Face-Slapping19 min read
My Mother's Advice and a Warm Stomach
ButterPicks13 views
My mother said the way to a man's heart was through his stomach.
I held a warm stomach in my hands and tasted nothing but metal and old lies.
"Desmond," I whispered, because names make things real. "You always did love two things: your appetite and your secrets."
I didn't say it to a living man. I said it to the body on my bed, to the neat row of stitches I had just finished.
"Why did you do it?" I asked the warm skin. "Why did you think you could hide?"
His face was peaceful like someone dreaming of supper. He had been peaceful for five minutes when I took his stomach out; he had been peaceful for weeks when he stopped pretending at loyalty.
"I'll fix you," I told him. "Just a little surgery, a little patience. You always taught me to be practical."
I kept my sentences short because the smell made my throat tighten. The food inside the organ told the truth better than any confession would. Shrimp still stringy, a broken tomato already a red bruise, bread gone soft. My fingers sank into it as if searching for evidence. Evidence slid between my fingers and ran down my wrist.
"I cooked for you every day," I said, pushing my own meal into the soft hollow. "Ma taught me. 'Make him want to come home,' she said. 'Keep his belly full and his eyes will stay with you.'"
"You ate the wrong thing," I told the thing that had been my husband. "You brought other hands to your mouth."
I sewed him up clumsily. Needle pricked my skin several times until my hand bled and my eyes blurred. Tears blurred like oil on water. I shouldn't have been crying, not now. But grief is a custom; people practice it.
"Desmond, if you can hear me—if any of you can hear me—I'm sorry for the stitches. I'm not good at mending things. But I know how to make a man stay."
After I cleaned myself, I looked at the man on the bed, finished with his one-way trip into silence, and felt a peculiar lightness. "Three legs or two," I told myself aloud, "a frog with three legs you won't find, but two-legged men are plentiful."
I had done this not for justice. I had done this as habit. It was not my first time.
When the police door did not knock after he died, I decided to move on. There was an efficiency to my cruelty. If someone betrayed me, I removed what had been betraying them and returned their body to the world as if nothing had happened. I had been taught this by sorrow and by my own small, clever heart.
I needed a new place. I needed a new man to teach.
"Where will you go now?" my reflection asked me as I stood by the window.
"Somewhere they can't call," I said. "Somewhere that forgets names and remembers nothing but obedience."
I found the traffickers the way one finds weeds in a garden—you look where the dirt has already loosened. I walked into their world pretending to be small and scared. I let them net me because they are always hungry for a new catch.
A man named Ramon Wheeler bought me for two thousand dollars less than I was worth, and that very evening he thought he had bought a lifetime of obedience. He was a wide-shouldered man in his forties with hands like old tools and a smile that still thought itself kind.
"You're mine now," Ramon said on the walk to his home. "You will do as I ask."
"Of course," I said. "I will make your life quiet. I will cook. I will be grateful."
Ramon pushed me through a wooden gate under a tin roof and introduced me to the rules of his house. "Don't try anything," he told me. "If you run, you will learn. If you scream, you will find just how much the world hates noise."
"Where are the other women?" I asked, watching his yard.
"A few," he said. "They know better."
There was a woman in the yard who moved like a tired animal. She looked at me and—briefly—her eyes asked something I did not answer. In her palm she hid a scrap of paper folded like a secret.
"Who is she?" I asked Ramon.
"That one? Graciela," he said. "She thinks she is useful. She gives us information for food. Listen to her but don't trust her."
"She will learn," I said, and I already had plans.
I chose my obedience well at first. I fed him polite words and salted his pride. "Ramon, you work hard," I'd say, "let me bring you food that heals your bones."
"Ramon, you deserve a woman who makes your house warm," I'd add.
He called me Iris and told himself I was a good woman. He encouraged his neighbors to think of me the same way. He took me to market in town sometimes. I wore the only clean dress I had and smiled. The other village women watched and they began to orbit me, because simple things glitter in a small place.
"How did you learn to cook like that?" Graciela asked me once, when the two of us stood near the smoke from the kitchen.
"My mother," I said. "She taught me that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
Graciela smiled like she was offering a hand.
“You're clever,” she said. “You could go far.”
I saw her ledger of betrayals then. She had turned a profit on quite a few women.
"Who taught you to read men?" I asked her, quieter. "Who gave you your ledger?"
She looked away and muttered something, then forked a slice of bread into her mouth. "You think you are clever, Iris."
I answered with a nod and nothing else. I watched.
Days passed and my lessons with Ramon worked. I bought his approval the way some people buy silence with a coin: pay a little every day. I learned to be a woman who waits for a man's attention. I learned to sigh at his jokes and to make his favorite soup at the right moment.
Then Florence Campos arrived.
She came into our world like a song misplaced on a wrong street. She did not belong in that yard or in that valley. She was young and wild and stubborn and fresh a way that hurt. She had been captured by chance and bought by Forrest Francois, who thought a college girl worth having made him feel clever.
Florence had eyes like the ocean when it decides to fight a storm. She did not plead when they threw her into the small room. She did not ask for pity. Instead she stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks like a woman counting the stars she planned to steal back.
I found myself watching her more than I should have. "Who are you?" she asked me once, flat as a command.
"Iris," I told her. "You should rest your voice. Words are costly here."
She looked at me and smiled with a cracked mouth like someone who had not yet given up on the idea of being brave. "Do you want to run with me?"
Her question was a spark. "No," I said. "Running is foolish if you have no map."
She laughed, a small sound that did not match the bruises on her cheeks. "You're a teacher," she said.
"I'm a student of the same class," I told her. "I remember how to pay attention."
I watched Florence try to escape and fail many times. She was hauled back like a kite on a short string. Sometimes she would scream; other nights she would simply sit and talk with the little bird that lived in her mind. "I will be an orphanage director one day," she told me once, when she thought I wasn't listening. "I will take children who have no safe place to sleep and I will give them a bed that smells like clean sheets."
"Even after this?" I asked.
"Especially after this," she said. "Because they will need someone who remembers what happened."
I felt a small stab of shame that made no sound. I had heard that dream once before in other years, in other bodies. People would hold onto dreams like rope when everything else unravelled.
Florence's presence shifted things. Men who had never looked my way began to weigh me with new hunger. Ramon noticed, and the attention soured his appetite into other vice. He went to the men's room less sober; he came back with a smaller man inside him.
"You're still the best one here," Ramon said to me once. "You keep the house. Don't think of leaving."
"I would not dream of scandal," I said. "But if you love the taste of me, then eat carefully."
Ramon did not listen. He began to disappear into the rooms of other women temporarily. The house slowly learned the contours of secrets.
One night, while the village slept beneath the indifferent moon, Florence crawled out of her shack and slipped into the soil like a small animal. She disappeared. The men wore their arrogance like delivery of a prize. They went to sleep with the knowledge they had captured a piece of sunrise.
Florence's attempt at escape sparked an explosion. Men lit up the valley with lanterns and flashed teeth like metal. They called into the dark, and then, shamefully, one of them found her. A child's cry cut the air when they dragged her back chained and kneeling, and a man—one of the men who had once bought girls—screeched with a kind of revenge.
It was then that I began to act.
I had come here to make a man obey me. I had also come here to collect a kind of justice I had stored in a small private bank. I wanted to see them stripped of what made them proud: their power, their certainty. I wanted them to be ordinary and weak and human in a way they had never allowed themselves to be.
At first I used small tricks. I added a cooling herb to a stew and watched a man's temper ebb. I set a bowl of rice on the floor and laced it with an herb that made old men sleepy. They fell asleep in the middle of conversations and woke with a sour headache. I learned faces then: the squeeze of a mouth when a lie is swallowed, the way hands tremble when a secret has been found out.
Ramon fell ill with a slow, public failure. He would be up, one moment puffed with pride; the next he would sag, unable to lift a bucket, as if every little thing required effort. I fed him sugar-coated threats and soothing speech. "You will live," I told him as I forced him to eat, "because I need you alive—alive enough to taste what happens when a man loses his footing."
He began to stumble as though life had been removed and only a rag remained to hold him.
The village noticed. Men began to gossip in whispers that smelled like fear. "That woman is powerful," they said. "Someone teaches her tricks."
"She's an outsider," another answered.
When the village mist cleared over the valley one week, it revealed new lines on faces. A man named Glenn Cain (one of Forrest Francois's cronies) came to my house and banged on my door, a hard man made from a rough life, the kind who could not conceive of a woman with a plan.
"What are you doing with Ramon?" Glenn demanded.
"Keeping the house," I said. "Would you like some tea?"
He grunted and refused, but his rage made him sloppy. He spilled his pride and left a paper trail of wishes and threats that would be useful later.
"Don't push too hard," I told Florence the night the men burned sugar in their bellies and tried to make the village their own. "They fear many things. Fear your courage most."
"This is not your fight," Florence said.
"Everything here is my fight," I answered.
The day I chose to act on a larger scale, I invited the village to a funeral of sorts. I planned it like a woman planning a harvest. Men would come wanting to display their strength; they would come thinking they were owed hospitality. I made a feast and set tables and poured wine that smelled like sin. I invited Forrest Francois, Ramon, Glenn Cain, Ernst Fox, Philip Daniels, Matteo Guerrero, Jude Casey, Fleming Estrada, Andres Floyd, and other men whose names were easily found on the list of cheap favors. I made sure they could not refuse—when a village loses an old man, who's brave enough not to show?
They came in groups, slapping shoulders, offering condolences and slips of cash. They shook my hand and called me "a good woman". They admired the meal and the order of things. "You have kept him well," said Forrest Francois, and he laughed like a man with nothing to lose.
"To the dead," he said, raising a cup.
"To the dead," the chorus answered, and their voices were full of swagger.
I served them my best courses. I watched them lean into the food and then lean back, surprised. I watched their eyes narrow.
"What's in this?" Ernst Fox asked as he combed his mouth with a finger like a child embarrassed to be messy.
"Just what keeps men alive," I said.
"And what a woman gives," Forrest Francois added, satisfied. "You will be well taken care of, Iris."
The bowl passed down the table, cups filled and drained, glasses clinked, the noise of a village comfortable in itself. Children outside played near the snow that had started to fall. Women pretended to speak softly. I stood behind a pillar and watched.
It took them only minutes to begin to show change. First, a slackness. Hands trembled while raising spoons. Jokes that once landed with a slam now fell like wet cloth. A redness climbed their faces—the flush of a man suddenly aware of his own body failing him.
"What did you put in this?" Philip Daniels grunted, throwing down his spoon as if it had burned him.
"Perhaps you are too old," Matteo Guerrero said with a forced laugh. "Or maybe we all ate too much."
"Get help!" Forrest Francois barked. "Someone get water!"
"No," I said aloud, stepping forward so that all eyes found me. "You drank the toast to the dead, you drank my grief. This is the taste of truth."
Faces shifted like a crowd watching the end of a play. First there was confusion. Then denial. Then fear braided with anger. Men who had once shared cigarettes and threats with each other grabbed for water, for cups, for each other—anything to wipe the sensation away.
"You're poisoning us!" Glenn Cain roared, toppling his chair as he lunged toward me.
"You're lying," Ramon managed, spittle on his lip, hands cold as river stones.
I had anticipated this. I had expected the performance. I had measured their breaths and timed the effect of the herbs. The poison was not immediate death; it was a slow, public undoing. It left time for spectacle.
"Do you know what it felt like to watch a body sleep forever?" I asked him, and my voice did not tremble. "Do you know what it felt like to peel food from a man who thought nothing of eating someone else's plate?"
Ramon's eyes were glassy, then bright with a stupid hope. "You want me to—" he croaked, searching for a place to bargain.
"You wanted men to be obedient," I said. "Now they are fragile like anyone else."
The crowd gathered closer. Women shouted. "Call a doctor!" someone screamed, but doctors are expensive and far away. The men doubled over with cramps. Vomit came in ragged ropes. Men fell to their knees, then collapsed like towers struck by wind.
Forrest Francois landed on the floor, hand pressed to his chest as if to hold his life in. "You will pay for this!" he said, voice shredding into something smaller.
"Who will pay?" I asked, and the sounds around me amplified into a chorus of panicking voices.
I felt Florence behind me, steady as a stone. "They never paid," she said softly.
"They paid with little girls' nights and the sound of breaking," I told the crowd. "They paid with what they thought was not worth anything: our bodies."
"A public punishment," someone whispered, horror-struck. Some women raised their hands, half in fear and half in triumph, watching the men they had once loved and feared flail like wounded birds.
"Shame," a voice said. "Finally they know shame."
Forrest's face moved through an ugly cycle: arrogance, surprise, denial, fury, then pleading. "I didn't—" he began, then coughed and produced blood. "You're a monster."
"Am I?" I asked. "You were the ones who sold children and bartered hands."
Ramon crawled toward me as if distance still meant something. "Iris," he pleaded in a voice like a dog. "Don't do this. Please."
"You're already done," I said. "You can't buy back what you destroyed."
The spectacle did not end with convulsions. There was a mess of sound: a child's cry at the edge of the feast, a woman laughing too loud, someone taking out a phone—an oddity in our valley—and filming it. The idea of proof pleased them. Proof, they thought, would protect them.
A few men begged. "Arrest her!" one called weakly, in both a plea and a plan. "Arrest her, and tell them I was forced—"
They were denied an audience beyond the yard. The world outside the valley was not listening to small villages on cold nights. We were corners of the same rotten map.
Ramon's breathing rattled. His vision blurred and then cleared. He looked at me and made a sound that might have been anger or apology—both mixed and indistinct. He clawed at a man's sleeve to pull himself up and staggered. A woman in the crowd spat on the floor. Children were ushered away, their faces pale and full of questions.
I watched Forrest Francois' expression change from rage to a child's panic. "I didn't—" he said again, as if repetition might make the world forget the ledger of his sins. His friends had all collapsed into an ugly pile of flailing limbs. The smell of vomit and sickness wrapped the yard like a new coat.
"This is public," I said to the group, to the women who had cowered and to the men who had tormented. "You wanted us to be quiet. You wanted us to obey. Here is your justice."
A man who had learned to be cruel on the banks of this valley—Andres Floyd—tried to crawl away. His hands slid in the dirt. "Shut up, Iris," he whispered. "You're not a hero."
"Never said I was," I said. "I am simply someone who remembers."
The pleading mounted. Men who had never been denied a favor now found themselves choking at the idea of water. The wall of their bravado crumbled into wet fear.
"Please," Forrest whispered to me, and the word was small and honest. "Forrest looked at the sky, as if hoping for instruction from another life. "You can have me," he said. "Take me. Forgive me and take me."
"Forgiveness is cheap," I told him coldly. "Forgiveness costs nothing. Here, you will die known."
He tried to bargain again and then stopped, because there was no plan left to sell. His breath hitched and then stuttered into silence as the poison slowed him down. He became small. He became human, finally. The men around him sobbed.
The punishment continued with the slow torment of the body and the louder roar of the crowd. There were curses and slaps and moments when a hand patted a fallen friend's hair like consoling a child. Women held up their faces, some with triumph, some with shock. "It's about time," an older woman said. "It was always about time."
A child appeared at the edge of the circle, and when she saw Ramon he was on the ground clutching his belly, one eye swollen shut. She cried. The crying pulled at my heart the way a loose thread is tugged. I had not known I had such a thing there.
The men began to do things the cruel never do: they made noises like animals, they apologized with voices like leaves. Some asked for their mothers. Some asked to be hidden. They tried to explain. "We were given money," Glenn gasped. "We had no choice."
"No choice?" I said. "You had choices you liked to boast about."
As the night grew thin and the moon drifted like an indifferent eye, the men began to piece together what the herbs I had used meant: a failure of the hands that made them consider their own hands. They would live—some would die later in the hospital outside the valley—but the first effect had been public and humiliating and very much like the reversal I had wanted.
And yet I did not stop there.
When their bodies had slumped and the yard had become a small field of broken men, I set fires to the stacks of old wood and dried thatch we all kept for winter. The blaze, fed by oil I'd set before the feast, rose fast and honest. Flames leapt, bright and insane, and for a moment I saw every man's face reflected in it.
"Stop!" someone screamed as people began to wake from poisoned sleep. "What are you doing?"
"It's your world burning," I said. "Your works, your houses, your spoils. You wanted us to be part of a market. Now the market is closed."
The fire took roofs like hungry animals and heat rolled outward until the valley itself seemed on fire. People screamed, some in panic, some in wails that sounded like old songs.
The women moved faster than anyone. Graciela ran to her house and began to pour water with frantic hands as though she could repair what this night had pulled apart in them. She had made her bargains and now she paid in smoke and loss.
A neighbor burst into tears as he watched his barn burn. Children wailed. Dogs barked and then yelped and ducked away.
I stood in the shadow near the edge of the yard. Florence came out with chains dragging behind her and then, with my hands, I broke them. "Go," I told her. "See them die and learn what fire tastes like when it has been fed with hypocrisy."
She walked toward the fire because the thing burning was not entirely ugly. "I want to see their faces," she said. "Not out of joy, but so that I can remember what people like them look like before they hurt someone again."
She was brave in a way I hadn't been in many years. She walked into the keening crowd, and I followed a few steps, because I wanted to watch and because I feared what I had lit.
And the worst of them—Forrest, Ramon, Glenn—burned with their crimes hanging in the smoke like injurious birds. Some men were dragged free, coughing and weeping. Some houses, too close to the flames, fell with a groan. The cry of babies cut like knives.
I imagined the village waking in a new life with large parts of its old sin collapsed like reed huts. But I also knew the truth: the valley would keep the same breathiness in men if no one taught it differently.
When the fire died, the snow returned like a pale cloth. The bodies that remained were many and the clean-up was messy and slow. People whispered like ghosts, then turned to the business of living. Children would remember the night of the big fire and later the papers would tell a tidy story: an accident, a tragic mistake.
Except real stories are ugly and precise.
We learned what they meant when they called the hospital. Some men lived. Some died in ambulances on the road. Some survived to sit in the ashes of their lives and apologize like old dogs. Some were dragged before authorities far away and asked to answer for what they had done.
But there was another public punishment waiting—one I had arranged with patient taste. When the funeral came for the men who had failed, the town trucked out reporters and photographers in a way a city would when it smells scandal. They asked questions and lit bright lights and made everything brittle and instantaneous.
At the funeral, right before the men spoke, I stood in the open and unrolled my hands. The cameras found me. I remembered the smell of Desmond's stomach and thought, for a second, of maternal letters I had read years ago. I had learned the best show is the one that tells the whole truth to anyone who would watch.
"Do you want to explain yourself?" a reporter asked, her voice a bell.
"I did," I said. "I only rearranged the balance."
"Is that a confession?" she pressed.
"A confession of seeing," I replied, "and of deciding to act."
They filmed me. The images would be small boxes in people's phones and cigarettes in their hands.
Forrest's last face went through the performance again. He tried to read the paper, his hands shaking. He had, in public, enjoyed a crown of small, petty reigns. Now, having been forced to be utterly small, he sat like a man who had been unmade.
The punishment proper—the worst humiliation—was the long parade of townspeople who came forward to recall what each man had done.
"That man asked my sister for money and gave my daughter a bruise," one woman said and the camera focused. "That man sold a young neighbor to a stranger," another said.
"I sold my daughter's body once to pay off a debt," an old mother admitted, "and he gave me two coins and a promise."
"Forrest," Florence said, stepping forward, "you called yourself a leader. You sold us like cattle."
His face crumpled. He tried to pretend he had been misquoted. "That is not true," he said, but his voice lacked the cough of certainty.
They condemned him in a way the law never could: by speaking the ledger aloud.
"You think we'll forgive you if you say a few words?" someone hissed. "You're asking to be human now that you are small."
There was a slow, satisfying hum in the air. Cameras flashed. Men who had been heroes in their neighborhoods now became headlines and footnotes. They shuffled and wrung their hands. They begged. They tried to name those who had driven them to this choice of anger.
A public punishment does not have to kill. It has to expose, to shine a light, to rearrange how the world sees you. They came forward to apologize, to ask for a second chance, to claim devotion. I watched their faces change—pride to fear to pleading. One by one they were stripped down in front of neighbors, in front of women they'd once slapped.
"Do you regret it?" Florence asked Forrest with a voice so small.
He broke. He cried because under the pressure of naming each crime he couldn't hold the lie together. He said "I'm sorry" with a rawness that removed any salt of performance from his voice. He sought my eyes, then lowered them.
That public scene was brutal and necessary. It lasted the length of a harvest and the depth of a wound. It left both men and women awkward with a new knowledge. The crowd recorded, murmured, and decided what to do with them.
Some men were taken away by police later. Some were left to the gnaw of gossip and the slow death of contempt. Some of their houses were burned. Some of their bodies bore the marks of their earlier night.
Florence and I stood later on the hill watching the valley settle. The dandelion I had plucked weeks ago lay in my palm—brown now, with the tiny seeds that had made it a promise.
"Will you leave?" she asked.
"Not yet," I said. "I still have things to close."
"I thought you were here for the man," she said softly.
"I was," I said. "And then I found out what else I could do with the knowledge."
She nodded, understanding more than she should at her age. "You did a thing I wouldn't have had the hearts for," she said.
"You think this will get us to freedom?" I asked.
"It will change how they see us," she said. "That can be the beginning."
We watched the valley. We felt the cold in our bones. I folded the dandelion seed head into a palm and blew. The air carried it away, scattering a small dust of possibility into the winter.
Later, when people wrote about the night, they stitched the story with easier words. They called it an accident, or a madness, or a crime of passion. But the truth sat as a small stone under the tongue: that I had been taught to feed men and instead taught myself how to starve them of power.
I stayed long enough to watch the longer punishments play out. Ramon did not die that night. He survived the poison and the fire and later sat on a cot in town with a hand that could no longer climb certain hills. He begged for forgiveness in the small hours and sometimes watched me like a dog watches the hands that feed him.
Forrest was brought before men who once cheered him and asked to name each debt he had. He stood naked in the court of neighbors and names fell from his mouth like ash. The papers caught everything and then moved on.
The final public scene was when the men were made to attend, months later, a village hearing where twenty women recited names and summons. The men were made to stand and listen. They tried to deny. They tried to make jokes. Their bravado broke into fragments. The crowd recorded and sent news to towns far away. People wrote angry letters and accused us of playing judge and executioner.
"Do you feel anything?" a reporter asked me in the end. "Remorse? Triumph?"
"I feel like someone with a ledger balanced," I said. "It is not for me to name what should happen, only for me to show it, so that others can decide."
"Did you ever think you would become that?" she asked.
"Ma said once," I told her, "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I learned the recipe. I changed it."
She smiled at the line because it made a neat story. Stories like neat lines.
When the valley quieted, Florence left to find a home where children could be safe. She kept her dream like a seed. She left me with a letter—small, like the scrap Graciela had hidden in her hand the first night I arrived.
"Thank you," she wrote. "For breaking their pride so mine could be mended."
I kept the letter folded and tucked it into the pocket where Desmond's old watch once lay. I kept also the dandelion stem I had pressed and dried, and the recipe for the fish soup that always lost broth when I tried to shove it back into a man's hollow.
Before I left the valley finally, I did three things.
"One," I told a neighbor woman who had come to see me. "I taught them all how to boil a proper fish soup so that every man who claims to know better will have something to eat."
"Two," I said, and my voice was flat. "I wrote down every name I remember on a page and handed it to the people outside. They can decide who goes to court."
"Three," I said, and I slid my hand into the small carved chest where I kept stitches and files and recipes. "I will keep my mother's advice, but I will make it mine."
"You're leaving?" the woman asked.
"Yes," I said, and I felt lighter than when I had taken his stomach out and sewed him closed. "I am going to a place where names matter less than the promise to protect the weak."
"Will you be free?" she asked.
"I'm already free," I said, and then I laughed once—harsh and honest—and walked out under a sky that was not kind and not gentle.
On the road, I kissed the folded letter and then tucked it into my pocket next to the dandelion seeds. I folded the recipe for fish soup into a neat square and kept it where my hand could reach.
When a child at an intersection asked me what I carried in my palm, I answered without lying. "A dandelion," I said. "And a list."
"What's on the list?" the child asked.
"Names," I said. "Names we refuse to forget."
I walked on.
I often think of the warm stomach. I remember the way the shrimp lay like ghosts within. I remember the way the stitches turned the body into a vessel again. I remember that a woman can learn a recipe and decide to burn the cookbook.
In the end, the valley remembers the night like a bruise: visible, then pale. People talk now about justice and cruelty in the same breath. Florence runs her orphanage now and sends me postcards with children smiling like pieces of tomorrow. Graciela moved away after the fire and sends no letters.
I have stopped sewing other people's wounds closed. I keep the needle for when it is necessary. Sometimes I cook fish soup and taste it before I serve it to a table, deciding whether the world deserves the warmth. Sometimes I blow on a dandelion and watch the seeds drift like an invitation.
I am not a saint. I am not a monster. I am a woman who followed an old lesson and turned it into something dangerous and precise.
The last thing I do before bed most nights is unfold Florence's letter and read the single line she wrote at the bottom: "Keep the seed."
I press the seed in my palm and feel as if I carry a small, fragile law: feed the hungry, break the proud, and never forget where you put the stomach.
The End
— Thank you for reading —