Rebirth12 min read
I Woke Up Twice and Stole My Luck Back
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up on the kang, cold sweat soaking my hair, shouting a word that tasted like glass.
“No!”
I sat bolt upright. My chest heaved. My palm went to my face and came away wet. Tears. Real tears.
“It was just a dream,” I told myself, but my voice sounded thin. The river had taken them in my dream—my parents swept away by a sudden rise of water. At the funeral the paper burned wrong and the whole house caught and my three brothers were inside. I had screamed; I had been dragged back. I had watched the flames swallow them.
“I killed them,” my mind said. “You did.”
My life had been one small humiliation after another. Falling into ditches, birds on my head, choking on water, failing in exams no matter how hard I tried. Seven weddings called off. Every young man I was promised walked to my cousin and fell in love with her instead. Everyone called me unlucky and worse—an omen.
I closed my eyes and counted the dream again, trying to catalogue the exact order, because if dreams were a map, I could change the path.
“Pascal will quit, ask for the betrothal money back, and take compensation they can't afford,” I said aloud, because I could see the exact moment: Pascal Salazar smoothing his collar, faking outrage, leaving us with the legal and social ruin my parents couldn’t survive.
“Not this time,” I promised, gripping the quilt so tight the threads dug into my fingers. “I will stop it.”
The courtyard door banged open and a sharp voice cut into the morning air.
“Cassandra! Are you home? Come out!”
Pascal Salazar’s voice was oily and practiced. My mother, Katherine Snyder, forced a smile though coughing shook her chest. She put a palm to her throat and still called out, “Bring your feet in, don't stand outside.”
I moved like a puppet: down from the kang, straightening my patched skirt. My heart had already made up its mind: I would choose the moment, not let someone else decide who I cost and who I saved.
He stood in the yard with that look men give people they are about to discard. “Why the delay?” Pascal said. He glanced at the faces gathered along the path—neighbors and busybodies who always came when a Lin family engagement stumbled. Every time I had been called a jinx, they came to see the show.
My voice came out calm because I wanted to be the first to strike. “Pascal, I want to break the engagement.”
Gasps scattered. People turned like wind-driven flags.
“You want to what?” Pascal barked, because the default had always been that men did the refusing, not women who’d been kicked aside seven times.
“You quit,” I said, “and you take your payment back, and you keep whatever you got. I’m the one letting you go, not the other way around.”
He sputtered. “You—how dare you! I left work for your sake—”
“You left to play a game you planned,” I said. I looked straight at him. “You always had a plan. You quit to get money out of them. You liked the arrangement.”
Every eye slid from me to him. Some smirks found their way into the crowd. Pascal’s mouth opened, closed, opened. Embarrassment flushed his neck.
“You’ll not get a cent back,” I went on. “I’m keeping the deposit for my mother’s medicine, as is right.”
“You—” His voice went small. “You can’t—”
“You know,” my mother said, steadier than she looked, “we were worried you would cause my family trouble. We were right to watch.”
Pascal’s face went through the stages: incredulous, angered, humiliated. He tried to recover by pleading—no, by lying. “It was for her benefit. It was her messing with me!”
I leaned forward. “You prefer my cousin Chloe Simmons, don’t you?”
That name alone was a vote of poison. Chloe, who walked like money and smelled like perfume. Chloe who wore new dresses and took other people's promises as if they were her due.
Chloe’s face went white. The hush pressed in.
“You always take what you want, don’t you?” I said. “You accept gifts. You smile at men as though they are theirs already.”
My hand went into the pocket of the linen dress where I kept the tiny, ridiculous things I used as markers. When I pulled out the sleeve Pascal had given me once—an embroidered stitch I’d marked on all my clothes—I held it up. “See this stitch? All my clothes have it. Your sister’s gift had the same stitch.”
Chloe’s fingers flew to her chest. “No—” she tried.
“Should we check the pocket?” I asked.
There was a rustle, a shameful tug. My mother and I unbuttoned and turned garments to show the crowd. The proof was there, bright as a lie.
“You are not my sister,” Pascal tried to say, but he had no script left.
“Take your money and go,” I said. “And don’t come back.”
He bowed like a beaten dog and left with a hush that tasted like vinegar. The crowd scattered, mutters following him. Chloe’s face was the color of mud. She fled, and the sound of her heels meant nothing but the relief that the first danger was averted.
Later, alone in my room, the house smelled of boiled millet and old wood. I thought of the small round child who had bounced into me that morning—my future son's voice, bright and impatient.
“Mom,” he had said, full of mischief even as he told me what I needed to do. “You must have his baby. The stars are fixed. If you don’t—” his face crumpled with worry, “I can’t be born.”
I had laughed because my head and my heart refused to take that leap. “Who is he?”
“Jackson Day,” the child said, naming the farm manager as if it were the simplest thing. “He’s the one. Take him and have me, and everything will change.”
At the time, I wanted to tuck my face under a quilt and never breathe a desire. Even now, the idea was raw as a wound. But the child’s urgency lived in me. If a life hung by such a hair, I would act.
A trip to the 813 farm—the place everyone whispered about like a legend—changed everything. The gatekeeper, Finbar Peters, froze when he heard me say Jackson Day’s name, then turned into a great man of welcome.
“You’re here for the field manager?” he asked gruffly, grinning in a way that comforted my nervousness.
“Yes,” I said, and my knees felt like they might leave me. The place smelled of earth and steam and iron. The kitchen smoke rose like a promise.
Inside, the office door opened and his eyes—dark, sharp, tired—found me as if they had been waiting.
“You came,” he said, and his voice pulled something out of me like a hand on a string.
“I—” I stammered, my face hot. “I wanted to say thank you. For the other day. For standing up.”
“What other day?” He was measured, cautious.
“For what you did.” I told him everything—the men who’d tried to punch me down in the kitchen, the pots of salt that had been switched, the way the angry ones had made my life smaller for the sake of jokes. He listened, quietly, the weight in his silence like wood on a fire.
“For being honest,” I added. “For giving me a chance.”
Jackson—Jackson Day—actually softened. “You earn more by working than by complaining,” he said. “Do what you do well. Work with your hands. Work with your heart.”
He did more than give me a job. He made it impossible for those men to break me again. He introduced me to the food team. He walked into the mess hall as if he owned my confidence, and the men parted like reeds; even the smirks fell to the floor. He insisted that the test for the kitchen be fair, and when a group of men tried to rig it, he set the rules so clear the cheaters were exposed.
They punished the four who had put salt in the wrong pots. King Palmer—the town secretary sent to watch what happened—posted a notice that morning that made our whole farm hum with energy. The four men were removed, publicly declared incompetent, and I watched them go from puffed-up egos to hollow apologies. The farm was small; “never again” tasted like a bell.
Not everyone was so easily dismissed. Chloe Simmons had a knack for cruelty like some people have for sewing; she wore charm like a weapon. She had been living off the luck that once belonged to me—my gifts, my betrothed—like a thief in daylight. I had to make her fall, but not with whispers. She needed a spectacle.
It happened at the field meeting when all the farmers gathered for the seed countdown. The whole village stood listening. Chloe strutted in, bright in red, expecting to be the centerpiece. I arrived with my apron still smelling of steam, and the crowd craned, because Jackson Day walked in beside me.
“You two are close?” someone whispered. The whispers became a kind of wind that fed the trap.
I arranged for proof. The embroidered mark—the tiny smile I had stitched into every hem of my clothing—presented itself as evidence later that day. I had found a small mended sleeve in Chloe’s drawer left in her mother’s house a week earlier. The pattern matched mine. Then I had someone I trusted to watch and to note: Chloe took more calls than any decent girl should take; Pascal’s attentions had been redirected long before his departure. The farm meeting was where stories are cemented, and I had wood and nails enough to build a causeway.
“That woman took my clothes, my marks, my men,” I said aloud at the meeting. I spoke the way I learned to speak—plain, with the edge of the mountain in it.
“Is it true?” a voice asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Chloe took the stitches I made when I was twelve and sold them as if they were her own.”
I walked into the center. “Where is your evidence?” she demanded, but she had no shield now—the embroidered sleeve lay in my hand like a small, accusing heart.
“You left me no choice,” I told the whole crowd. “You took things you had no right to take.”
Her face went through a long, slow collapse. First came shock. “You can’t—” she tried.
“Explain yourself,” Jackson said. His voice was even, but there was a steel in it. Around us, people leaned forward until their chins almost fell into their bowls.
Chloe had been the sort of woman who smiled at men and took their favors as though they were owed to her by fate. Now she stood in the center of the field with the smell of turned earth and compost and witness around her. The crowd's breath sharpened into interest.
“Explain what?” she asked, and the bravado had nowhere to go. Her eyes flicked, hunted for allies, found none.
Jackson took a step forward. “You have hurt many families with your games,” he said. “This ends now.”
At that instant, a small accident seemed almost divine. Someone behind her startled a stray ox, and in the scatter, her heel slipped—a perfectly real, perfectly human instant. She tumbled into the roadside slurry of the compost pit, a splash that sounded obscene in the quiet, and for a moment every eye turned to her as if to drink a public spectacle.
She clawed herself up, repulsed and furious, and the nearest women turned away their faces in disgust. The field was loud with instant moral calculation—some could not hide their glee at the fall, others felt a small shame at the appetite of the crowd, but the result was public and unmistakable: Chloe was humiliated. Her clothes ruined; her perfume nothing now but slick; her dignity gone.
But humiliation alone is not justice. I wanted her to understand loss in a way she had never understood it—loss of power, loss of the easy favor that had been her currency. I walked to the podium and told the crowd the sequence: the gifts on her lap that matched the pattern on my stitch, the calls at night, the men who had been led away. I told them how my family had been undone by those who took what is not theirs.
Chloe’s reaction moved across the scale I had practiced watching in other people: denial, thin sarcasm, shivering anger, a sudden attempt at explanation, and then collapse. “You lied,” she said, voice high. “You set me up.”
“You lost your right to speak for yourself when you valued your gain above someone else’s life,” I said. “You made choices.”
The crowd made a decision. They would not take her word again. She lost her job at the health station. The patient folk of the village cannot be told easily; they waited for a spectacle and then arranged for consequences. Her employers were asked—politely—if their clinic wanted a person who had preyed on the goodwill of neighbors. They chose to avoid scandal by letting her go.
That public expulsion was the first punishment: the drying up of social favor. Then came the second layer—her former admirers peeled away like rotten fruit. Men who had once offered small tokens of affection found it less interesting to be seen with a woman who had been thrown into the compost pit of public opinion. Invitations were not given. Offers were withdrawn. She found herself at the edge of porches watching families who had once courted her attention turn their heads.
Chloe’s reaction moved in real-time: first astonishment—her mouth opening, not understanding that favors could be so fragile—then loud protests, “I was never—you can’t st—” and then bargaining. “I can apologize. I can return gifts.” The crowd, satisfied with spectacle, was not moved by apology alone. They wanted accountability.
So there was a third punishment: she had to perform, in front of the community, a ritual of restitution. She returned each garment that she had taken, collected men’s words that she had claimed, and apologized in the market square. Her cheeks were raw from the cold wind and the scrub with broom-handle apologies. The women watched, folding their hands like knives. When she finished, when her voice had run out of gas, people turned back to their work as if the performance had rebalanced the ledger.
Her decline was slow and humiliating. She saw the people who once praised her go where she could not follow. The baby-faced smugness that had made men laugh was gone. She learned the most terrible lesson for a woman who thinks luck is given: the village gives fortune and the village can take it away.
Pascal’s punishment was different. He had not been merely a taker of favors; he had been a planner of poverty. After the farm workers saw his cowardice—how he had tried to use legal contrivance to bleed my parents—Jackson Day made sure his fall would be public and irreversible. The farm foremen wrote up the incident. The town secretary, King Palmer, posted a notice naming him as unfit. He was fined a small portion of the money he tried to extort, forced to perform community service in the fields at sunrise—manual labor to make the point. He was compelled to stand before a meeting where he apologized not just to me but to Katherine, to my father Hank Beatty, to the brothers—Case Pena, Ike Ferrara, Dirk Pfeiffer—who had believed in him.
At first Pascal wore arrogance like armor. When the crowd gathered and Jackson named the offense and the price, his face turned from sarcasm to panic. “You can’t—” he tried to bargain. “I—” He faltered as men he thought he could buy stepped forward. Their mouths turned to thin lines as he was handed a shovel. “Start at dawn. You will plant for a month. You will work the irrigation lines for a season. You will retrieve the weight of your greed with your back.”
The crowd watched as he bent, and the progression was clear: arrogance, denial, forced labor, humility. He tried to lift his chin and say his truths, but the work took sounds from his throat. He begged once, twice, then silently. The humiliation of being ordered to repair the very structures he had tried to break is a cure rarer than most realize.
The villagers watched. Some hissed, some sighed with satisfaction; many kept quiet, weighing the cost and the moral of the day. Pascal’s friends left. The ones who had been willing to stand by him when it served them now watched him sweating in the sun and drank tea and spoke no words. That is a punishment more corrosive than any jail: to be shown that most of what you thought would hold you is just water.
By the time the month ended, Pascal’s face had lost the glow of entitlement. Chloe walked a harder path. Public life is a mirror. They both ended poorer in a way that made sense in a small place: they were poor of trust. My mother’s cough eased. My father—Hank Beatty—stopped worrying for a week. The pattern my child spirit named shifted.
Work in the kitchen gave me an edge I had never known. I learned to measure, to salt not too much and not too little, to hold my hands steady and let the steam rise. The farm people called me "sister" or “Cassandra” or sometimes, in some private corners, “saozi”—a nickname that carried warmth. Jackson teased me sometimes. “You cook well,” he said. “You keep the men fed, they will think of you often.”
“Don’t call me that in front of the men,” I protested, but my chest felt lighter than it had in years. I could see the future of the kitchen like a map: me working and being good at it, the family sustained, the little boy safe.
My brothers—Case Pena, Ike Ferrara, Dirk Pfeiffer—found small spins of luck: a neighbor proposed a match for Case who would bring decent land; Ike found a chance to apprentice at a repair shop; Dirk was offered a position to work the irrigation teams once more. None of these were riches, but the old slope of misfortune leveled for a while.
Chloe’s downfall continued in private ways, too. At the health station where she had strutted like a queen, no one visited anymore. The village's gossip dried on the vine. That slow toll of rejection is worse than any single humiliation.
As for Pascal, the sight of him hauling water at dawn became a lesson the men told their sons. “Don’t play with other people’s lives,” they would say. “You will plan wrong.”
One evening, after the harvest of a small success—chicken fat crisped to the right crunch, jars of pickles properly sealed—I took the tin of malted milk Jackson had once given me and set it on the table. The label was dented. He had handed it to my mother once, shy as a soldier with his single offering.
“Keep it,” he said that day, eyes flicking away as if he had offered more than he intended.
Tonight it felt like an altar. I held the tin and listened.
“Will he ever be mine?” I asked the quiet.
A small voice—my son, surely, somewhere near or future—answered me the way children do: impatiently sure. “You did what you had to. Keep the tin. Remember the smell. We were almost lost. Now we are not.”
I smiled in the dimness, running my thumb over the dented lid. Outside the wind moved the grass like a crowd shifting to see the next act. Inside, the wooden house warmed and the sound of men talking softened to things that meant tomorrow.
I had changed a few things. One by one, the threads of the life the dream wrote for me were rewoven. I had pushed a liar away openly. I had let the farm see the truth. I had made public moments into the justice the village understands, and I had learned the way to craft luck with hands and heat and the right measure of salt.
There would still be hard days, still cold nights, and maybe still dreams that landed like knives, but I had the first line in a new story. I had my mother’s cough lighten; a bonnet for one brother; a lean chicken as a promise. The tin sat between us like a small sun.
“Keep it a while,” Jackson had said once. “For luck.”
I kept it. The dent in the tin fit my thumb like the map in my palm. I wound the thread he gave me into my hair and waited for the day my little boy would click his fingers and say, “Now, mother, make me breakfast.”
The End
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