Sweet Romance15 min read
Wake Up in a Mourning Hall, Plant Crops, and Beat the Bullies
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I woke up to the smell of burnt paper and the dull echo of people talking too loud. My head felt like someone had put a hot iron inside it and turned it. I blinked and the world spun full of bright dots, then settled into a roof of thatch and the wooden beams of a small house. I was kneeling on straw, wearing stiff mourning cloth, and in front of me two coffins sat side by side. A brazier hissed. The place smelled of incense and old grief.
I tried to move. My hands fumbled at the coarse cloth on my arms. I felt whole. No broken bones. No blood. Nothing to match the memory slipping up through me: a cart, a shout, the screech of wood and metal, the hot taste of dirt when I hit the ground. I remembered leaving to buy medicine and then a crash. That should have meant pain, bandages, time. Instead, I opened my eyes into a funeral parlor.
“Fallon, are you alright? Where does it hurt?” a thin, anxious voice whispered near me.
“Braxton?” I heard myself say, and the name fit like a hand into a glove. Seeing him pulled me fully awake. My brother—older, gaunt but steady—was right beside me. He was the one who had stayed near the coffins and looked like he hadn’t slept. When he saw me open my eyes, he went pale with relief.
“Fallon! You scared me to death.” He grabbed my shoulders as if steadying himself as much as me. “You mustn’t do that again.”
I wanted to tell him I remembered being older, a researcher who had eaten the city’s quick soups and typed papers under neon lights, who knew how to grow a tomato that wouldn’t crack. Instead I shrugged like a frightened child. “Brother, I’m fine. I just felt dizzy.”
Some woman in the room who’d been shouting suddenly turned her face and brightened like a hound smelling fresh meat.
“Ah-ha!” she trilled. “See? You three need someone to care for you. If Fallon is weak and sick, you can come live with me and my son. We’ll look after you. We’ll take the property, sell the little house—”
I stiffened. The woman’s grin was all gums and teeth. Her voice slicked with something I had heard before: pity that’s really hunger.
“That’s enough,” a big voice cut in. A broad-shouldered man rose up and stood between the woman and the three of us. His chest looked like a wall of muscle. He spat across the air: “Beatriz, don’t start like this again.”
“Who are you to speak?” the woman snapped back. Her name, according to the rusted voice of rumor, was Beatriz Powell. She was the last person I wanted to meet. Her son stood by like a wolf.
“Cooper,” the big man said, and his tone turned soft. “She’s making trouble. Let the children be.”
“Don’t you two talk to me like that,” Beatriz huffed. “Those dead left them money. If they come to my house, I’ll help them. They’ll not live out in that hut.”
She meant the money. I had a cold little knot form in my chest. I touched my waist, where a small pouch would have been. Nothing. My memory prickled, though: my parents had died, they'd left silver to pay for Braxton’s medicine. The numbers—three taels for a month’s drugs—rose like a scar in my memory.
Cooper, the big man, stood like a mountain. “I don’t trust these people. They like to take things.”
“Then tell them to show us the money,” I said, testing the voice, the first true one I’d used since the funeral sounds had woken me.
“Don’t be silly, Fallon,” Braxton said, but I could feel in him the same worry that stripped me raw. If we had coin, those vultures would smell it. If we didn’t—if we were poor and tired and had no one—then everything would be worse.
I let myself look like a small, frightened thirteen-year-old. It worked. I turned onto the crowd, and started to cry. Small noises, the kind that tug the heart, started to ripple.
“Look at them,” Beatriz said loudly, like a theater performer. “Ungrateful. A poor widow would care for them and this is how they repay—”
“You took our coin!” I cried, then played it like I had been taught: anger, hurt, small voice. “You took twenty taels from my brother’s chest while we were set up to grieve!”
The words flipped their faces like paint. In the crowd people who had been leaning to Beatriz’s side cooled. Murmurs started and swelled. The kind of gossip that lives in a village is cruel, but it also has appetite for justice.
Someone near the front of the crowd stooped and found—what? A small black money pouch, ugly with dust. Someone unsnapped it. A hush fell like a blanket. They counted coins out, silver bright enough to make men blink.
“It’s twenty taels,” one voice said quietly, then louder: “That’s twenty taels.”
Beatriz’s smile froze. Cedric Cantrell—Beatriz’s son—blanched. Cedric tried to snatch the pouch back. He looked like he’d swallowed mistakes: a face red with anger and fear together.
“You’re accusing us?” Cedric snapped. “You made this—this lie—”
“Hold him,” Cooper said quietly.
The crowd had gone from bickering to a predator’s thirst. Voices pointed, years of gossip unspooled into accusations.
“You stole the children’s money!” a farmer yelled. “You came earlier, you argued, you were loud. You meant to take it.”
Beatriz’s mouth moved, then shut. Her eyes darted like a trapped animal. She tried to say she was there to help, that she was a relative. The villagers knew her better. The heat rose in their faces like an old coal.
No one had seen me slip the pouch into Cedric’s sleeve. I had had a plan: push them, let them show their ugly face, and let the village judge. That was what I’d learned living among people: expose lice, they show their sores.
Cedric’s expression turned from smug to terrified so fast I felt a stomach flip. He tried to laugh it off. “This is ridiculous. Where’s your proof?”
The proof lay on the ground—silver, dust, the look of twenty taels—and then in the crowd’s eyes. Murmur became accusation, accusation sharpened into action. Someone grabbed Cedric’s arm. He jerked free, but they had added hands, and he stumbled.
“Put him in a cart and take him to the yamen!” someone shouted.
“No! You can’t—” Beatriz tried to stop them.
“They stole from children!” the villagers cried. They pressed like waves. Cedric’s wife, Holly Koenig, who’d been silent in the doorway, suddenly began to weep. Her tears were not honest. Her hands clawed at her skirts like claws. Yet she did not come near to stop him.
Cedric’s face, for a moment, burned with blind pride. I had seen that look in men who thought they’d always get their way. Then the reality of weight came. Hands grabbed him. People pushed his shoulders. He tried to jab fists, to curse. His voice swung from anger to panic.
“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” Cedric screamed. “You’re all liars! That money—someone set me up!”
“Liar!” the crowd shouted back, and the words sounded like hammers.
A young man, coarse and blunt, stepped forward. He was a local authority—someone who could act. He had that brown look of people who’d been forced to keep peace. “Bring him to the clerk. We’ll take him to the magistrate.”
There was a great crowd, as the story wanted. People who had helped at the funeral now stood, mouths open. Some crossed themselves. Some shook heads. The gossips who had earlier smiled turned sour. A dozen of them seethed as if someone had cut them. A half dozen children peeked from behind legs.
I walked to the doorway as they dragged Cedric forward. He looked at me with a face going through stages: first hatred, then confusion, then denial so thick his voice cracked; next came fear, and finally the wilt of pleading.
“You—don’t do this—” he begged, faltering.
“Let him go,” Beatriz sobbed suddenly, but her voice had lost its swagger. Her hands came up, pitifully.
“Who took the money?” the village clerk demanded when they shoved Cedric before him. People crowded in. I stayed at the edge, pretending to be small.
Cedric spat. “You—this is a pack of lies! They—these children made it up to get attention!”
“No one makes up silver,” the clerk said. He untied the pouch again and showed it. A woman in the crowd held the coins under the sunlight like a counter to the world’s lies. “We will take him to the magistrate to be judged.”
That was the turning point. Cedric’s mouth formed a line. Fallacy melted out of him. He lunged to pick up the money—whatever he thought he could recover—but a dozen hands stopped him. People hissed. They pushed him down to his knees on the packed earth. The whole village watched.
Cedric’s face went through the full slide. In one breath he was arrogant. The next, he was stunned, as if someone had snatched a throne from under him. His eyes went wide and glossy.
“You have no proof!” he cried. “This is madness!”
The crowd’s whisper turned into a chorus of disgust. “Shame on you,” a voice muttered. “To steal from children.”
He clawed at his sleeve. “My pockets! Check my pockets! It’s not there, it’s not there!” He fumbled, torn between the instinct to deny and the rope of reality tightening. The clerk turned him inside out.
Someone dug into Cedric's coat and found a scrap of fabric that didn’t belong to him: a torn piece of the same mourning cloth I wore. The crowd murmured. Cedric’s face whooshed with color and then drained. He looked like a man woke in the wrong cell.
“I—” Cedric tried different tactics: barbed jokes, false bravado, ugly accusations. Each one fell flat.
Around us, the villagers reacted like a living thing. Some thrust forward to point, faces red and wet with judgment. Some pulled their children away. Some laughed—low, ugly guffaws. A few had pity but that pity was sour; they had been fooled before. A small girl mimicked Cedric’s last cry and the sound made people laugh harder.
Then the change. Cedric’s tone folded in on itself. He began to deny in a whisper. He swallowed words. He went silent as everyone counted him under the sun. Sweat and dirt shone on his forehead. The crowd closed in.
“No—please—” he began, the voice shrinking. The denial broke and was replaced by a choked plea. He knelt lower, limbs trembling. The canvas of his earlier pride lay in tatters at his feet. He reached his hands toward Beatriz, who had last held the loudest position of authority, as if there would be mercy in her hands.
“Mother, please—” he begged.
Beatriz’s face had hardened to stone. She looked away at first, like the person who had been called out had been a stranger. Then, with the slow motion of disaster, the skin around her mouth sank. She tried to straighten herself. Her breathing hitched. “They set us up… they planted it on me—” The words came in a scrape, thinner than before, as if her throat had been rubbed raw.
“You lied,” the clerk said quietly. He had that look of a man who had seen too many actions like this. “You and your son took a child’s savings.”
At the sound of that, a few people began to spit into the dirt or to mutter historic curses. Some of the younger men, who had grown up with Beatriz’s bullying, closed their fists and looked like they wanted to strike her. But they didn’t. Law matters had to be clean.
Cedric dropped to his knees fully. His face was pale. Tears started to come from him but they were not clean. He rolled his head and then bowed. “Please, please—” he said, voice small as if it had been shrunken. “I didn’t mean—”
“Then tell the magistrate that,” the clerk said. “On a stool of witness.”
Someone handed Cedric an old coarse cloth. He wrapped it about his hands and began to beg, “I swear, I swear I didn’t—” His voice broke into a sob that made a few women in the crowd hush.
The villagers, who had gathered to watch justice, shifted. Murmurs moved to pity and then to a coldness. People who had once smiled at Beatriz’s boldness now stepped back.
“You will be taken,” the clerk said. “There is law in this place. You will be judged by the magistrate.”
They picked Cedric up, and with each hand that took him, he yelled new cries. “No! No! I’m innocent! This is a set-up! The children—”
“Quiet!” someone snapped. It didn’t matter. The crowd was done listening to his perfume of lies.
Beatriz dropped to a stooped posture of a woman in pain. She tore at her sleeves and at last, something like shame showed in her face. She had tried to be big. Now she was small. She looked from person to person, and the crowd returned looks heavy as stones.
They led Cedric away with his hands bound. The cart that waits by the magistrate’s office waited. People watched him go. In the open way of a small town, they would talk about this for years. Parents would use it as a lesson. Children would point. The gossip would become legend.
I watched the cart leave. My knees were weak. Braxton put a hand on my shoulder. He whispered, “Thank you.” He didn’t say for what—I knew. He didn’t need to. I felt the knot inside me ease like a rope loosening.
---
After the funeral, the house was quiet. The weight of grief sat on us in small heavy breaths. Braxton and I took the small chest of silver, counted what remained, and spread it on the rough table. Twenty taels were gone, but many small coins remained. I saw the numbers again: three taels for a month’s medicine, not enough. We had twenty silver pieces left and old papers sealed to the wall: my parents’ scrolls, old paintings, books that smelled of dust and ink.
“We can survive,” Braxton said in that steady voice he used when the house was about to fall and he needed to hold tight. “They were fools. We’ll make it.”
“I can farm,” I said, surprising myself with the sharpness of the answer. “I studied plants. We can plant a garden. We can also cook. I can cook things people want.”
Braxton frowned. “You? A girl at the garden? The work is heavy. My arm—”
“You can sell the paintings,” I said, touching a rolled scroll, remembering the fine strokes in my head. Our father’s hand had been trained, our mother painted birds. “They are worth more than people think.”
“What will they say?” Braxton asked quietly.
“Let them say,” I said. I had a weird calmness then, like someone who had found a map by accident and now saw the route. I was young again, but I had hands that had trained plants, a head that knew soil, and a stubbornness you could not grow on an ordinary acre. I would plant.
That night we ate what we had. I put the bones that market would not buy into a pot. I went to the market with coin braided tight in my fist, and because I am me, I haggled. I found the butcher pushing his unsold bones into a pile. I bought a sack of marrow bones and a small piece of pork belly. There were rotten parts nobody wanted: intestines, lungs. I bought them because I had a plan.
“It smells terrible,” the little brother—Chance—said in that soft child voice that makes grown men hold their chests. He clutched his robe. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Make soup.” I smiled. “And make people want to eat it.”
I spent the day with a fire and salt and a pan that had been used by our family for years. I roasted bones, I made broth, I threw in radishes and herbs. I charred chili over the fire and ground it into coarse powder. For people who have salt—and I would find salt—any food becomes a specific country’s dream.
When the soup was ready, the broth was thick and white. It smelled like comfort, like heat on a cold night. Braxton tasted it. He closed his eyes. “Fallon,” he said, “this is good.”
We ate like it was a festival, and for the first time since the funeral, something inside me loosened. We had food. We had each other. We could start.
The next morning, when the sky was cut clean with pale light, I woke to the green in my head. I felt something different beneath my palm: a small thread of warmth at my wrist. There, where the seam of the cloth touched flesh, I found a red string tied around my wrist and a white, soft stone carved like a cat’s head.
“Where did that come from?” Braxton asked when he saw it. He reached and felt the stone—he drew back like from an ember.
“It’s mine,” I said. A small knot of anxiety and wonder unfurled like smoke. I accidentally muttered: “I need to buy salt.” The sound seemed like a signal.
That afternoon I went to the market again, this time for the real trade. I had one small packet of new herbs I wanted to sell. The market had changed. People were back to their busy faces. Stalls lined with goods I had only ever read about in my old life stood there like a second world. I wandered on impulse and found a stall selling crystals of white salt, shining as if housed from the sea.
“How much for a sack?” I asked the stranger behind the stall.
The man looked over me and then at the small stone on my wrist. His face changed. He held up a measuring cup. The words he said were foreign in tone but he pointed to a board and made a slicing motion. The stall owner named a steep price in a ticker I didn’t understand.
I barely had the coin, but I had something else now. I felt the stone tingle. I remembered the cat on my shoulder—the cat I had met in a strange wooden space in the day that blurred into night. I had seen a small black cat who talked. I had laughed then. It had told me the place was not for buying ordinary crops. It called out to me as if I’d been meant to come.
The man who sold salt—Ravi Conti—grinned when he saw my face and the stone. He reached and tapped the cat head quickly. Light flashed in the stone and I heard speech the way hearing is in a dream: “You can exchange this. It’s not coin your world knows, but here it will buy.” He spoke of a market where things were exchanged with ‘lifespan’ and where plants of other worlds were worth more than local coin. “Bring me something from the green field of your space, and I’ll give you sacks of salt.”
I remembered the crate of seed packets in the wooden room where the cat had pointed me. But that place—my head still shivered with the memory—was not my world. It was a space where a cat spoke and a field of perfect soil and a wooden inn stood. A merchant I had never known stood there like a doorkeeper. The red string at my wrist burned warm and the carved cat head hummed.
I nodded and took a small sprig from a pouch I had placed tentatively in my sash. The seller’s eyes widened. He packaged salt in a sack that folded into the air like a trick. The sack closed and it felt not heavier nor lighter than before, but the coin inside was real enough.
On the way back, I planned. With salt, we could make preserved food, make trade goods that brought better returns than selling a scroll. A jar of seasoned salt would be a town treasure. Braxton could sell a painting every few weeks. Chance would learn letters and go to class one day. We could survive. We could do better.
That night I boiled stock and prepared a tiny jar of salted fish. I rolled rice into neat lumps and wrapped fish in paper, small divided meals that smelled like the sea. The cat—Ezra Mendes—who belonged to that strange room showed himself on my shoulder that night, all whisker and light, and complimented the jar while I offered him a small ball of rice.
“You’ll need to plant,” he said. “Plant everything the way I say. Plant for me and for your family.”
“Why me?” I asked. “I’m not a chosen one. I’m a third-rate plant scientist gone to seed.”
“You were named by the space,” he said simply. “You have the hand for seedlings. You have patience.”
So I planted. I dug a small patch by the kitchen and spread seed from both this world and the space. I woke early to water it. Plants grew faster in the green field in my dream world, but I learned here how to coax an old root into life. The next days I pushed a cart into market with bowls of spiced dishes the like of which the town had not tasted. I used bones, offal, and salt to make something sticky and warm and loud with flavor. Braxton stood by with a stack of paintings to sell.
People ate like they had been given scraps of memory. The soup was called “spice-and-bone,” and soon a circle of men stood at my cart and counted their coins. We gained a little coin, then more. We bought paper to wrap the paintings, and sold a painting which went for a silver piece. Braxton’s brush looked sharp in the sun. He looked more like himself.
But the world has men who think they own everything. Beatriz and Cedric conspired once more. They came to the market with false smiles, and they made trouble. Beatriz hissed and said that my family ought to be under her roof, that we were vagrants who would waste the silver. She coveted what was ours and wanted to take over Braxton’s paintings and the little hut we slept in. People who had once stood with us shifted.
I pushed the cart and cried in private to Cooper one night, “I am tired of being prey.”
He looked at me like a man ready to sharpen a blade. “Then stop being prey.”
So I taught myself to be loud in the market and to smile like a merchant with palms of steel. I tied more red strings to my wrist and to Braxton’s, and I paid the salt seller in ways that bent the rules. But I also set a trap. I planted our coin where I knew the greedy would look. I left a scrap of cloth with a small purse where someone like Cedric would find it. In the funeral that followed the first day of sales, I handed a coin to a child and let him play. When Beatriz and Cedric moved in, their pride turned into theft.
That public punishment came because I wanted it to. I had faith in the people of the village, even if I had faith in no one else.
After the trial of shame, life settled. We planted more. We bought more seed in the market where strange merchants came and traded things no one at home knew how to value—fruits that tasted like spring, salt that made food sing. I learned to trade the small green herbs from the space the cat had given me in exchange for things Braxton needed: roots, round white things that looked like medicine, and a small pair of bright purple roots called purple-gold ginseng which a man named Lorenzo Atkins—who traded in strange root relics—said would be good for my brother.
When Braxton’s medicine changed because of those roots, his condition eased. The pills worked a little better. I watched his cheeks go from chalk to something that looked like life. I cried a little when he laughed at something offhanded and coughing did not steal his breath.
There was a lesson in all of this: the world will try to take what you have; protect it but do not become what they are. Use tools that are true. Plant what you know and sell what people will buy. When wrong is done, expose it in public—because shame weighs more than silver. I still cook, I still plant. I still go into the strange wooden room and pull seeds out of boxes for Ezra Mendes’s field. I still scrape paint on paper with Braxton’s hand. I still teach Chance letters and push him into the schoolyard.
The cat sometimes turns into a tall man for one breath and calls things to me that I would never have understood otherwise. Sometimes I laugh in the small hours and think of the enormous, warm market in the space where traders can buy with life.
And once, in the quiet between winter and seed-time, when fog sat on the fields like a cup lid, a woman whose face I had seen in a painting came with a small gift: a pottery jar with a narrow neck and a ribbon. Inside was a seed I did not recognize. The cat blinked and told me the name with a small purr: “Linggrass.” He put his paw over my hand.
“Plant it for me,” he said. “Plant it for Braxton. Plant it for the three of you.”
I dug into the earth where a child had found a silver coin and planted the small seed. It would grow faster than any plant in my old lab. It would teach me to be still and wait and watch hands that cared for soil. It would give me a chance to be more than a survivor. It would let me lift my two brothers into a life that would not fear hungry women like Beatriz. It would give me a cart that sells food and a home with paintings and a brother with medicine.
I tied the little red cat-stone against my wrist and pushed the soil over the seed. Ezra Mendes sat on the fence and looked at me like someone who likes what he sees.
“Good,” he said. “Now you will keep your hands busy.”
I smiled. “I already do,” I said.
The sun dipped. I closed my eyes and heard the market in my head: the calls, the clink of silver, the sizzle of bone fat on a pan. I smelled salt and charcoal and the sharp sweet of the new seed. This was enough for me. I had been given a second life. I would not waste it.
The End
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