Skip to content 
Silence. A heartbeat too long. Isaiah’s head lifted slightly. Silas’s smile returned, thinner now.
“I checked.” The yard seemed to collapse inward with that sentence.
Mama Edna finally exhaled. Not in fear. In recognition. The game had ended.
Silas leaned closer, voice almost gentle. “Tell me where the others went.”
Mama Edna said nothing. Not defiance. Not resistance. Something older.
Silas straightened slowly, as if disappointed but not surprised. “That’s fine,” he said.
“You’ll tell me differently.” He turned slightly, addressing the patrollers.
“Take her to the shed.” A pause. “And the others watch.”
Ruth struggled instantly. Isaiah did too. But iron answered iron, and both were dragged away.
Mama Edna did not resist. She simply walked. Each step slower than the last, her body bending under time itself, until the crowd could barely tell if she was moving forward or simply collapsing into motion.
But as she passed the line of watching enslaved people, something strange happened.
A hand lifted. Then another. Not waving. Not reaching. Remembering.
Small, almost imperceptible gestures from people who had spent their lives forced into stillness.
Silas noticed none of it. He was already walking back toward the house, mind turning like a locked mechanism trying to solve a new equation.
But behind him, in the shifting silence of the yard, something else had begun to form.
Not rebellion. Not yet. Awareness. Inside the shed, the air was thick with old wood and iron dampness.
Mama Edna was pushed inside, shackles removed just long enough for the door to slam shut behind her.
Darkness swallowed her instantly. A lantern clicked on outside. Silas’s voice came through the wood.
“I want the truth before sunset,” he said calmly. “Or I start taking pieces from everyone else.”
Footsteps faded. Silence returned. But inside the shed, Mama Edna did not move toward fear.
She moved toward memory. Her fingers searched the floorboards. Found them.
A loose edge. Old. Familiar. She pressed down. Nothing. Again.
This time, something shifted. A thin seam of wood gave slightly, revealing a hollow beneath.
Not the herbs. Something else. Something she had forgotten she had left behind.
A second pouch. Older. Darker. Her breath caught for the first time that day.
Outside, footsteps returned. Not Silas. Patrollers. Voices low. Waiting. Guarding.
Time tightening. Inside the shed, Mama Edna closed her fingers around the hidden object.