By the second week of May, the last bite of frost had finally loosened from the Arkansas soil.

  Dogwoods flared white along the edge of the Hollis land, their petals trembling in the breeze. The red clay had softened into something workable, and each morning smelled of smoke, damp earth, and wild onions crushed beneath careful steps.

  Virgil lay in a reed-woven basket beneath the sycamore tree, staring up through fractured patches of blue sky.

  He could hold his head up now.

  Not well. Not for long. But enough to observe.

  “Mid-May 1917,” he calculated quietly. “Three weeks old.”

  America had declared war April 6.

  He had been born April 27.

  Registration for the draft would begin June 5.

  The dates sat steady in his mind. They did not fade, even when everything else blurred.

  He shifted and immediately regretted it. His neck wobbled. His arm flailed uselessly before settling against the rough cloth lining.

  “Motor control: pathetic,” he assessed. “Upper body strength: improving.”

  Mornings had settled into rhythm.

  He had learned her name naturally—through repetition, not revelation.

  “Lila,” Thomas had said the evening before, voice tired but soft. “You done enough for today.”

  Lila.

  So that was his mother.

  He watched her now as she moved between the bean rows, hoe rising and falling with steady precision. Her sleeves were rolled. The backs of her hands were red from pump water and scrubbing.

  In his former life, he had once complained about grocery delivery being late.

  Lila grew the groceries.

  “She manages water, food, livestock, laundry, and a newborn without a spreadsheet,” he thought. “No automation. No safety net. Just endurance.”

  A voice drifted across the field.

  “Lila! You out here?”

  Virgil wondered, “Who is she, and why is she searching for lila my mum?”

  “Ellie Mae !!!” his mother exclaimed.

  “Oh! So she is Ellie May”, he thought.

  He’d heard his Da say it once at supper. “Ellie Mae brought over eggs,” he’d mentioned casually.

  Now she appeared beyond the fence, bonnet tipped back, freckles bright against sun-warmed skin. A flour sack hung from her shoulder. On her hip balanced a sturdy toddler with determined eyes.

  “Walter, you hold still,” she said, shifting him down onto the dirt. “Go on now. Don’t you wander.”

  Walter.

  Virgil stored the name immediately.

  Walter stumbled forward on thick, uncertain legs. Barefoot. Blond hair falling into his eyes. A smear of something—jam? dirt?—across his cheek.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Thomas says you’re spoilin’ that boy already,” Ellie teased as she approached the porch.

  Lila laughed lightly. “Thomas says a lot of things.”

  Walter noticed the basket.

  He approached with the reckless confidence of someone who had never fallen far enough to fear it. He stopped, stared down at Virgil, then extended a damp, partially eaten biscuit with grave seriousness.

  The biscuit landed squarely on Virgil’s chest.

  Virgil blinked at it.

  He considered the absurdity of a thirty-year-old legal analyst like himself, who got reborn and was now stooped to be gifted a soggy biscuit by a toddler.

  A laugh escaped him before he could stop it—thin, wheezing, undeniably infant.

  Both women turned.

  “Well I’ll be,” Lila said softly, hand lifting to her collarbone. “That’s the first time he’s laughed like that.”

  Ellie Mae beamed. “Walter, you done made a friend.”

  Walter clapped loudly for himself.

  Virgil studied him carefully.

  Estimated age: eighteen months to two years. Stable walking. Limited vocabulary. Strong attachment behaviours.

  No knowledge of Europe tearing itself apart. No awareness of history or even the letter of the lord.

  Just dirt. Just sun. Just biscuit.

  The visits became regular.

  Almost daily, Ellie Mae arrived with Walter in tow. The women shelled peas into dented tin bowls or mended worn shirts shoulder to shoulder. Their words floated over the yard, pieced together from repetition.

  “Thomas heading to Memphis Thursday?” Ellie asked one afternoon.

  “Mm-hmm,” Lila replied. “Boiler room work, he says. If they’ll keep him.”

  “Boiler room !?, So he is a labourer working in Memphis”

  “Well naturally, he has to go to Memphis to work that’s the only city around here, and where there is city there is work”

  Virgil noted it silently in his mind.

  Another afternoon—

  “They say the men gotta register soon,” Ellie murmured, lowering her voice slightly. “Town clerk posted it.”

  “When?” Lila asked.

  “Early June, I hear.”

  Virgil didn’t need clarification.

  June 5, 1917.

  Men ages twenty-one to thirty.

  Thomas fell inside that bracket.

  His pulse quickened faintly.

  “Timeline accelerating,” he thought.

  Meanwhile, Walter had discovered a beetle and was attempting to share it.

  Virgil turned his head deliberately.

  He thought, “like really what is this kid?”

  The days were tactile in a way his former life had never been.

  When Lila laid him on a blanket, dirt pressed cool against his bare heels. Wind moved through the sycamore leaves with a soft clatter. Sunlight warmed his eyelids red when he closed them.

  There were no engines humming. No distant traffic. No phone vibrating in a pocket.

  Only chickens.

  Only wagon wheels.

  Only human voices that carried cleanly across open air.

  One afternoon, Lila handed him a wooden clothespin while she hung laundry.

  “Here you go, Virgil,” she said gently. “Hold that for Mama.”

  He focused.

  Thumb inward. Fingers curl. Apply pressure.

  The pin snapped closed in his fist.

  Both women gasped softly.

  “Look at him!” Ellie exclaimed. “Strong hands already.”

  Walter clapped again, shrieking with delight.

  Virgil immediately loosened his grip.

  “I should pace myself,” he reminded himself. “I should stay within the expected developmental range, what the heck let me be a brilliant child but yeh not a freak.”

  Appearing ordinary had become a strategy.

  Yet something inside him had shifted.

  There were stretches now—brief but real—when he forgot the history entirely.

  There were moments when existence narrowed to the sway of branches overhead and Walter’s garbled attempts at speech.

  Moments when being small felt… uncomplicated.

  But evening always restored perspective.

  As the sun dipped low and painted the fields amber, his mind would quietly unspool the years ahead.

  1918 — Influenza pandemic.

  1920 — 19th Amendment ratified.

  1929 — Market collapse.

  1933 — Roosevelt inaugurated.

  1941 — Pearl Harbor.

  These historic dates did not terrify him.

  They structured him.

  He remembered apartment hallways from his former life—long corridors smelling faintly of disinfectant and isolation. Doors closed. Lives parallel but disconnected.

  No one had wandered in carrying fresh eggs.

  No one had sat on a shared porch mending clothes simply because proximity made it natural.

  Now he knew their names.

  Lila his mum

  Thomas his dad

  Ellie Mae his neighbour

  Walter his first friend

  Names turned abstraction into responsibility.

  That night, as Lila rocked him in the dim glow of the oil lamp, she brushed her fingers across his forehead.

  “Sleep now, Virgil,” she whispered.

  The chair creaked in a steady rhythm.

  “This world is fragile,” he thought as his eyelids drooped. “Poor by future standards. Medically primitive. Economically unstable.”

  But it was not empty.

  And for the first time since waking in this body, his plans were no longer purely about advancement.

  They were about shielding.

  Thomas would stand in a registration line soon.

  Influenza would follow within a year.

  Walter would grow up in a century that would demand more than biscuits and dirt.

  Virgil Hollis lay in his basket beneath the Arkansas night, three weeks old and holding a timeline no one else around him could see.

  He did not yet know the method.

  But he knew the sequence.

  And in 1917, the sequence was leverage enough.