Rebirth14 min read
I woke up in a cradle and remembered the lab
ButterPicks16 views
I woke to a smell like wet clay and old oil, and a hand like a burl of tree bark groping my cheek.
"She's got good skin," a woman's voice rumbled at the foot of the bed. "Pretty face. Shame about the frame—no shape to her at all. Nobody'll pay for a lump like that."
"Don't talk like that!" a second voice hissed, wheedling. "Look at her, Gregory—white as milk. If you ask me, she'll fetch more. Five taels is kind."
"Five taels," muttered a third, younger voice. "I'll give five and a half if you sell her to me."
I tried to scream and my mouth answered only with the taste of iron. My head banged like something locked in a mortar. For a breathless moment I only had impressions: the mold of a dark room, red wood furniture carved in circles, a line of sun through a lattice window—I had been sleeping eighteen hours straight after a marathon in the lab. I had been counting enzyme batches, calibrating incubators, pushing one more trial until success tasted like air. How did I end up under braids and rags and hands that felt like they'd fixed ploughs?
"She's awake," the wheedling voice said suddenly, delighted. "Why didn't you say so, girlie? Speak up. Speak."
My eyes were small black beads in a child's face. My fingers were the size of twigs. Somewhere a clock ticked habitually and I mouthed the lab's formulas and reagent names and felt them drifting like bright beads I could not reach. I had a new account of my body and a baffling, native will that resisted me: three years of disuse had turned limbs into soft clay.
I pushed. It took a full minute to roll, two minutes to haul legs to the floor, and all the time the old woman and the thin young man argued like wolves over a kitchen peel.
"That's my offer," the thin man said. "Five taels. Take it or leave it."
"Five taels," the old woman crowed. "All mine. You'll get beef for a month."
I crawled like a turtle and found the door. Wood, earth, the smell of smoke. My mind—Anastasia Pedersen's mind—raced. I had been Anastasia Pedersen, a postdoc in plant pharmacology. I knew fungi like old friends. The field notebook in my head sang names, Latin and modern: Agaricus, Ganoderma, the nasty little Amanita with its red cap and white stem—the song from a childish rhyme bloomed from some residue of the borrowed body: "red cap, white stem; eat and you lie upon the planks..." My stomach dropped. I had crawled into a body whose family, apparently, had planned to sell it off.
I didn't have time to think like a scientist. Survival came first.
"Five and a half and I walk with it now," I heard the thin man bargain, a lisp in his tone I had seen in male postdocs during presentations: too smooth by half. He had a farmer's green robe and a belly that pushed at the fabric. He looked like a greedy insect. He smelled of rice wine.
"Grab her, then." The old woman shoved forward and the man lunged. I swung, with all the body's animal cunning. My small hands snatched a money bag from the sill—pure instinct, muscle memory from a stranger's life—and tucked the coins under my ragged top. There was the bright, bright flash of a plan in me: if someone wanted to sell me, I'd sell them options instead. I crawled back into the shadow.
"She took it!" the young boys at the doorway cried. Two thin children—Jaxon Roux and Grayson Beck—were flying in, cheeks smeared with dirt. "Heart—where are you, Heart?"
"Heart?" someone repeated, indulgent.
"Heart." Gregory Castillo—my so-called father—came in slow and stern. He had thick shoulders and a face that rarely smiled. He looked at me with something like a puzzled ocean. In the next instant, everything spun: the house erupted. An old leader came. Voices pooled. The old woman's face brainlessly turned to bluster and then slithered into fear. I watched them argue, hands and faces and the old woman's bargain and the young man's wheedle—the thing that always intrigued me about people: when the world treated them as currency, some people learned to be cruel.
"She's my child," Amelia Dubois—my supposed mother—said at some point, voice brimming with a tenderness I recognized and longed for. The house smelled of steamed eggs and the hum of boiling water. They were pretending, and I clung to the pretending like a raft. I had a choice: run toward the road into uncertain death, or stay and learn the lines of this life.
So I stayed.
The next hours were a jumble of tongues and actions. I did something childish and dangerous: I found a wild mushroom patch outside the yard. My adult knowledge jammed against toddler motor skills and, in three clumsy motions, I pulled one pretty, white-stemmed, red-capped mushroom—Amanita muscaria—into a kettle. I had to be careful; if I offered it to them it would be murder. I wasn't killing anyone. I only wanted the spectacle.
The old woman and the thin man argued more loudly. "Do it," he said. "We take her to the market and—"
"To the house of ill repute?" Amelia's eyes flashed. "I won't have my child—"
"Your child? They say she can't speak. She'll fetch two taels at best."
"Two taels? You think my girl is two taels—"
"I say five! Five and a half for a pretty face."
Uncle Bodhi Larson—my small family's parasite, a man with a forever-swinging belly—smirked. "You keep arguing and I'll take the silver and the child. No? Fine."
It is a fine line between mercy and fury. I slipped from shadow, fetched the money bag I'd hidden, and stuffed the whole into my little bellyband. I did what my other life would have called 'triage': I cut a red mushroom cap—only the cap—and tossed it into the kettle. It steamed. The old woman's face went from avarice to suspicion—she hated the smell—but she drank the tea anyway as a favor to the thin man. They all argued and laughed and paid the contract. Then, as if a stage importance had changed, Uncle Bodhi suddenly fell to the floor and mimicked a baby: he flailed and wailed, and the old woman melted. They hugged. The house became a farce.
When the crowd spilled to the yard in outrage—"They're selling the child!"—no one saw me quietly sliding coins into my pocket and stuffing the small important things into my waist. I climbed onto a stool, reached the altar, and palmed tiny silver pieces. The dance of cunning had become automatic.
Later, I watched the two-headed bargain flip. They had counted coins on a plank, shaken hands, and then the old man's face blurred. It started as a trick—an act. It turned into an absolute farce when people began to see it. The crowd laughed; the old woman sobbed to the sky like a goat. I was a child saved by chaos. I had the village's charity that night because Jaxon and Grayson called my name and the old leader, the one who handled family decisions, made my house their concern.
Days passed, and I learned the rules of this body. "Heart" had been apparently sickly her whole life. Yet when I cared to look, the villagers kept telling the story a different way: that I had been loved, folded into quilts and coaxed with steamed eggs. I felt their hands and their pity and the sweet teeth of their kindness, and I kept to myself a vow: I would not let them sell me.
"You're not well," Aunt Vera Brandt—my grandmother in the story—said once with a sigh and immediate irritation. Vera Brandt was a woman who kept her claws hidden, until the right moments. She had been the knuckled negotiator over my fate. She had a voice that could peel hides. My adult blood burned with an old, icy plan: I would make sure she could never shame us.
We were poor and proud and hungry, and then the earth blinked for us. I found it by accident: in the hollow under an old tree there was a soft, strange, fleshy growth. It looked like meat gone wrong—greyish-brown, fungal, luminous at the edges. It moved faintly. My scientific brain, soaring absurdly inside a three-year-old's body, named it in a whisper: a living Ganoderma, the fabled "taisuì"—the emperor's fungus, the thing of legend. In old books it was given impossible properties—lore about longevity and restoration. In the practical world, it sold for more than a season of harvests. The village would fight over it, and if I handed it to someone, I would hand them power.
I told no one. I dug around the root with two brothers and the twins who thought little but ran a mile for anything shiny. When we dug it up, it was whole: a heavy, living thing, half fungus and half tree knot. We lifted it like a small animal. Men and women crowded, eyes greedy. I felt both terror and the slow joy of someone who understood value like a code.
"Did you find it?" Old Leader asked when he saw it laid on the yard's stones. "Whose land?"
Gregory Castillo said nothing at first. He was used to being kind like a dull bell. Then he performed one of those adult acts I had admired since being a child: he called the elders. We had enough honor.
At the village threshing floor, the meeting became a patchwork of counsel and claim. The elders—stone-faced and ready to pounce—discussed charitably. "We could sell it," one said. "We could carve it and share. If the officials take notice—"
Gregory said quietly, "It's found on an old family yard. We found it while we live here." He looked to the elders and did something smarter than lying: he offered fairness.
"The village put roofs on them when they needed shelter." the old leader replied. "We will give the family a share. We will ask the apothecary. We will be just."
In practice, what they called "just" meant cash and contract. We packed the great living thing into a cart and took it to the county's largest apothecary. I stood at the edge of the cart and watched my little hands handle the coin I had never seen in such numbers. They sold the thing and, through bartered negotiation and a show of Gregory's quiet bargaining, the village took most of the coin and handed us a measured share.
I learned something useful then: when a village sees its fortune, its small soul relaxes. People who had laughed at my body now offered blankets. The old leader said quietly he had arranged for our family to have a patch of land taken from the communal holdings; we would plant. "You will have a house, Gregory," he said to my father. "You deserve some peace."
It should have been a soft success. Instead, the memory of the old woman's greed and my uncle's parasite-belly did not fade; it ripened.
Rumors are the weather of a village; they gather and pour. A day came when the old woman and my uncle attempted to return to their old positions—Vera Brandt with her stinging words and Bodhi Larson with his oily whine. They tried to refuse the sentence of exile. They wanted pay, and they wanted a place at our table. The elders had put their names out of the family records; in this village that is a blade.
I had been quiet for weeks, learning how to speak the short, sweet words my little body could manage. I watched and learned the angles of people's faces when they lied or begged. I kept the habit of taking notes in the small mental register of my other life. And I learned the desire for honest justice. When a person harms a community, what they suffered had to be seen.
The punishment was to be public.
"Vera," the old leader said to the gathered crowd, his voice not loud but like a stone rolled down a hill. "You sold your grandson's daughter. You tried to sell the child of the family you should have cared for. You took money and secretly argued. You will stand."
The crowd parted like water. "She sold her own blood," someone spat. "To the house of shame."
Vera's face folded from outrage into a hard mask. Bodhi's belly clenched. "You have no authority to do this," he said, trying to wheedle. "You must be ashamed of perpetuating gossip—"
"I am the head," the leader said. "This is a family matter in front of the clan. You will be shamed as you shamed others, according to the old ways."
They made them climb the raised threshing platform in the center of the village—the place where decisions were declared. I sat on my father's knee and watched like a scientist watching an experiment explode.
First, they called forward those whose goods the old woman had long cheated: women who had sown seed and had their grain shorted, men who promised help and received a lie. One by one they came up and told a short tale: how the woman withheld flour, how she lied to make money, how she forced young mouths to go hungry. Bodhi's lies were remembered in particular—how he had taken his own share of meat and left others with bones.
"She sold my cousin's child," a woman began, voice shaking, "and told a lie about the money. They took what we earned." Men nodded. Children whispered. The sun cut the lines in their faces.
Then came the ritualized part. They made Vera stand in front of everyone with the contract she had used to bargain—someone had brought it forth in a leather-fold. They unrolled it like a map of shame and read her name on it out loud. "Vera Brandt," the elder read, "you signed to sell your granddaughter."
"You lie!" she screamed, but the crowd had memory and a kind of hunger for rectitude. That is a thing as old as law. She tried to twist the words like a snake, spinning regret—"I was poor!"—but the elders had already lined the witnesses. The thin, pale men who had bought a favor from her that day stepped up and spoke of the bargaining and the false-baby act. Bodhi, faced with his own words, started with denial—"I was joking"—and then slid to pleading—"My belly, my house"—and the tone changed under the sun: he looked smaller than he had in years. It was an incantation of diminishing.
"Show us your face," another woman said. "Look at those you will meet every day. Hear them speak."
They had them stand, and then called the women to speak how such acts would dishonor generations. "Your name will be spoken to warn," one elder intoned. "You shall be marked by the village."
They performed small acts that tore at dignity: they removed Vera's apron—the badge of her matronhood—and handed it to a woman she'd mistreated, who spat into it and returned it. They took Bodhi's wine-stained robe and ripped a strip from the hem—the symbol that his comfort would be cut. They made them hold the contract as they walked a circuit around the threshing floor while villagers chanted the acts they had committed: sold child, stole grain, lied, cheated. The sound rose into a collective roar.
"Look at them! This is the face of those who sell their own," a woman cried, and someone from the crowd held up a small hand-made placard listing the offenses. The old leader's face was expressionless. He had decided this as prudence, not vengeance. The villagers were hungry for that show. They would not let evil hide. They wanted to see it undone.
Bodhi's face changed first: from insolence to the flush of denial—"You don't know—"—then to panic. His mouth worked. He tried to rip the strip back, to regain his robe. He said, "This is an unjust—"
"No," the village said in a chorus. "You are unjust." He faltered. Then came the last stage—collapse. He fell to his knees, and then, in an absurd, scarcely believable moment, he began to beg.
"Please! Please!" he croaked. "My mother! I am sorry. I—"
The crowd turned like reeds. Many had children and had felt the small tender fury of being cheated. Someone spat. A dozen hands reached to push him away. His wife—if she were still there—could not answer. The woman he had tried to sell in his greed had been given refuge. He had nothing.
Vera's face, which had been a horseshoe of rage, softened into something like a choked whine. She tried to use her old trick—induce pity. "I am old," she cackled. "I am hungry. We were desperate." But the tide was against her. "You used the child's name like a loom to weave your misdeeds," another voice said. "You do not get the privilege of hiding."
They made them distribute work as restitution. For a month, every dawn they were made to wash the pots for those they'd exploited, to gather leavings, to carry water. The village watched how their roles shrank. But the worst was not work: the worst was exposure.
They made them stand, each morning, at the boundary road where people came into the village and read aloud what they'd done while villagers pointed. Children jeered. Women made a point of refusing to share the soup pot when they passed. The old leader forbade them from joining any festival or market. "You will not be seen at weddings, nor have any favor from us," he pronounced.
The shape of their reaction was classical: first pride—"I do not care what they think"—then brittle laughter, then the sharp denial and indignation, then sheer fear when no one opened their doors. Bodhi, who had once thought himself clever, began to tremble. He would pass the market stalls and the sellers would lower their heads. He tried to bargain again; a dozen women publicly refused to sell to him. Finally, he begged forgiveness. "I will leave," he said hoarsely. "I will not be near you." The villagers watched him go and, as he passed, a child broke from the crowd and snatched a coin from his hand and ran off with a scream of laughter. He had become the joke.
Vera Brandt did worse. One day she stood in front of the altar and a young mother, whom Vera had cheated, spit in her face. The old woman staggered and then dropped to her knees, and the knot of her dignity unspooled. She started crying like she had never had to cry—but it was a weak, animal sound. She tried to bargain for a second sentence: "Give me the rest of their silver," she gasped. She sought to bribe with false tears. The crowd—those whose unrequited labor she had stolen—would not relent. The public humiliation was not a brief thing; it lasted weeks. She went from bravado to pleading to shameless bargaining, and then to absolute collapse. On the threshing platform she wept, and people, many of whom had known her pride, stood with faces like stone.
Some in the crowd took photos on small wooden frames—no, they simply watched—because our era did not have instant things. They pointed, they shook their heads, they clapped when the old leader said, "Let this be a teaching." Children who had once been jealous of my warm lap now stared with the same blankness. A few called out, "We won't let you back." Others took pity and whispered, "It's gone too far." The elders, though, were focused: they wanted to cleanse the village of future slights.
I watched every shift in their faces, the way a guilty person shrinks when the sun finds them. I felt my small heart stitch up inside me. I wanted vengeance less than I wanted justice: I wanted them to understand the scale of harm when someone treats a child like a thing to be exchanged. They did understand. They saw.
After the weeks of punishment, there was a silence where their voices had been. The old leader decreed, "They may live, but they will be strangers." They left the village borders under watch. Bodhi's belly flattened; Vera's apron never returned to shining order. They had been stripped of ease and left to the hard edges of living.
There is a certain sweetness in an ending like that: not the cruelty of revenge, but the clarity of consequence.
Life shifted.
We bought land. We made a home. We used our share of the fungus money—Gregory, with hands like a steady plough, took our sixteen taels and promised a proper plot. The elders gave his family a long lease on a spare lot—he would be the householder. We bought clay bricks and an axe and a forge in town. I learned to carry wood; the little feet that at first could barely stand became solid. I learned to move like a child whose body had a mind of its own—dangerous, but also immensely alive.
Little joys were everywhere. Amelia taught me how to braid my hair; the brothers taught me to climb low trees, and Jaxon and Grayson would race me and then claim that I had "cheated." I discovered bread fried in oil and the electric joy of a simple sweet cake. I found friends who would shield me from sneers. I learned, too, to hide my other life: the names of compounds and lines of genetic sequences remained like a secret map in my mind.
At night I would sit on the roof of the new lean-to and practice pronunciations—Anastasia's long words squeezed into a small child's mouth. The village grew used to my small adult mind disguised as a child. They confided in me things they would not tell outsiders. "How are you so quiet and old at once?" one woman asked.
"I'm a good listener," I said.
I began to make small medicines from leaves. I boiled stonewort and made cooled infusions, adding tiny bits of crushed mycelium we had saved. Old men claimed the broth warmed them; the cough eased. People smiled. My small hands did good.
I never forgot the red cap song—the foolish rhyme that had once crawled in my borrowed child's head: "Red cap, white stalk—eat and lie upon the planks." I hummed it sometimes to remember how close a life of trade and desperation had almost taken me.
The months stitched into seasons. The new house rose into a proper lean, and Gregory—quiet, stern—moved in with us like a rock. Amelia's cheeks grew softer with ease. The children learned to fight less and to cook more. The twins Jaxon and Grayson taught me a secret route through a thicket where I found herbs, and when I found the red-spotted mushroom again I did not pick it; I left it as a lesson.
Once, standing in the dusk with my hair braided into two small shoots that Amelia tied like beans, Gregory leaned down and let me climb onto his shoulder. "Heart," he said softly—he knew I could speak more than the village realized—"you are our little stubborn thing. You belong."
"I belong here," I answered, in a voice that was now a patchwork of two lives.
He smiled. "Good."
At night, I keep the coins folded into a small cloth. I keep a scrap of the contract that once threatened my life. I keep a tiny red cap of a mushroom as a token—both of danger and of the strange luck that had saved me. I am Anastasia in a child's body, and I am, unapologetically, the family's heart. I call myself Heart because the village does and because the name is honest.
I learned how to be small and big all at once. I learned to protect, to bargain, to forgive when necessary and punish when justice was required.
Sometimes, in the quiet, I hum the nursery rhyme that my younger brain sometimes remembered wrong, and I add a little line of my own: "Red cap, white stalk—leave it; we plant instead." The line fits us now. We planted on the new land a row of seed, and when those seedlings rose they held the memory in their leaves: that we had saved ourselves by being clever and kind.
And every night: I wind my small braided hair between my fingers—two tiny bean braids that Amelia tied for me—and I feel like a child, completely and utterly, which is the most honest kind of life I have ever had.
The End
— Thank you for reading —