A baby’s eyes fluttered open for the first time. The air was thick with the scent of wood smoke and damp linen, and the dim yellow light filtering through a warped glass window painted the room in a muted, sepia haze. His vision blurred, as if the world had been smudged by time itself.

  He couldn’t move properly—his limbs were too soft, too weak. His skin felt raw and tender, swaddled in a rough cotton blanket that scratched at his senses. But what rattled him most wasn’t the strangeness of his body—it was the clarity of his mind.

  “No… no, this isn’t a dream.”

  He tried to speak, but only a frail coo escaped his lips. His tiny fingers curled instinctively as he fought to lift them. The sound of a woman’s voice, soft and worn like cotton that's been scrubbed too many times, echoed above him.

  “There he is… our strong boy”, she whispered.

  Our protagonist’s heart pounded—or maybe it was just the unfamiliar pulse of a newborn heart, beating like a drum inside a fragile cage of bone and breath.

  “Where am I? This isn’t right. I was… I was thirty, back in 2025. I was working late on my office desk, shit I had to write a legal brief to present to the judge tomorrow. The hum of electricity, the glow of screens, the sound of traffic in the backdrop of his office… it was all just yesterday. Wasn’t it?”

  He felt a tremble rise from somewhere deep in his chest, but it wasn’t fear. It was disbelief—existential terror wrapped in infant skin.

  Sweet mother of Jesus. “I died”, he thought, “but it was so soon, last I checked I was healthy, no luck on the romance department, but healthy all the same.

  Then came another voice—lower, edged with the rough cadence of a man who works with his hands and speaks little. “He’s got my eyes,” the man said with a chuckle, the kind worn men save for rare moments. “Gonna be tough like his Pa.”

  Virgil strained to listen. His ears were adjusting—so was his mind. The woman’s voice, likely his mother’s, spoke, “Our baby boy will be a proud Arkansan”. Her tone was tired but kind.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Arkansas? That’s close to Memphis. Am I… in the South?”

  The answer came in fragments over the next few hours, like puzzle pieces falling into place while he drifted in and out of sleep.

  The floorboards creaked with age. The room was modest—cluttered with stitched quilts, a wood-burning stove, and the metallic clink of a bucket being filled at the well outside. A rooster crowed nearby. His nose caught the earthy smell of soil and pig feed. From somewhere far off, a steam whistle blew, likely from the mill in town.

  “This is rural America. Post-war. No electricity here… not in this house. The factory… my Pa must be one of the men working twelve-hour shifts in a textile or rail yard across the river in Memphis. And Ma? She’s holding me with the hands of a woman who knows how to milk a goat and patch her husband’s boots with the same thread.”

  That realization struck him hard.

  “This is before 1990s !! I need to figure out exactly when!”

  “o lord looks like I am in past not some unknown strange world.”

  Virgil couldn’t cry. Not in fear, at least. He wasn’t like the other babies who entered this world blank and new. He had a soul & had a memory, he couldn’t demean himself to cry like a new born, “ this is the worst” he thought. He remembered everything: digital clocks, social media, air-conditioning, microwave popcorn, virtual assistants.

  “And now I’m wrapped in coarse fabric in a two-room farmhouse near Marion, Arkansas, where my father takes the wagon to Memphis and my mother gardens by hand and hauls water from a pump.”

  He tried to catalog everything, even as his infant mind began to dull under the fatigue of birth. He had to stay sharp. Had to hold onto his identity.

  “Okay. First things first. Observe. Don’t speak. Don’t give yourself away. You're the eldest now. You’ll be expected to help, to carry, to work. I need to be useful, learn fast—but slow enough to not stand out, I have a family in this life atleast, now I will do everything in my bucket list ”

  “They’ll teach me to read again—probably with the Bible or a McGuffey Reader. There’s no internet to help me cheat. I’ll learn arithmetic the old way, in a one-room schoolhouse, if they can afford to send me.”

  He felt his mother rock him gently, humming an old hymn. “Shall we gather at the river…” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

  Tears welled in his eyes—not from discomfort, but from a soul-crushing, beautiful sadness. He wasn’t just reborn. He was re-planted, like a seed in different soil.

  “This life… it’s going to be hard. But maybe it’s a second chance.”

  “Maybe… I was sent back to finally do what I can and use my brain to reach the top.”

  As he drifted into sleep again, the ticking of a wind-up clock on the shelf echoed like a heartbeat through the silence.

  And Virgil Hollis, reborn in dust and cotton born in deep south, whispered within the walls of his own mind:

  “I remember everything. And I will never forget who I was. But now, I must become who I am meant to be.”