Rebirth11 min read
The Potatoes in My Pocket
ButterPicks12 views
I remember the dust the way some remember a face. It stuck to my lips and to the inside of my mouth until every word tasted like sand. The third drought had ended half the fields and most of the names in our village. We left in a long snake of bundles and fear. People talked about water like it was a rumor—like some promise that might not come true.
"I won't give her away for less than a sack," the butcher said, pushing the girl with the rope. "Half a sack, take it or leave it."
"Half a sack won't do," the old woman insisted. "She's all I've got left. Please—"
"Please? Please what? We need food now." The butcher's lips were dry as the bark on the dead trees. He laughed without sound. "You want her to starve with you?"
I was twelve the day they tried to sell me like I was some scrap of meat. I watched the butcher's knife glint at the market before I learned how to keep my mouth shut. I watched people bargain for children like they had nothing to them but bones.
"I won't be sold," I said.
They froze. The butcher spat. "Girl, don't talk back."
"Let her go," a woman shouted from the trees. Her hair had been braided and torn; her hands smelled of smoke and water. She moved like someone who had nothing left to lose; her voice had a timbre I recognized later as stubbornness. "That's my daughter."
"Your daughter?" The butcher sneered. "You? You have the look of someone who would trade blood for barley."
She did not answer. She had a small boy clinging to her skirt and an empty look in her eyes I have come to know as the look of too much fatigue. She pushed at me and I found that the ropes around my hands had become loose. The lightning came before anyone could name it.
A crack of light split the air and something hot and white struck the dirt. The butcher's boot smoked. He staggered back, eyes rolling, and there in the brief hush the rope at my wrists fell away.
"Don't touch her!" the woman shouted.
I ran.
"Come back for the sack!" the butcher yelled after me, more to his pride than to me. "There are others to buy—better meat—"
I found shelter beneath a dead tree with my mother and my brother, Lucas, who had always been easy to look after and foolishly brave in the best of ways. He smiled like lantern light. My mother smelled of smoke and river water and the way she rubbed her fingertips suggested she fixed things that were meant to stay broken.
"They'd sell you for food," she told me that night. "They'd sell the shirt off a man's back if it meant a belly with bread."
"Then don't let them," I said.
She looked at me—the mother I had and the woman who had pulled me free—and she nodded once. "We'll go on. We will not let them make you into something else."
We left our village the next day with a handful of people who waited for others to decide how to live. People whispered about stealing and about which village would be better. We kept our heads down and our packs light. Hunger teaches you what matters most: water, warmth, and someone who will not hand you over to the butcher.
"We'll follow you," Gabriel said the day he met us. He carried a child on one hip like he had practiced at home and his hands looked as if they had been used to coaxing rather than hitting. "If you'll have us."
I did not expect kindness. It is a strange thing to find in the middle of dry fields, but it appeared in Gabriel's steady gaze. "You can walk with us," I told him. "If you keep your hand to yourself."
He grinned like a promise. "I don't plan on an empty hand."
We gathered a small group—Daniella, my mother; Gabriel; Saul, Gabriel's boy; Thomas, a quiet wiry orphan; Madeleine, a blind old woman who carried a basket of small kind things; Boyd, Madeleine's little one; Jaida, a quiet woman who flinched less than most; Harrison, an old vendor who said he could read the land like a book; and a few others. We were a strange family of found pieces.
We were moving like ghosts until the day I found the handle.
"I need to go," I told Daniella when the sudden pull came. "I'll be back fast."
She held me by my shoulders, the way a mother does before letting a child fall and learn to fly. "Be quick and be careful."
There, behind a scrub and a dead stump, my hands found something cold. It was a bronze ring with a tiny red stone set into it. It fit around my wrist like a secret. I pressed the stone, and the world opened.
A column of smoke and a frame of gold blinked into being. It was a small room—smaller than any hut, smaller than the shed Gabriel had lost to the drought. Inside: a barrel of water, sacks of potatoes, a crate of red roots. I could have taken it all. I could have been selfish and hidden everything. But something about hunger makes you understand greed the moment you taste it. I carried water out and a sack of potatoes and closed the little door.
"Somebody came," Daniella said, out of breath, as I beckoned. "Where? What did you find?"
I showed her the small pool we had filled in the dried-out hollow and the potatoes we’d buried. Her face opened like a light.
"You found water," she whispered.
"Found," I said. "Not taken. For those who we trust."
We used the space like a blessing. It refilled like a well after each dip, as if some kind of mercy had taken to filling it again. We fed hungry mouths. I started thinking of the space as a pocket inside the world, a little lending place for the desperate.
We were careful, for a while. We shared only with those who had shown us kindness. The rest of the line—especially the old woman from my own house, Petra Fleming, and her granddaughter Luisa Howard—watched us like predators in waiting.
Luisa used to snarl at us. "Hand me your food," she said once, with the audacity of those who have always been used to getting what they want. Her grandmother agreed with her, telling our neighbors that we were hoarding. "You think you're better?" Luisa taunted. "You think you'll keep warm forever with your little tricks?"
One day the air snapped. The village sides split because hunger makes people forget the difference between right and necessary. Someone said, "They have food," and the word spread like a fever. Crowds are funny that way; one small voice will swell into a hundred and then a thousand.
"We ought to teach them," Petra said loudly when she realized we had more than we said. "They are hoarding and lying."
"She's lying," Luisa crowed. "She has food. I've seen them with bundles. They laugh at us." Her voice had the bright cruelty of someone who had never learned to fear hunger.
I should have been afraid. I had seen men take what they wanted before. I had learned the sounds of knives being sharpened on stones, and how quick hands were when the belly was empty. But Daniella stepped forward and faced them.
"Leave us," she told them. "If you pull aside our skirts, you will find only the same as you: empty sacks and tired bones."
"Show us," Petra demanded. She stepped forward. Her hands were suddenly less steady. The crowd pushed. Men shoved. Someone said, "Tear it open! Let's see the treasure!"
Daniella unfastened her pack slowly and deliberately. "If you take, you must pay. You will pay with this," she said, and she lifted her chin like a queen who had nothing left to lose. She put the bronze ring and the red stone into her palm and let the sun catch it.
"You're bluffing," a voice hissed. "You would give the proof away?"
"I would do worse than that," she said. "You will not lay your hands on my daughter, on my grandchildren. If you try, you will have to answer for it."
The first one to move was an overfed man with five sons, the sort who had always let his family grow fat on other people's charity. He lunged for Daniella's pack. Saul and Thomas and Boyd threw themselves forward. "No!" they screamed.
At first it was only some pushing. Then quickly—because hunger gives people speed when they are near violence—hands grabbed, faces climbed like vines. They pulled at skirts, they clawed pockets, they called names that had no power except to wound.
"What are you doing?" I yelled. "Leave my mother!"
"You think you can keep them warm forever?" Luisa said, and she smiled in a way that made me hate her. Petra went white as she watched the circle close.
"Stop!" Gabriel's voice cut through like a blade. He tried to hold the line but the crowd was a thing with momentum. Men shoved him aside.
For a terrible minute I thought we would lose everything. Then something happened I could not plan for: the crowd turned on the three who had first accused us—Petra, Luisa, and an uncle who had sneered at us for day. It started with a shove and the man who had lured everyone to us found himself on the ground. People wanted someone to punish. The crowd needed blood and wanted it quick.
At first they laughed—wild, nervous laughter. "We'll take it from them," someone shouted. "They'll pay!"
"Take what? Their pride?" I said, but it was not enough. The crowd surged. I saw stones thrown. Petra's shoulder was struck; she fell on the earth with a cry that sounded like a small animal.
"Stop!" I screamed. "This is not the way."
But once a mob decides, it has a rhythm of its own. Hands grabbed Petra and Luisa. They were dragged into the center as if they were robbed of the very air that kept them standing. I watched their faces change—the small cruelty they'd worn like armor melted into surprise, then fury, then a fierce, guttural denial.
"No! Stop this! I'm not—" Petra's voice shook as the men around them chanted accusations. Luisa's face was red not only from blows but from a dawning horror.
"You're lying! You called them thieves! You said they'd starve us!" a woman cried, and slapped Luisa across the face. The smack echoed. Heads turned. Someone pulled out a scrapbook and started filming—everyone was quick to capture the moment, as if to prove they had been right the whole time.
"You think we didn't do right? You think we'd steal from you?" Another man shoved Luisa; she was knocked to one knee. She clawed at the dirt like a spider trying to climb a wall. "You will see," she spat, breathless. "You'll see me—"
Her voice cut off when a man ripped open her blouse to look for hidden food. He found nothing. The crowd's mood shifted. The same hands that had hurled stones now searched pockets and pouches—any sign of dishonor, of treachery. Petra tried to stand and was shoved down again by a boot. "No! I'm your elder!" she pleaded.
A boy raised his phone and began recording. "Put it on the scroll!" he cried. "They'll like this. They'll see who chewed their bread."
The circling watchers made no move to stop them. Some clapped. Others wept. A woman near me started to chant: "We don't take from our own! We don't let them hoard!" Her voice was small and angry. I realized it was rage at scarcity that had lent her this zeal.
Then—then the story changed in the way such things do. Someone from the far edge of the crowd shouted, "Enough!" It was Gabriel. He pushed forward and took a stand between the beating hands and them. "Stop!" he roared, and in a moment his shouting became the louder thing. He was not alone. I saw Jaida, standing with a stick in her hand. Madeleines' blind eyes glistened. The crowd faltered.
"We won't become the thing that devours our own," Gabriel said to the circle. He planted his feet in the dirt and took a breath the size of a prayer. "If you want food, you will ask. If you want to take, you will be remembered for taking."
The change did not come for the heart of the offenders. It came for the crowd. They had fed on fear, and fear found another target: revenge is often its own medicine. Slowly, the blows stopped. Petra lay curled, weeping; Luisa sat on the ground, her face a map of humiliation, with dirt in her hair and tears cutting gritty tracks down her cheeks.
They had their faces burned by the truth in public. Luisa's eyes moved from outrage to denial—"It wasn't me!" she cried—then to the hard wetness of collapse. "No, I didn't know," she tried, but it was too late; the crowd's verdict had been delivered in public, and humiliations, once shared, echo long after the body remembers the pain.
People began to record the scene on their devices. Some people laughed. Some looked at their hands as if they had just eaten something bitter. A few clapped as they always clap at a performance: light-handed, shocked, satisfied in a shared cruelty. Others just stood silently, and their faces were gray with a new knowledge: when there is nothing to share, everyone becomes dangerous.
Petra crawled to her knees and begged for mercy, voice thin and tearing. "I only—" she sobbed. "I was hungry. Do not stone me. I was trying—"
"No excuses," another man said. "You cried wolf and now you have no voice."
Luisa crawled behind her grandmother and begged in staccato breaths. "Please. Forgive. Forgive me." The crowd's murmurs filled the air like a distant storm; some shook their heads, some spat in their palms and walked away. Someone recorded Luisa's pleas and shouted it to the group, "Here! She begs!" The recording would travel, and so would the shame.
We watched, horrified and a little relieved—because once the cruel had been struck down by the same hunger that birthed them, something like balance returned. But I held my brother Lucas through it all and knew that vengeance was a poor granter of safety. We had paid in fear and in the public exposure of someone's weakness. Even so, I would not forget how Petra's eyes had changed: from gloating to shock, then to stubborn denial and finally to begging. She had started the fire and had been burned by it. The crowd's reactions—some shocked, some eager with phones raised, some clapping—were human and ugly.
When the beating stopped and people sated their blood-thirst, Gabriel stooped and helped Petra to her feet. He bound her shoulder with a scrap and said softly, "If you can't care for your kin, don't try to frighten other people's." His voice was not a victory cry but a tired reprimand.
We left the scene with our hands stained in the dust and our names changed in a dozen mouths. The news would reach distant villages by the morning. I learned that shame and punishment had a currency all their own in a world starving for justice.
After that, we became careful again. People who had been so quick to judge now looked at us with a new understanding: we were not just lucky; we were dangerous, and they had seen what happens when hunger meets cruelty.
"Do we keep going?" Saul asked me that night by the little pool we had dug.
"We go," I answered. "We go where the water leads and we share with those who are honest. This is not mine to hoard."
A small group joined us because they had been fed and because Gabriel had bound them with a different loyalty—the kind that scatters when it is built on kindness. We taught each other to mend shoes, to light a fire with damp wood, to pluck mushrooms that could be trusted and to boil water until it sang. I used the bronze handle at night and learned the room's limits. It was not endless, but it refilled. I began to think of it as a promise in my pocket.
We walked, and the land changed. We found a cave with a trickle of water and a floor that held mushrooms like treasure. We made a life from the crumbs the world would not keep. We shared stories and roasted red roots and the children learned to run without the fear of being chosen for market.
And still, Petra and Luisa's punishment lay on our tongues like a lesson: there is a cost to cruelty, and sometimes the crowd will deliver it in full, with phones recording, with people clapping, with the guilty reduced to pleas and to the crumpled posture of the defeated. They were punished in public, in full view of the same people they had tried to frighten. The sight was both terrible and cleansing—a public reckoning that echoed for days.
On the last night I remember before the frost came, I knelt beside the bronze handle and wound my fingers around it. The little red stone warmed as if it remembered my palm. I pressed it and the room opened and filled and the potatoes waited like small suns.
"Will we ever have enough?" Thomas asked, cheeks full of roasted root.
"Enough is a quiet word," I said. "We will have enough for now."
I put two potatoes in my pocket and one more into the small sack for Daniella. Lucas slept with his head on his mother's lap. Gabriel snored softly beside the fire. Saul and Boyd and Thomas dreamed of bread. Outside, the dark clicked with small animal sounds and the sky went slow and bitter and cold.
I tucked the bronze handle closer against my skin and felt for the red stone. "Tick," I thought, as if the little thing had become a clock I could wind when the world seemed about to stop.
We had survived the market and the crowd. We had survived hunger and the public shame. We had found a door that made water and food appear. We had learned, the hard way, how to share without letting the world chew us up.
When morning came, I wound the handle once more and carried water to the little ones. The bronze was warm where my palm had rested, and the red stone winked like a private star. I had a thought then—simple and dangerous—that I kept close like a secret: as long as I had that handle, I would never be sold again.
The End
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