Face-Slapping13 min read
Two Graves, One White Flower
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They had sold me six years ago. Today I came back to see my parents, and the only light waiting was two slabs of stone.
"I came back," I told the earth, because there was no one left to hear me.
"Casey? Are you sure she can do this?" a voice asked behind me. Cooper Briggs stood to the side, his hands jammed deep in his pockets, eyes like two small frightened birds.
"I can," I said. "I will."
He watched me kneel, touch the cool concrete of both graves, not able to say my parents' names. I had kept the white hairpin tucked behind my ear for six years; now I took it off and laid it on the left stone.
"Why did they do it?" Cooper muttered. "Why did they take you away?"
"Ask them," I said. "Ask the people who bought and sold us."
He did not answer. His mouth closed into a thin line. He was the one who had been timid enough to let them buy me, yet bold enough to be the buyer. I had seen him the night they dragged me away. He had pressed my head down, shoving me into a life that wasn't mine. For six years I lived the life they arranged for me—work, shame, a child, noise, hunger, and the kind of quiet black nights where you learn the exact angle of a bucket handle and the swing of a pig's tail.
"I want to go home," I had begged in silence as I folded straw mats and handled pig feed.
"You won't," they had said. "No one bought our women and let them go."
They were wrong. They had returned me for a day, with a small army of watchers, all of them silent and full of suspicion. They thought they still owned me. They thought owning was enough to make me small.
I told them I wanted to visit my parents' grave and come back. Cooper brought me. Booker Blankenship, the one who had more money and a bigger house and more teeth in his grin than a good man should have, watched me like a hawk.
"You stay close," Booker told Cooper when we left. "Don't let her wander."
"I won't," Cooper said. "I won't."
He lied.
At the gravesite I knelt, and my breath became a river of grief. I had dreamed of gentle hands, of a mother calling my name, of my father's crooked smile. I had dreamed of a door swinging open. Instead, I found stone, two names that read like an old closed book, and a white hairpin.
"Casey," Cooper whispered later as we walked back. "We should go. They'll be waiting."
"I know," I said. "But listen—" I touched his arm, and he flinched—"they sold us. They sold women like we were objects. I won't let it go."
"You want revenge?" Cooper asked, voice small.
"I want them to know what it feels like to be broken," I said. "To feel their world crumble in front of them. To lose what they think they own."
He frowned. "That's dangerous."
"It's already dangerous," I said. "But danger keeps me alive."
The village had rules: don't speak too loud, don't ask too many questions, don't pry into a man's chest. The rules had kept my mouth shut for six years. Now I would break them.
Back in the yard where Booker and Cooper's family lived, everyone watched my face for cracks. I put the white hairpin back in my hair, deliberately. It was a small sign—innocent and clean. People reacted to small signs in big ways in that village.
"She's gone soft," one auntie hissed. Virginia Flowers pressed a cloth to her mouth and pretended she wasn't listening.
"She'll bring shame," her neighbor said.
"She already has," Virginia replied aloud. "They took her away and came back. What else do you want?"
"Let her be," I said when someone muttered close. "I'm well."
"Well? You look like you've been run over."
I kept talking as if nothing burned under my skin. The village had believed a story for years: that the bought wives either ran away or settled. The truth—what I had seen—was not something they wanted to repeat. I had seen girls murdered when they resisted. I had seen the worst corners of people's hearts.
I had also seen how money bent the rules. Booker had more money. Booker had power. Booker was the man whose house had the singed prayer mat and the hanging lantern with the cracked glass. Booker had driven the car that came once a month with sacks and young faces.
That was the man I chose to get close to.
"Make him believe you want him," I told myself. "Let Cooper be the coward he is—use him."
I changed myself to fit the broken mold. I smiled in the morning. I took food prepared with hands that had been taught to cook for others. I let Booker watch like a landlord watches a tenant who might leave.
"It would do us good if you helped out at Booker's," Cooper said one evening. "It will mend fences."
"I'll go," I said. "For a time. For a reason."
I went. I watched Booker's house like a hawk watches a field. I laughed when his mother, Virginia Flowers, called me a saint.
"She's a good girl," Virginia told Booker once when he muttered to himself. "She stays. She works. She keeps the house."
"Makes him look better," Booker said. "Better than all the others who tried to run."
"Keep her close," Virginia said. "You might be the one happy for once."
I kept my face blank. "My hands are rough," I said to be humble. "But they know how to work."
"You're not like the rest," Booker said later, taking me aside. His grin was a mix of hunger and ownership. "You listen, Casey. If you stay, you'd have more. You'd be safe."
"And if I don't stay?" I asked.
"Then I'll make sure it's hard for you," he said softly. "I've paid for things like you before. I know how to keep them."
Inside me the old frightened girl flickered and almost died. I fed her to the plan.
I learned to catch the rhythm of Booker's temper. He liked to show off in the yard. He liked to have a woman who looked at him like light. He liked approval. He hated being looked down upon. He was proud like a rooster that doesn't know when winter comes.
I let him believe I was soft. Then I let Booker see what a fool Cooper was.
One evening, I let Cooper overhear a careless throwaway that made him squirm.
"She's better than the ones you get," Booker bragged, to his cronies in his yard. "She keeps her mouth shut."
"Think she'll stay?" one man snorted.
"With me? Of course." Booker laughed. "She'll have a roof, food, a place where no one ever asks questions."
Cooper's face burned. He was a man who had always been in Booker's shadow; he was the one who paid and then hid.
I let Cooper notice me lingering close to Booker. I let myself trip and let Booker catch me. I whispered lines I had learned on the road.
"I always thought you were different," I said to Booker one night, eyes glossy like someone making a small, private surrender.
"Different enough," he said, putting his hand on my back. "You're different from the rest."
"Do you ever think about leaving?" I asked, chest tight.
Booker laughed. "Who would take her? Who would want a woman like you? Stay, Casey. We will keep you safe."
I wanted to spit, but instead I leaned my forehead to his shoulder. I let him feel like a man.
Cooper watched. He watched me leaning on him and saw the green veins in his own face pulse. He saw the way Booker owned the air between us.
"Do you want me to take you away?" Cooper croaked later, voice thin. "I can—"
"No," I said. "You're not that kind."
"Not that kind?" he said. "What do you mean?"
"I mean you're not the one with hands that can make men listen," I said. "But you are useful. You started this. Help me finish."
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Keep him jealous," I told him. "Stir the pot. Make Booker feel something he cannot buy."
He nodded slowly, like a gull bobbing on a flat sea. "I can do that."
The plan was crude and honest: make Booker want me enough to take what he thought belonged to him, then use that wanting to fuel a fire between him and Cooper. If two proud men could be made to turn on each other, their ruin would be sweeter and public.
"It will hurt," Cooper said once, when I told him the full plan. "When they fight, someone could die."
"Then someone deserved to die," I said. "They killed my chance to go home. They sold other girls. They cannot live in peace."
He shivered. "You are cruel."
"You taught me cruelty," I answered. "You taught me survival."
Weeks passed. I let Booker hold me in the way he liked: brief, possessive, with a cloth's worth of tenderness. I let Cooper watch and rage. I whispered Booker's name when it suited me, and screamed when the plan asked for it. I lied until I believed those lies.
And then it happened—I missed my period.
"Two months," I told the women who gossiped by the river. "Two months."
"That's not Cooper's," someone said.
"It couldn't be his," Virginia mused. "He is too timid."
Word travelled as it always did: fast and vicious.
Booker came that day like a storm. He grabbed me in the yard, anger and triumph both making his jaw hard.
"Who's the father?" he demanded. "Don't lie to me."
"Who's to say?" I murmured, and let my eyes fall away.
He believed what he wanted to believe: that I belonged to him. I let him believe. I let Cooper believe.
"Make him own it," I told Cooper in private. "Make him claim it."
He did. He told Booker in a drunken hurry that the child was his. He said it to make Booker jealous, to make Booker fight for what he saw as his being taken. Cooper's words were a match to dry grass.
The fireworks came in the way villagers love: loud, public, and with witnesses.
"You're crazy," Booker roared the day he confronted Cooper in the square. "You claim what belongs to me? After what you did? After what you made me lose?"
"You called her yours," Cooper spat. "You bought her. You had no right to own her pride."
Voices gathered. Aunties shoved children back. Wheels stopped. People leaned on fenceposts and took out pipes, and eyes flashed in a way I had learned to read.
"Don't fight," I cried, grabbing at Cooper. "Stop it. Stop it now!"
But once you light a fire in a field that dry, stopping it is not an option. Men carry tinder in their chests. I had pulled at both tinders until both burned.
They clashed like bulls. It was not tidy. It was not noble. It was raw, animal, public.
"You're nothing!" Booker screamed at Cooper, swinging a cleaver he'd grabbed from his bench. "You bought a life you could not handle."
"You're the one who sold it!" Cooper returned, stumbling, eyes wide with fear and something close to feral courage. "You're the one who took her voice and left her with nothing."
People watched, mouths open. Someone screamed for them to stop; someone else shouted to fetch a stick; another ran to find the magistrate. But in that village, honor is a combustible thing, and the crowd becomes both fuel and witness.
At some point, both men had weapons. I stood between them like a pale marker in a storm, holding my daughter to my chest. The little girl opened her eyes and looked at the men like they were monsters. She could not understand stakes older than her.
"Don't—" I said.
"Get out of my way!" Booker barked, pulling his arm back.
Cooper lunged and Booker swung. The crowd gasped. Then there was a sound like breaking wood and the scream of a man who had been cut deeper than he knew.
Booker staggered. Blood came bright and fast. He clutched his side and fell to his knees.
"Booker!" someone cried.
"Stay with me!" Virginia shouted, hands flapping like a bird.
Cooper didn't slow. He pressed his attack into frenzy as if each strike might empty his chest of its chest-ache. He seemed to change shape; the boy who had hidden behind pockets became an animal who thought killing would make him whole again.
They rolled in mud and blood, and the crowd circled like vultures at a kill.
"Please stop!" I screamed, voice raw. "Both of you—stop!"
They didn't stop.
I remember the way people pressed forward to see—faces, mouths, eyes full of disbelief and secret satisfaction. There was finger-pointing and someone recording with a small black phone. Some people had the coldness of those who have seen this before and prefer to watch.
Then Booker made a move that set everything to a different pitch: he reached with his left hand, grabbed Cooper's wrist, and pulled him in. They fell together. Booker, in a red spray, managed one last shove, and Cooper's blade found Booker's belly.
Booker looked down, stunned. Blood spread like ink through fabric.
"No—" he said.
For a second time the crowd couldn't decide whether to act. Virginia screamed, a raw explosion of grief. Someone tried to tug Cooper back. But when two roosters go at each other until both have no fight left, the world watches and does not interfere.
Cooper staggered, knife in hand, eyes crazed. He lunged with what was left. Booker, half-righted, plunged a long nail of metal into Cooper's shoulder—a desperate defensive act that meant as much as a plea.
The two men slid to the ground, locked, and the light went out in both their eyes. They died like dogs in the yard.
The scene that followed was long and public and awful—the punishment I had built toward, and perhaps the only true justice I could find in a broken world.
People screamed. Mothers clapped hands over their mouths. Children wailed. Some bent to help; most only pressed forward to look.
"Call the magistrate!" someone begged.
"Call the constable!" another yelled.
Virginia ran to Booker's side and pressed her face to his chest. "You were a fool," she sobbed, looking up at me with hatred and grief mixed. "You promised me—"
"What did you expect?" I asked, voice small. "What did you expect when you bought people like goods?"
Her fingers dug into Booker's shirt, and she shook him like a woman trying to wake the dead. "Stay with me! Stay with me!"
"Get away from him," someone hissed at her. "He killed. Both of them killed. Move!"
I stood in the circle of faces, clutching my daughter. The spectators' reactions were a map of the village's soul: some were stunned; some were whispering; some took pictures. A boy near the fence laughed, a short, shocked laugh.
"She wanted this," someone muttered.
"No!" I shot back. "You think this is what I wanted? Do you think this will bring them back?"
A woman spit. "They died. They're dead. Good."
"Good?" I echoed, and my voice broke. "You call this good?"
Across the yard, two bodies were being tended to by an old man who knew how to close wounds—too late. People moved as if they had not seen what they'd come for.
The punishment had come public because I had designed it so. I had wanted them to see, had wanted all of them—neighbors, aunties, grandparents—watch the men they had protected crumble. The fall had to be visible. Justice had to be noisy.
For five hundred words and more, the square thrummed with response. Villagers argued about who started it. Some blamed me; some blamed the men. People whispered about the hairpin in my hair, about my daughter's eyes. A woman with a stiff back walked to me and spat on the ground. "You made them murder," she said. "This will get us trouble."
Virginia, crumpled on the ground with Booker's head in her lap, stared up at me like a woman betrayed. "You broke everything," she said. "You took my son from me."
"He never was yours," I said. "Not any more than your money could buy a heart."
A small knot of men came forward and shoved people back. They wanted order. The magistrate was called. Someone tried to take the child's hand. "No," I said, sharp. "She stays with me."
People point fingers, as if their hands are clean. I am not innocent. I chose this path. But so did they. They all did. They let this happen for years, and now, cradling my daughter, I watched the fallout.
Police arrived hours later. They looked grave and slow. They took statements. They took my hairpin and tried to unpick my motives like a seam.
"What happened here?" the constable asked me. He expected a tidy version—bought woman goes mad, kills greedy men. That would have been a story.
"They took what wasn't theirs," I said. "They sold lives. They thought it was trade."
He frowned. "You set them against each other."
"I did," I said. "Yes."
He wrote quickly, his pen scratching. People murmured and avoided my eyes. Children held ears. Someone pointed at the white hairpin on the ground where I had dropped it in the struggle, and someone picked it up. It was bent.
I remember Virginia's face when she looked at me in those minutes: not only hatred but a kind of dawning comprehension that perhaps she had been a part of the machinery. She flinched like a person who has been punched by a truth.
"This will ruin the village," a woman sobbed. "This will bring magistrate trouble, outsiders, the kind of paper that writes about us and does not understand our lives."
"Do you care?" I asked. "Do you care that girls were sold? That some of them were beaten, some left to die? That mothers sold their daughters? Do you care that my parents died trying to find me?"
Silence.
They had mouths to speak but no one wanted to say the things that mattered. Instead they all turned to watch the spectacle of two men who had been a storm of cruelty and cowardice—both ended in a silent heap.
I could feel the crowd's weight like a net tightening. Some felt pity; some felt fear. Some felt that the village had been cleansed. Some felt that a wrong had gone too far.
"She must be punished," an old man said. "You cannot let someone go who did this."
"She is a victim," another argued, voice cracking. "She was taken."
They argued about law while the bodies cooled. They spoke of the magistrate. They spoke of retribution.
By dawn the next day, the yard had the hollow look of a stage after the play. People came to the fence to talk. Children played among the evidence. Someone placed flowers at the threshold of the yard where the fight had ended. I watched, staring at my daughter's dark eyes, and felt both triumph and a hollow ache.
"I wanted them to feel the taste of losing everything," I told Cooper's dead eyes, lying on the hard ground. He could not hear. But some kind of justice lived in the watching.
When the magistrate took me aside later, his brow heavy with the kind of law that considers only facts, he asked, "Did you intend this?"
"I intended them to stop buying and selling daughters," I said.
"Violence doesn't stop violence," he said.
"Sometimes," I said, "it does."
They put me through the motions: statements, custody questions, the exchange of papers. They wanted stories. I gave them only the truth and a few omissions. I could not give them everything.
At the end, when the yard fell quiet and the bodies were carried away under tarps, I wrapped my daughter in a blanket and walked out of that village I had been sold into. Cooper's eyes had been wide as if surprised by the end. Booker had a look of a man who had believed himself too clever to die.
Outside the gate, a woman I had known from the years of working there touched my arm. "What will you do now?" she asked, voice shaking.
"I will go home," I said. "I will bury the rest of the past in the ground with my parents and walk away."
"With him?" she asked, nodding at the little girl.
"With her," I corrected. "My child."
She looked at the hairpin, which had been returned to me by an officer who didn't know what to do with it, and she said, "How will you live?"
"I will live the only way I know," I said. "Step by step. Day by day."
The magistrate let me go with conditions. There were people who would never forgive me; there were people who would spread the story until even distant towns knew the name of the village where two men died in blood. There were those who would say I had brought ruin and those who would whisper that I had finally taught a hard lesson.
I left with my daughter sleeping heavy against my chest. I held the white hairpin against my palm until it warmed to my skin. I thought of my parents' graves and the promise I had spoken to their stones.
"I did it," I whispered to the pin like a child. "I did it for you."
When we reached the worn gate of the house my parents had left, I set down the child and walked to the small kitchen table they had kept. I opened the bottom drawer where they'd hidden a few coins and a photograph. There was no fortune, no letters of law, only a little house and enough memory to make me whole.
I put the white hairpin in an old wooden box and closed it. The little girl reached up and touched my cheek, sleepy again.
"Will we be safe?" she asked in the way only a child can ask, all bluntness and trust.
"We will be," I said. I did not know if it was true, but I wanted her to believe it.
At night I went to sleep for the first time without the sound of people watching. I dreamed my father opening a door and my mother making tea. In the morning I woke and the white hairpin was beside my bed, bent but there.
"One day," I told the girl, "we will plant a flower there—white, so no one forgets why we came back."
She smiled in her sleep, and in the garden outside the house two small graves waited. I had left the hairpin on one and drawn a cross in the earth with my toe.
I had taken my revenge. The village had seen their monsters fall in the open, and for all its mess and blood and guilt, I could not say I regretted it. Regret had no room for my parents' faces.
They had punished the men publicly. They had watched. They had lost. The white hairpin was small, but it would keep the story alive, and when I buried it again beside the graves, I whispered to the stones, "I came back."
The End
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