Face-Slapping11 min read
The Nursery Rhyme and the Black Cat
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I never thought a little rhyme could smell like rot. I never thought a line sung by children would point to corpses.
"Listen," I said, keeping my voice low. "Do you hear them? The children on the lane—singing that song again."
Mark Solovyov folded his arms and looked at the lane as if he could stop the world by frowning. He always looked at things like they were problems he could lift.
"Can't you see," Mark said, "they're only kids."
"They call the dead by name," I answered. "That isn't only a child's play."
He didn't argue, but he didn't laugh either. Sometimes Mark doesn't show the storm until it hits.
"Janessa," Bram Krause barked from the doorway, "don't spook the children. Let them sing if they must."
"I'm not scaring anyone," I shot back. "But someone is using the tune."
Bram snorted like he always did when a court case smelled like trouble. "Who? A ghost?"
"Not a ghost," I said. "A vow. A plan."
We had a string of strange deaths threading through the county like a crooked needle. First, Hailey Christian—found by the big house's south wall with her tongue missing. Then Emilio Matsumoto's head—Edgy, the county steward—smashed so badly people thought his family sign had fallen on him. Then Ethan Burks, a guard, hung in a forest with animals at him, like a bad story come true.
"You think it's the song?" Bram asked, calm as always.
"I think the song is a map."
"Tell us the map," Clifford Mancini said, wiping his hands. Clifford was always a warm, busy man with jokes in his pockets and a pipe half-smoked.
"Read the first words of each line," I said. "They line up with the corpses we've found and the order we saw them. Someone wrote it to make us find what they wanted us to find, when they wanted."
"And who would do that?" Mark asked softly, like he didn't want the answer.
"Someone with an old grudge," I said. "Someone patient enough to wait for bodies to age into clues."
"And someone clever enough to write a song for children," Bram muttered.
We worked the scene the way detectives do—small steps, each tracked in the dust. People looked at me askance when I crouched to touch a footprint. They liked the clean way Mark moved, the way Bram's voice cut through gossip.
"Why did you come?" Mark asked, once. "To see corpses? To puzzle out riddles lovers leave for one another?"
"To find what the dead were trying to say," I said. "And to keep other people from dying."
He watched my hands. Mark's hands were quick, built for catching, for holding. He had a cat once, a black animal with blue eyes that followed him everywhere. They called it Black Panther. It slept on his shoulder and looked like a shadow of something larger.
"You know your place," he said finally. "You're stubborn."
"I know my sword," I said, and smiled. "Sword and wit are the same."
People kept calling us to scenes. Each scene made the song feel nearer.
"Janessa," Andrei Omar said one night when he showed me a scrap of cloth he had taken from a corpse, "this handkerchief—blue stitch work. Where is that made?"
"In the town," I said. "Ask Karen Brantley. She knows linens. She sits by the window and plays the coin game with the ledger."
We moved like a machine: Bram running the arrests, Andrei reading the bodies, Clifford doing what he could to keep the town calm. Mark and I walked the yard of the great house and tried not to look at the man with silk and knives who called himself Sergio Thomas.
"You can watch," Sergio said once with a soft smile that did not reach his eyes. "Or you can stay in your place and bow."
"Bow to what?" I asked.
"To taste," he said. "To power."
"Power will not change what you are," I told him. "It only shows it."
He laughed and ordered his servants about like a rehearsal for something dark.
It was in Sergio's garden the thing came out of the earth—literally. We dug a spot he had said was empty and found a woman half buried. She coughed and spat and looked like someone given back from a grave.
"She's alive," I said, breath gone from surprise. "We need a healer!"
"Who would bury her?" Bram asked. "Who would undo what was visible and then try to hide the rest?"
"Someone who wanted a body gone," I said. "And yet someone who wanted a story sewn into the soil."
The woman we dug out could speak, but only little. She pointed at the pansies and the turned dirt and made a motion like sewing.
"She said her name," Mark said. "But she didn't say her name clearly."
"Names get buried," I told him. "But wounds don't."
We found more—tokens, a handkerchief with blue lotus embroidering, notes burned to ashes and then reformed by witness memory. People cried and chewed their nails. I learned a new craft: how to read a burnt paper by the curl of its ash.
"Whoever wrote that rhyme," Bram said, "is playing with a pattern."
"And patterns need players," I answered. "I want to know who invited the mice."
Mice had already done what mice do when left alone with rot. They ate where the dead had been soft. They had been set like a trap, fed with meat on a hat, then turned loose to feed. "Who feeds them?" Bram asked.
"I can think of one woman," Hallie George said quietly. "She glows the way a match does before a fire. She is gentle, and she smiles with teeth."
She said it like an accusation and a dirge. Hallie had been the maid to many at the big house and knew smiles that masked knives.
"She seemed small at first," Hallie continued, "but she hides a different kind of strength."
Hallie's voice made the world still like a breath waiting on the edge of sound.
We learned, over bitter bread and more bitter facts, that not every villain tastes like rot. Some wear perfume. Some give presents. Some smile.
There was one man who needed a punishment beyond the law's slow hands. Jaime Durand—called Ma San by everyone—had been taking what he wanted from the weak for years. He had touched people who could not speak, had traded their bodies for favors, then laughed about it with his cronies.
"You took the wrong woman," I told him the night I found him in the stable. "You thought you could take another person's life and let the town forget."
He spat. "And what then, thief? You and your dainty hands think you can punish me?"
I did not answer with words. I answered with a plan. We could have sent him to Bram's people, or to the magistrate. But sometimes towns want the music of a public clearing, a moment when everyone sees the rotten thing get pulled out into light and crumbles.
We led Jaime Durand into the square at dawn.
"Bring him!" I shouted.
People came out of doors in their nightshirts and packed the square. Bram's men stood in a line. Mark was at my side. Clifford puffed and patted his pipe as if he were taking his seat for a story. Hallie and Andrei stood at the edge, faces pale. Even Karen Brantley had brought a lantern. Word had spread like a fever: a punishment would be seen.
Jaime swaggered in with two paid men. His coat was late fashion and his boot heels shone. He smirked like a man who thinks bells ring for him.
"What is this?" he asked loudly. "A halting of commerce? A joke?"
"Not a joke," Bram said, voice full of iron. "You will be shown the harm you have done."
He pushed Jaime to the center. I stood across from him.
"You've taken what wasn't yours," I said.
Jaime laughed. "And what is yours, dove? Words?"
"No. Children," I said. I looked into the crowd. Eyes found things. Eyes are hungry for truth. "You thought you could hide in gutters. You thought no one would notice the footsteps you left by the river."
He sneered. "You can only accuse, sword-girl."
"Accuse? I will prove it."
We rolled out what we had—testimony, a string of lies Jaime had told to different women, the pattern of keys and favors he had used to catch girls alone. Bram slammed down a leather bundle. Jaime's smirk began to crack.
"Look," Bram said. "This is one of the scarves you gave to the girl at Mill Lane. The same dye, the same knot. You gave it to two other women before she died. You wore the same glove at each meeting."
Jaime's face grew hard. "You have fabric."
"Fabric ties names," I said. "And your blade stitched more than one wound."
The first sound that broke him was a murmur. The crowd had no phones or cameras. They had faces, hands, voices. A woman in the back began to cry. A man slapped his palm to his brow. Children squinted from behind legs. Someone began to chant: "Tie him! Tie him!"
Jaime's voice rose, then thinned. "You lie! You witches and captains—" He tried to laugh, and the laugh came out small. Bram motioned, and two men pinned Jaime’s arms behind him.
"Keep him still," Bram said. "We will show the town the consequences of your trade."
They stripped his coat in front of everyone—a humiliation; the kind of stripping that leaves a man's pride as bare as his shoulders. The crowd gasped. He was a known figure; his exposure made children point.
"Look at him now!" a woman huffed. "The man who boasts in wine and slaps girls' faces—see him flinch!"
Jaime's face flushed from anger to pale shock. He tried to pull at their hold. His knees bent, and a tremble moved through him.
"Turn him," I told Bram. "Make him face those he has hurt."
Bram did. Jaime saw the faces gathered—Hallie, her chin lifted though her hands were shaking; an old baker who spat; a young mother clutching a child. For the first time, he saw them as people, not as breeding ground.
He started to yell. "I am innocent! I did no—"
"He touched my sister," a woman called. "He put his hand on her throat!" Her voice split like a bell. People nodded and stilled.
"Stop lying!" I said. "This man made bargains with the worst in their hearts. He turned money into silence and silence into broken lives."
Jeers turned to shouts. Jaime's face lost the last of his color.
He tried another move—denial. "You must be mad! I have friends. I'm a merchant's man. I paid for—"
"Paid?" Bram spat. "What price buys consent from those with black eyes and bruised arms?"
He went through the stages—first defiant, then shocked, then denial, then visible cracking.
"You're lying," he said to the crowd. "You—"
Someone threw a pot. The pot missed and smashed on the stones, but the sound of breaking glass was like a drumbeat. Jaime doubled over. People stepped closer. Mothers shook their heads. The old ones—those who had seen injustice before—nodded with a heavy, slow movement that felt like a funeral.
"Beg!" someone cried.
Jaime's laugh faltered. He saw the children, then the mothers, then a man he had once paid off but who now stood with folded arms. The man blinked, and Jaime's expression melted.
"Please—" he said, voice small. "Please. No. I will—"
He begged. The word landed in the square and fell like a dropped stone into water. Ripples of disgust ran around. Someone spat. Someone took out a rag and waved it in disgust. People who had nodded earlier now shook their heads and stepped back as if to keep the stain from them.
"No," I said quietly. "Begging won't buy back what you took."
He fell to his knees with a wet sound of cloth on stone. His coat, once expensive, lay dusty. He reached up, as if to clasp at mercy.
"Please!" he said. "I have children—"
"Children who deserve better than you," Bram said. "You will be taken to prison. The magistrate will ask you your price. The town will remember you."
Jaime had moved from arrogance to pleading to collapse. He sobbed small and fierce. Women hissed and called him a beast. Men gripped him tighter.
"Now," I said, so the crowd could hear, "you will be made to face what you did. Those you harmed will stand. You will hear their names and know each one was a person."
They brought forward anyone who wanted to speak. Each voice added a nail to the coffin of his vanity. He crumpled with each name, hands at his face, voice broken. He begged all over, sometimes in a roar, sometimes in a whisper.
"Don't—please—stop," he gasped when a survivor spoke of a night of tears. "I didn't—"
"No," the woman said. "You did. You will learn silence cannot hold what truth can make heard."
People began to clap—not a cheering clap but the kind that closes a jury's fist. Some took pieces of cloth to mark the crime. A few younger men in the crowd raised their hands, not to strike but to hold Jaime down as the guards took him.
When they lifted him, he looked every inch the man unmade. His knees scraped the stone, his boots flopped like old leaves. His voice had sunk to a wheeze.
"Please!" he begged again. He knelt and the sun hit his shoulders. He looked like a man who had been burned and couldn't understand he had set the fire.
"No more bargaining," Bram said. "You will go to a cell. And you will be remembered."
The crowd watched until they had no more faces to spare. They watched until Jaime vanished into the magistrate's wagon. They watched until silence settled like a lid.
We did not kill Jaime in the square. We did not set the law in our own hands. But the square does something laws sometimes cannot: it strips a man of pretense and hands him to the world he tried to profit from. He left with his pride gone and his face open to the dawn.
Afterward, people came to me with hands full of small favors—a saved ribbon, a loaf of bread. They said thank you like a currency.
"You could have let them deal with him," Mark said as we walked away.
"I let them look," I said. "People needed to see that their voices count."
Mark nodded. "You didn't break the law. You moved the town."
We were young then, and we thought moving towns was almost the same as mending them.
But not everything was wrapped neatly. The song kept ringing.
"Who wrote the rhyme?" Andrei asked later, tapping the vellum of an old pamphlet with his finger.
"I don't know yet," I told him. "But I know someone fed it into the mouths of children, and someone used its lines to mark deaths. The writer is still out there."
"The woman who cut the girl's tongue," Bram said quietly, "she was bold."
"Bold does not mean safe," I said.
"Who was she?" Mark asked.
"She had the best smile and the worst hands," Hallie said. "And a name I heard once in a whisper—Greta Mason, from the kitchen. Her life was a slow burn."
Greta was gone by the time we ran down the story. The woman who had buried someone alive was half-done herself, and when we asked about her help, we found threads that went deeper—into debts paid by gold, into favors, into a house that had too many keys.
The last line of the rhyme lurked like a promise. "Big flowers, sun on you, make flower paste under the vine." That one made my stomach sick.
"What is 'flower paste'?" I asked.
"Buried," Bram said. "What flowers feed on."
We had dug and found bones, a woman, and the last pieces of a life. We held them in our arms like a promise.
"Will they sing it forever?" I asked one night, as the moon rode low and Black Panther wound around Mark's ankle like a shadow that wanted to sleep.
"Until we teach them to sing another tune," Mark said.
So we taught them. We taught them to sing about bread and barns and the small trade of the market. We taught them to sing names of those who fought for them and to whisper the ones who were lost.
And at the end, when the garden's pink petals wilted to dust, I sat on the stone where we had dug up the buried thing and set a little blue handkerchief on the ground—a piece of evidence, a small comfort, a map back to what had been lost.
"Do you remember the rhyme?" Mark asked.
I looked at him and then at the black shape of Black Panther sitting like a king.
"Yes," I said. "I remember it because I can see where the lines point. And because I still hum it in the market, in a new way."
I folded the handkerchief, placed it in my pocket, and walked back down the lane where children were playing, their voices bright and ignorant of bones.
"Sing something kinder," I told them. "Sing for the living."
One of them looked at me, big-eyed and serious.
"How does it go?" he asked.
I smiled and taught him a little song about bread. He sang it like a promise.
Above us, the black cat watched, and the nursery rhyme remained—only now, every time it came up, someone else would answer with a bright little tune about waking and about work and about a hand that can hold another, like ice that won't cut the skin but like a child who takes your hand.
We had pulled the rotten things from the garden and put them where the sun could find them. The rhyme still lived, but its teeth were less sharp.
Mark rested his hand on my shoulder.
"Will it be enough?" he asked quietly.
"It has to be," I said. "For now, we have root, and we have root's work."
At the edge of the lane a child started the old song—then stopped, unsure, then smiled and began a new line.
"Sun bright, bread warm, neighbor's hand," the boy sang.
I nodded. That new smell—warm and not rotten—was what I wanted to inlay in the town's small chest.
Black Panther flicked his tail and walked with us, the cat's blue eyes glinting like secrets we had already told each other.
And when the tune ended, I walked home with Mark, the handkerchief in my pocket, and the nursery rhyme folded into the story we could now tell differently.
The End
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