Rebirth11 min read
My Jade Charm, the Hidden Room, and Little Six
ButterPicks12 views
"I can feel it," I said, pressing my palm against my belly. "He kicked."
"My baby," I whispered, letting the sun warm my face behind the glass. "Don't startle me."
"Gracelynn, do you want to tell us?" Dad's voice came from the doorway before I had a chance to make the call. Fielding Marques stood there with his hand on the knob, the same smile he always saved for weathering storms.
"No, not yet." I lied and mouthed to the empty air, then thumbed my phone, then stopped.
"I called," he said. "We can be there in an hour."
"Please," I said finally. "Just… hold the line."
"Of course." His voice softened. "Call your mother. Tell her we're coming."
"I already did." I shut my eyes. "They'll be here."
"Good," he said, relieved. "I'll wait in the car."
I put the phone down. The dream had woken me again—fire, ash, buildings folding like paper, water swallowing streets. It was always the same: a sky gone wrong and a house I knew collapsing. The dreams had started months ago and only grew sharper as my due date approached.
"I have to go," I told the empty room and picked up the smooth jade charm from the bedside drawer. It was ordinary-looking, cool in my palm. I had kept it since before I deleted him from my life.
"Gracelynn, what's that?" Regina Farmer asked when she arrived. She had been hired through an agency to cook and keep house. She was already like a second mother—steady hands, quiet jokes.
"It's nothing." I hid the charm back in the safe and smiled through a contraction.
"Ring Dad." Regina's voice turned practical. "You need to breathe."
"Right." I called the ambulance and the hospital. The contractions sharpened like teeth.
"You're doing great," the midwife said. "Breathe, like this."
"Okay." I followed the rhythm she gave me. "Push."
"I can see a head," the midwife cheered.
I heard the sound that made the room tilt—the new small voice, a sound that blew all the fears away.
"He's here." The midwife handed me a wrapped bundle. "A boy. Six pounds, six ounces, sixteen-oh-six."
"Hello, Little Six," I said, laughing through tears. "You chose a dramatic entry."
"What's his name?" Dad asked, beaming.
"We'll call him Little Six for now." I watched his small red face, the smear of vernix like powdered milk on his brow. "He won't be properly clean for a while."
"You have to tell your mother," Regina said softly.
"I will. I promise." I lied again, because it was easier. They would be here soon.
The first night in the hospital they arrived—Fielding's car pulling into the lot like a boat into harbor. Corinne Garnier and Fielding propped me with pillows and made chicken soup as if there had never been an argument between us.
"Where's my granddaughter?" Corinne asked, fussing with the blanket.
"He's our grandson," Fielding corrected, proudly. "Raul Hart. We'll call him Raul for paperwork, but in here he's Little Six."
"Raul? That's a strong name," Corinne smiled, smoothing his tiny fist. "Good choice."
"You're spoiling him," I said.
"Only a little." Fielding winked.
At night, when the hospital lights dimmed, I finally dared to think of the charm again. I slept and dreamed the same scenes of ash and broken waves, but in sleep the charm pulsed in my pocket like a heartbeat.
When I woke, the hospital room was quiet, and the charm lay against my palm. I didn't know what possessed me to press my thumb to it then to feel it cool and hum. When my skin bled, the charm touched crimson and the world flickered.
"What's wrong?" Regina asked from the hall, then gasped when I vanished. We were in the room, but suddenly I stood on a grassy plain with a spring and a cave of shelves beyond—my chest tight with awe.
"I see it," I breathed. "A space."
"What do you mean?" Fielding's voice cut through the hush, husky with sleep. "Gracelynn?"
"It's nothing." I blinked. "Just a dream."
But it wasn't. I learned fast: the charm was the key. The spring tasted like cold stone water. The shelves were empty, but because of them I could feel preparedness coalesce like a small city in my gut.
"Show us," Corinne said when I told them on the third day. Her surgical hands curled around the charm like a woman re-learning anatomy.
"Okay." I took a pillow and fed it into the spring with the slow certainty of a magician. It vanished, and their mouths fell open.
"You're not making this up?" Fielding asked.
"I'm not." I laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. Try yourself."
They did, and they gasped the way people gasp at snowfall. Their eyes were children’s again.
"This could feed us," Corinne said, already outlining a plan on the back of an old receipt. "This could shelter us."
"We need logistics," Fielding said, brisk and sharp. "A warehouse. Machines. Tools. Seeds."
"We need milk," Regina added, smiling at little Raul who was sleeping like a dumpling.
"What about the city?" I asked, remembering the ash and the water.
"We start with us," Corinne said. "Then we do the town."
We stockpiled. We turned our apartment into a quiet command center. I learned to order for urgency and for stealth—boxes of powdered milk, cases of diapers, sacks of rice, machines for sealing, generators, and sleeping bags. I learned to pick items that could be hidden and nested, an economist of last resorts.
"Are you sure about the seller?" Fielding asked the night I clicked Buy on a heap of thermal quilts.
"Yes." I showed him the messages. "Baxter Crawford’s goods are reputable."
"Good." He exhaled. "Send him the deposit."
My days became lists and my nights became short and precious. I painted a picture, but even pencils felt like luxuries when the world tilted.
"How will we train to use the equipment?" I asked once, watching Fielding sketch a layout for a tiny orchard in the storage room of the space.
"We learn," Corinne said. "Together."
Weeks turned into a grinding pleasantness. We learned to stack machines so they wouldn't crush each other. We learned that the storage hallway in the space ran deep and tall like a grain elevator. We learned that living things could not be pulled inside—animals and people could enter only by physical doors, not by the charm's illusions—but we could move feed and fences and tools by thought and will.
"Try the livestock," Fielding said one morning, eager as a schoolboy. "We will need protein."
I pulled a small pen into my living room and, with a puff of impossible motion, five hens and two ducklings blinked into being, startled and real.
"Oh." Regina clapped. "They're cute."
"We'll keep them in pens inside the space," I said. "And raise rabbits as well."
We worked faster than I thought possible. Peace settled across the rooms like dust. On the market the sky turned wrong in small ways—hot spells and sudden storms—but for a while it felt like a secret we could hold.
"Your ex?" Corinne asked one evening, lifting an eyebrow as she folded a stack of thermal shirts.
"You mean Fabian?" I said. The name tasted like ash.
"Yes." She folded peacefully. "The one with the abrupt military promises."
"He's in the past," I said. "He said he'd return after service. He didn't. I'm done."
"Good." Fielding's voice was final. "You're moving on."
But the world tilts strangely when men like Fabian are involved. News came slowly; people moved faster. Sometimes a person tries to come back when things look like storms, and sometimes they try to claim a piece of what used to be theirs.
I had thought Fabian gone. No more messages. No more promises. I had prepared my life small and enough.
Then one afternoon in the town square, a crowd gathered.
"I thought she was a rumor," someone said.
"That's him?" another shouted. "Felon? Soldier? Look."
"They brought out his former comrades," a woman said. "They say he was assigned. He isn't in jail."
I didn't plan to attend the square. I didn't plan to see him. I went to buy supplies, methodically, and then met a neighbor who acted like a gossip and nudged me forward. The square had a stage—community center hosts a farmers' fair every weekend—and the organizers had set up a screen to advertise local goods.
"Felix," someone started—no, not Felix. My voice trembled and I saw the face I had tried to forget. Fabian Chen stood on the edge of a truck bed, wearing a suit that didn't fit his moral age. He looked as startled as I felt.
"Why is he here?" Regina whispered.
"Because he wants to show everyone how successful he is," Fielding said darkly.
Someone played a slideshow.
The screen lit and the entire square watched a sequence of messages, clipped audio, and a screen recording sent to the organizers by a stranger who had sat at a café two days earlier and overheard. The footage was of Fabian's voice, suave and small. He was at a table with a woman who wasn't me, laughing and saying things meant for private ears.
"I'll leave when I have the money. My wife is only an ATM, you know? As soon as I get my transfer, I'm out," the audio said in his clipped bravado.
A murmur rose like a tide. I felt my hands go cold.
"I never thought he'd be a coward," a man near the back exclaimed.
"I'm the one who took care of him," a voice snipped.
A young woman—one I recognized as the mistress he had paraded on social posts—stood beside him and shrank back as the crowd shifted toward him like iron filings to a magnet. Someone pushed the secondary mic forward, and the audio was amplified.
"Explain," the organizer commanded. "You stand here with your head held high—explain."
Fabian's face changed color in one slow frame. His jaw worked.
"It’s… a lie," he began. "I—"
"Is this you?" a woman from the first row shouted, holding a phone with a recorded conversation. "Is this your message? Are you the man who called her an ATM?"
Cherry-red shame bloomed across his cheeks like a painful sunburn. His arrogance unspooled like a loosened bolt.
"I—it's not what it seems," he stammered. "You don't understand—"
"Explain," the crowd demanded. "What did you mean by 'my wife is an ATM'?"
Fabian's fingers trembled. He stepped back. He stuttered and then tried to play the military card.
"I was deployed—it's complicated. I had to—"
"You ghosted her," someone shouted. "You left her pregnant and alone and went where? To what? A deployment of cowardice?"
The mistress shrank further, eyes wide with the knowledge that she had been played. Fabian's bravado collapsed under the weight of one hundred eyes and the bright, unblinking lens of dozens of phones.
"You're making a scene," he hissed, trying to reclaim control.
"You're making a family sick," Regina said, stepping forward, voice blade-cold. "You are the one who left without a word."
People whispered. Someone held up a printed series of messages—old, deliberate, cruel—where Fabian plotted to leave the country after receiving a transfer bonus and called a woman 'a step.' He had written names in a file that once had felt like a home.
"I did what I had to," he said. He smiled for a second, a brittle, insane smile, like a man trying to forget he had hands.
"Everyone record him," a young man urged. "This belongs online."
Someone played messages Fabian had sent to others—evidence he had planned to take money from his pregnant partner to fund betting and a new life. The square filled with the sound of him trying to explain and the sound of his explanation turning to dust.
"Wait—no—please—" His voice shrank again, now the voice of someone exposed, small and needing mercy.
"Come here," Corinne called. Her eyes were as hard as a scalpel. "You left her when she needed you. You think you can stand on a truck and lie?"
The crowd moved closer. Phones recorded. The mistress took a step away from him as if the contact were contagious.
"Don't you dare approach her family!" someone hissed.
"I—" he tried to reach for me.
"Don't!" Fielding's voice was a low, dangerous thing. "Stay back."
Fabian's face went ashy. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I—"
"Get on your knees," Corinne said without raising her voice. Everyone heard it like a verdict.
Fabian looked at her as if she had asked the sun to go out. He fell to his knees on the asphalt in front of everyone, his suit already wrinkled.
"You know what you did," Corinne said, and the silence that followed was a heavy thing. "Beg us."
He did. He begged in a way that unravelled the last of his pride: "Please. I made a mistake. I—I'll pay. I'll—I'll take responsibility." His hands shook. He reached to the crowd as if to crawl back into favor. Someone recorded the petition; young men front-row nodded, because such scenes made things real.
"Why now?" a woman asked. "When the city is under stress? When families tighten and prepare? Why now?"
He stared down. "I wanted to show her I could—please. I tried to come back—"
"Too late," Regina said. "You walked away."
The crowd's mood turned to a chorus. Some clapped. More recorded. A few muttered that justice was not the law but the people’s judgement. Someone laughed; it sounded nasty and bright.
Fabian looked small, pleading. He had moved through denial, through pride, to this: his knees dirty on the hot tar, suit ruined, clients' faces in phones mistakes forever saved. He reached for a handkerchief and began to moan.
"Don't you dare touch her," Fielding said again quietly.
"Stay down," Corinne told him.
He slumped, and the square watched. Some people took pictures of him kneeling. Some filmed the entire humiliation. Others simply watched, the justice raw and public.
The mistress walked away, tears on her cheeks. Somebody cut away from recording to offer her water. The group around Fabian thinned like fog at sunrise. Phones still hummed, and the screen on the community board replayed his own words—there was a sting to hearing a liar trapped by his own mouth.
"Record the evidence," the organizer said. "We will send this to the agencies. We will name him for what he is."
He kept begging. He kept failing to make any of it right. When he finally left on a borrowed bike, head bowed, everyone watched him go in stunned silence and then—slowly—returned to the practical business of life.
After the square, I walked home with Raul asleep in my arms. Corinne kept close and Fielding too. There was a quiet relief that taste of victory, small and sharp. The public performance had been a cleansing, a public accounting that turned a private betrayal into a lesson for his future.
"Did that make you feel better?" Regina asked gently as we sat by the gate.
"No." I admitted. "But it made it clear."
"We have other things to worry about." Fielding's voice returned to planning. "Tomorrow we test the generators."
"Tomorrow," I echoed. "Tomorrow we teach Raul how to climb trees—no, not yet. Tomorrow we test the well."
Days thickened into schedules. We stocked the space with seeds and machines and metal racks. We bought tractors and mowers. We set out plans on paper that might be the difference between survival and neighborly bankruptcy.
"You know," Corinne said one night as she patched a pair of gloves, "people think a space like this is invincible. It's not. It's a tool."
"It's an advantage," Fielding corrected.
"It's not a magic bullet," Regina added. "You can't send people in your place. You can't put a heart in a jar."
We learned the hard ways—how the charm worked and didn't work. We discovered the space could not take living bodies as storage; it provided shelter and stock. We also learned the water from the spring tasted like the skin at dawn—clean and quick to lift a fever.
One afternoon, as sun bled low and the sky sweetened, a tremor shook the town. The phone calls began: sirens, the city map crawling with red alerts. We felt the edges of the dream happen: the TV rolled images of a far coastline, a place I knew from childhood maps now writhing under water and flame.
"Pack the rice," Fielding said. "We won't risk being on the roads tonight."
"We need to leave soon," Corinne said. "Move the tractors close to the gate."
"Let's move to the village early," I said. "The old house is better-than-nothing shelter."
"So we go at dawn?" Regina asked, voice tight.
"No. Now." The tremors were learning that the world could buck beneath us. We packed with machine precision: food, blankets, Little Six's small knitted caps, fuel, and the charm in a hidden pocket.
We left the city by path and by plan. The village welcomed us with a hush, the house's walls like a patient jaw. We closed the gate and lit the stove and watched the little boy, Raul Hart, sleep, the sound of his breath like a small machine.
"Will we be safe?" he asked much later when he was old enough to pull curiosity from his lips.
"We will be careful," I said. "We will be ready."
Years later, when Little Six runs barefoot under the orchard we planted inside the space, when tractors hum and the shelves are full of tins and stories, when neighbors come for repairs and chai and we teach them the hand of the plow, people will ask how it started.
"It started with a dream," I tell them. "And a charm."
At night I take the jade out and place it on the stone beside the spring. It hums faintly. I say nothing—no promises. Outside, the pond breathes under the moon, and Raul, for all his smallness, sleeps on.
I slide the charm into the pocket of a simple rice sack in my storage room and close the lid. The lock clicks once and the air smells of iron and dried wheat.
"This," I say to no one, "is ours."
The End
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