sharp eyes. They took me in for twenty-five yuan a month.
"You're very quiet," Lila said the night she showed me the room.
"Used to being quiet," I said. "Used to making something out of nothing."
"You're from the countryside?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "I am looking for my father." It was a lie. I had my own reasons to apply for residency and a certificate. "Also work."
Lila laughed. "You're ridiculous. You already look like a business person."
In the light of their small kitchen, I started another plan: hair accessories. In the eighties, fashion favored loud hair ribbons and bright clips. Big stores would quickly copy anything. But hand-made, pretty, and small-scale sold well in the university dorms if you could offer color and novelty. I needed raw materials: scrap cloth from textile factories, yarn ends from knit houses, cheap plastic clips. I needed workers.
Lila had a network: friends with sewing machines, a list of people who could pick up home-based stitching work, a connection at a small factory. I invested in two hundred jin of cloth offcuts and a hundred jin of acrylic yarn ends. Lila's old friend at the knit factory agreed to sell us yarn at a fraction of retail if we took it in small lots.
We made scrunchies—big, flouncy cloth ones—and knitted small decorative clips. We hired three workers from the street: a tired mother named Beth Boyd, a thin boy named Dax Dennis who'd left school early, and a woman named Jaelyn Omar who could finish ten clips an hour. We set prices: scrunchies five mao each, clips eight mao each, a combo two for a yuan fifty.
We sold on the university lawns and outside factories. I taught them scripts. I taught them to point to pictures of stars in magazines they had never seen: "This skirt is what actress Li Hua wore," we'd say, and hold a clip next to a picture. People bought the idea of newness and glamour, and we made a small fortune. We took orders, then went to Broadsea City (a two-day trip to the real apparel hub) to buy bulk belts and better jeans.
In three months we had three small stalls and a steady demand. The real break came when a supplier named Evert Cash, who traveled with bolts of fabric, took an interest. He offered a bulk order for a thousand hair pieces for a chain that sold to coastal towns. The deal paid me nine thousand yuan on delivery. We cleared our inventory and I sat in my small room and looked at the ledger and realized I had a business.
"Why are you telling me any of this?" Lila asked once, sitting on the edge of my bed.
"Because I once died," I told her. "Because I don't want to be sold. Because I want a roof, an identity, and a business to never go hungry again."
She touched my hand. "Then we build. Together."
We built.
Months passed. I found my rhythm. I learned to adjust product lines. I set up a small system with a neighbor, a woman named Marianne's Aunt Hazel Hernandez, who helped us arrange workers. The city was small enough that reputation mattered, and we were careful with promises. We paid promptly. We used part of profit to buy a small old house in the edge of Easton, a ragged place that people said was "too far out"—exactly what I wanted. I used the house to claim a family registry and finally change Dalary Dixon's name to Maxine Rousseau in the record. Getting identity documents was a simple triumph that felt like stealing back life.
Yet the village remained: a weight at the back of my neck. Dorothy Bush, my grandmother in Dalary's life, and Henri Beatty, my cruel uncle, believed I had been sold. Six hundred yuan. They had collected the money already to give as a bride price. Goddard Duke, the man from the other village rumored to be a killer of wives and a violent temper, was due to come to collect.
I could have let time pass. But quiet revenge is not my thing. I had learned how to sell a good story, how to put a product on a table and make it desirable. I learned that humiliation is a currency as old as the village hall. I decided to use every resource I had—my money, my new identity, and the network of people whose gratitude I had earned—to take back my life and give the people who had hurt Dalary a lesson that would not be forgotten.
I planned the punishment for three weeks.
"You're doing what?" Lila asked when I told her. She heard the fury in my voice and did not ask more.
"Bring two loudspeakers. Bring Evert Cash's truck. Bring the firebrand—old aunt Marianne's public connections. Bring a tape recorder. Bring the local radio operator. Bring everyone you can," I said. "We don't catch them in some back alley. We drag them into the light."
The wedding was set for the village hall. Five hundred people would be there—family, neighbors, even some people from the county. I paid a young reporter from Easton to come, to listen, and to write. I sent word to the train station man who owed me a favor—Dustin Eklund—who had once our saved child to thank. I called in favors and I brought money. I rented a loudspeaker truck and parked it facing the village square.
On the morning of the wedding, I returned to the village wearing the plainest dress I owned and a thin smile.
"Maxine?" Dorothy Bush's mouth fell open when she saw me. She had not expected me to return in person. She had expected to stand at the top of the hall like a queen of spite and slap a child into the next marriage.
"You shouldn't have sold me," I told her calmly.
"Sold you?" Dorothy sneered. "You ran off like a thief. Who knows where you went!"
"Who knows?" I stepped onto the small platform that led to the hall. Two speakers in the crowd began to hum at my signal. I could see Goddard Duke in the olive jacket at the front—he had a swagger and a chest that looked used to force. He smiled a cruel smile when he saw me.
"It's time to speak in front of everyone," I said. "I'd like to remind Goddard Duke what he promised when he agreed to marry a sixteen-year-old girl from this house."
Faces turned. Muffled conversations rose. I felt the heat of a hundred eyes.
"Dalary"—I said the old name slowly—"was not yours to buy. She is underage. She did not consent. This family planned to sell her for money."
Henri Beatty stamped his foot. "You can't say that! She was worthless!"
A voice came from the loudspeaker, and my reporter's tape started to play. I had spent days collecting evidence: a tape of a man from a neighboring county bragging that "the Dalary girl is just for income" recorded from a drunken brag, a written note found in Penn Cunningham's chest with calculations on how to divide the six hundred yuan, and a copy of the household register I had purchased back that showed the real status of Dalary's household.
On the recording, a rough voice said, "She is worth six hundred and a bedroll. When Duke comes, the money will pay for the year of rice." That was Henri Beatty's neighbor. People hushed.
"Turn it off!" Henri shouted.
A neighbor, one of the women who had bought goji from me months ago, pointed with a shaking hand. "You sold a child. You called her a curse. This is what you did."
Goddard Duke pushed forward. "What proof have you? This is a lie!"
"Proof," I said, and I signaled the police liaison I had arranged with Dustin Eklund to bring. Dustin stepped out of the crowd in plain clothes and held up a small notebook. He had been the man whose child had been saved months before—now he stood on my side, a big man with a voice that carried. "We checked. The girl's household register is in order now. The girl has an ID card. She is free. You cannot claim her."
Goddard laughed. "What can an ID do against tradition?"
"Tradition does not give you permission to buy people," I said. "You do not own her. You do not own any woman."
He glared. "You think you can come back here with money and make me bow? You are nothing!"
"Watch me," I said.
I asked the band to play no music. Someone in the crowd—one of the textile factory workers who owed me small favors—had brought an old cassette recorder. I played another tape, a recording of a private conversation his brother had kept by mistake where Goddard had boasted in a tavern about beating a wife into silence and how he preferred "young wives for easier control."
There was a sound like a stone dropped in a well. Goddard's face changed. He went from defiant to pale.
"You lie!" he snarled, voice cracking.
"Do you deny saying that?" I asked him. I heard the tape again: his own voice, rough and drunk, admitting it.
"Turn it off!" he rasped, but nobody turned it off. The crowd had shifted from curiosity to anger.
"Where is your sense of shame?" I asked the crowd. "You saw her as a way to get six hundred yuan. You beat her and locked her. You planned to hand her over to a man who admits to hurting women."
"Shut up!" Henri spat. He stepped forward and reached for me. His hand landed on my shoulder.
I twisted, faster than he expected, and pushed him back. He stumbled and hit a bench. People gasped.
"Hands off!" someone cried.
I had asked my friends to be ready. Lila held up a stack of my goji flyers and waved them like banners. Penn Cunningham's sons, the weak ones who had always been afraid of their mother, stood on the edge of the crowd looking uncomfortable but not brave. The real power was not in fists—it was in shame and witnesses.
I pointed to the county clerk who had come with me. He was an old acquaintance from a goji sale who owed me small favors. He read aloud the household account I had paid him to copy. He read the note where money division had been written.
"What you did was criminal before it was custom," I said. "You tried to sell a child against law and against conscience. You tried to send her to a brutal life for the price of rice. Now stand and admit it."
Henri's face turned red, then grey. He looked at Dorothy, then at the gathered neighbors who had started murmuring and whispering—neighbors who had once passed by Dalary taking wood, never stopping. The faces in the crowd had shifted. I saw children who had been scared in their small beds, teenagers who had bought my hair clips and now looked at their elders with sudden new eyes, the mayor's assistant who had come to see the spectacle, his jaw tight.
Goddard tried to laugh. "This is nonsense. You're a city girl now. You bring your tricks from the city."
"These are tricks," I answered quietly. "Tricks are how we protect ourselves. I tricked him into showing his true voice because that voice will follow him now."
He moved to the stage where a red cloth had been set for the ceremony. Wedding ribbons floated down the road. Many in the crowd had brought cameras—Polaroids now common. Hands raised. The cameras clicked. Faces were recorded.
"Get down!" I said.
Goddard's body stiffened. He understood what I meant. The crowd, hungry for the spectacle of bad people finally being called out, urged him on. "Get down!" they shouted.
He balked. Pride is sticky. Then he fell—first a stumbling drop, then to his knees on the dirty platform. The red of the wedding cloth stuck to his jacket like confetti.
"Please," he said, and the word tore at the air. "Please—I'll get money. I'll pay. Forgive me. Forgive me."
There it was: the change. The swagger dissolved. He curled his hands and pressed them together like a man in a church.
"Forgive you?" Dorothy's voice was a cracked laugh. She had taught cruelty all her life and now watched a man reduced to pleading. "You mean you want me to forgive you for buying and breaking a child? You want the people to forget what you said?"
People began to shout. Some spit. Others started a slow clap that wasn't praise but condemnation. A boy from the back—the nephew of the man who had been promised Dalary—spat in Goddard's direction. An old woman slapped a palm to her forehead and wept.
Goddard begged louder. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I swear I'll give you more rice! I swear I'll—"
"Get up!" I said. "Get up, and confess in public what you plotted."
He looked like a man drowning. He bowed so low his forehead touched the red cloth. The crowd hissed. A neighbor filmed with a small movie camera. The mayor's assistant shook his head and told his aide to note the incident for the records. Someone shouted for the police, but I held up my hand.
"Let them be punished by the people first," I said.
Henri beat his chest, then his face collapsed. "I—I didn't think—she was just a mouth to feed. We needed the money." His voice became small and high. "I was wrong. I was wrong."
"Apologize," shouted a woman whose sister had been abused by Henri years ago. "Apologize!"
Henri stumbled forward. He dropped to his knees, his chest heaving, the same place Goddard had bowed. "I am sorry. Forgive me." The words came out raw and useless.
People began to gather and throw insults—old, hot insults about traitors and thieves and lowness. Polaroids flashed. The scene was not clean justice; it was messy and human. They screamed and wept and warned and cursed. Doors opened across the square and women shouted out windows, "How dare you."
I watched the change in Dororthy Bush's face. She had been a tyrant for thirty years. People had feared her. Now she found herself watched. Her mouth gaped like fish out of water. For the first time, villagers turned their backs.
Goddard broke. He pressed his face to the wooden boards and wailed.
"Please," he begged again. "Please stop. I will leave. I will leave with nothing."
"Leave," the crowd shouted. "Go away and never come back."
He crawled off the platform like a thing with too many legs and ran down the lane. Some people laughed. Others spat. A few threw mud at his back.
He left with his reputation in shreds. People would greet him in markets with cold eyes and the children would sing the rhyme: "There goes Duke who loved to hurt." His mother would receive whispers. He would not get married with honor. He had nothing left but a name mired in shame.
That day, the tape ran and the town talked. Word spread to the county. A reporter from Easton sent back an article. I had made sure of it. The humiliation was not legal punishment; it was social death. It stung worse than a jail cell might. Bad men had been reduced to begging and fleeing. The family that planned to sell me had been stripped of their power. The old community gossip turned into a weapon.
I had wanted them to kneel and beg. They had done it.
"Now," I said afterward, standing on the same boards with my chest sore from the adrenaline. "Put these things back where they belong."
Someone—Marianne Gerard's aunt—brought forward the small chest in which Dorothy had hidden records and money. I pulled out the household register and my old reasons for leaving. I handed Penn Cunningham a written demand: the six hundred yuan, returned to my pocket, paid plus interest. He swallowed and paid in front of the people. I made them come to court if they wanted more. I made them publicly give the money back.
There was no one moment of heroics. There was no single knockdown blow. There was the slow turning of a town, the seeing of a truth that had been muffled by fear.
That afternoon, children following each other through the square chanted, "No selling girls! No buying girls!"
The next week, the market sold more of my goji than ever. People came to my stall and thanked me. Some cried in my hands. Lila tied a scarf around my neck and said, "You did it."
"Not for me," I said. "For Dalary."
Later, the county party office arranged a quiet hearing. The authorities insisted on procedure. They couldn't arrest them for everything—culture and law had their limits in 1985—but everything that could be done was done. They fined the household. They warned Goddard to leave the county for a time. He was banned from receiving new brides in the official channels. Practical consequences followed social humiliation.
Months after, when I walked past the village square, people nodded but kept their distance. Power shifts slowly. But the sight of Henri Beatty's sons working humbly in the fields, of Dorothy Bush's quick mouth falling silent, of Goddard Duke's shadow shrinking by the roadside—those things were proof I had not simply left; I had reclaimed.
And I kept building.
I bought the old house in Easton and turned it into a tiny garment shop. I hired more women who had been left with nothing. I gave jobs to those who had learned to stitch under my hand. I opened a small storefront—Maxine's—which sold clothes, accessories, and, oddly enough, jars of goji.
We got better. We got smarter. We made mistakes. We paid for those mistakes and learned.
People came and asked about me. I told the story once, carefully. Later, a journalist in Coastal City ran a small piece on "The Girl Who Sold Scrunchies." It was a tiny thing, but it put a face on a woman who had been sold and refused.
Months later I sat in my small office, listening to Lila talk about classes at the university, and I pulled out the small photograph I kept folded in a drawer. It was a Polaroid a stranger had taken at the village punishment—my face narrow and hard that day, the crowd behind me, Goddard on the ground.
"Do you ever think about going back?" Lila asked.
"I go back sometimes," I said. "To check the registers. To see the house. But mostly I look forward."
"There was a man in the paper who said you were cruel," she said softly. "He thinks it's shame to make men beg."
"People will always talk," I answered. "But those men knew what shame meant after that day. Shame can be a safeguard for others."
We looked at each other and laughed—a small sound that meant survival.
I am Maxine Rousseau now on paper and in the market. I keep a picture of Dalary folded inside a book. She was worth more than six hundred yuan. She was worth a life.
I tell this story not to brag, but because the first time someone tried to make me a thing to sell, I refused. I walked out of the wood shed with two sweet potatoes in my pocket and an old knife. I walked into a strange city and made a business. I taught women to stitch and men to sell. I learned who favored honesty and who favored a strong voice.
The last retribution was not a legal sentence but something else: the public breaking of those who would sell girls like produce. They knelt on my terms, not because I wanted to watch the broke and beaten, but because they needed to see what their cruelty would bring. The villagers needed to remember.
When life gave me the strange generosity of a second chance, I took it with both hands. I will not be sold again.
The End
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