Rebirth17 min read
I Woke Up in July 1980 — And I Was Not Going to Lose Again
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I woke to the edge of pain like an iron file across my lungs.
"Mae, wake up," someone whispered and my world split into light and the smell of old wood polish. I tried to breathe properly. The air was thin and hot.
My hand clutched something cold on the bedside table. A glossy paper calendar stared back at me: July 1980.
"July 1980?" I mouthed. "What the—"
A laugh that had no warmth threaded through my head, and every memory from the life I had been pulled out of—the last mission, the explosion, the betrayal—came back sharp as a blade. I had been an operator once. I knew secure entry, silence, and how men broke beneath my hands.
I looked down at my wrists. They were small, raw, and the palm had calluses like someone who’d worked for years with tools, not guns.
"Don't be foolish," I told myself. "You survived worse. Figure it out."
Two knocks at the door shook me.
"Open up! You little tramp, open up!" A woman's voice blared in the corridor.
I blinked. The voice was furious and familiar—not from my past life, but the cardboard of this new one. I crawled out of bed, found a dress that smelled of starch and dust, and moved like someone who had trained to keep reflexes even when tired.
There was a red stain on the bedsheet. A cufflink lay on the floor—blue stone, old-fashioned. I picked it up like it was a clue.
"The cufflink belongs to him," I heard myself say under my breath. "He left it. Tristan Dorsey left it."
A memory I had not earned flared: a hotel door, the sound of a drunk man's laugh, the sudden pressure of fists where there should have been care. I had been in a room that exploded. I had died in fire and now this life had been handed to me like a burned card.
"Mae! Do you think it's a hotel?" someone demanded from the corridor. "Tell us when you came home!"
"Tell them I was home last night," I said aloud, testing a voice that felt without armor. Then I pushed the door open.
The kitchen smelled like boiled cabbage and old oil. A frail woman with white hair sat on a stool near the small window, her hands folded. "You came home," she said, as if reading a script.
"Esther," I whispered. "You can't—"
"Shh," she said and squeezed my hand. "Lie down, keep your voice low. They'll call you names."
Two women barged in: Juliana Alvarez with a sneer, and Daphne Andersson, who moved like a wolf comfortable in borrowed power. Juliana's face was bright with malice.
"Where have you been, Mae?" Juliana demanded. "Last night you were seen at a hotel. Who did you go home with?"
"I—" I felt the world tilt. "Who said that?"
"Service is full of gossip, don't play dumb." Juliana spat. "You are a disgrace. You will not go to college. We will make sure of it."
Daphne crossed her arms. "We found out everything, thanks to people who saw you. You will not shame this family."
"Hey!" Esther's voice cracked. "You don't get to say that to her."
I kept my face stone-cold, because that was cheaper than panic. "Who saw me?" I asked quietly.
Juliana tilted her head. "Servants, guests. The lobby boys."
"Name one," I said. "One single person. Who reported me?"
Juliana's mouth opened, then closed. Her eyes glittered for a second, like a cat's before it strikes. "We will make them say it. You'll see."
I wanted to scream. In my body, the memories stitched together into a plan. If I had been killed in an explosion forty years in my future, something had wanted me gone. I would not be shoved into a life of shame again.
"Fine," I said. "Prove it."
They left, calling me names that had nothing to do with me. I sat at the small table and let my anger go hot and useful. There was no detective agency I could call. No tech to trace hotel records with. Only the things I knew—lock picking, human patterns, how secrets olfactory themselves in a house.
"Esther," I said. "When she calls me names, you stand up. You remember you have a voice."
She nodded, and even then I could feel a small warmth in me: not exactly hope, but a possibility.
The town was a row of factory-built houses. Doors opened into courtyards. People knew each other's loudness and quietness like harvest maps. Gossip traveled faster than bread.
"You can't keep living here like a shadow," Daphne told Juliana that afternoon, when they rallied neighbors to paint me as a woman without sense. "If she ruins the name, what will our children say?"
"I would not mind," Juliana answered. "She had the nerve to be better in school. We will not let her take the place meant for Midge—"
"Juliana!" Daphne hissed, and I heard the clack of their shoes fade into the afternoon.
They wanted me small. They were used to breaking people with accusation, with the soft violence of consensus.
I would not be broken.
That night, when the household slept, I slipped from the dirty kitchen and went to the house where the family kept its hidden things. I had no right, no legal footing, but I had fingers that could coax tumblers and a memory that had once stolen passports.
"You think you can take our votes and shut our mouths?" I whispered to the dark. "We'll see."
I opened the lock easily. Shelves of envelopes, stamps, a small tin box. Inside there were ration coupons, a handful of worn bills. Juliana had been hoarding the family's tickets—grain, oil—and the money she called her own.
I put them in my bag. Not because I wanted to steal for the thrill, but because Esther was old and brittle and had done a lifetime of work for people who spat when the kettle boiled over.
I did not sneak like a coward. I took what would feed us, and I left the box carefully where it would not look ransacked but would appear as if the family had simply misplaced something. The ledger would take some time to show the gap.
The next morning Juliana shrieked that thieves had been in her home.
"You stole our tickets!" she cried, pointing at me in public, in the square, with the neighbors gathered like birds. "The rotten tramp—"
"No, you lost them," I said simply. "You told the officer earlier that everything had gone missing—"
A cluster of women looked at each other; gossip fruit cracked to reveal seeds of doubt. "She lies, she always lies," Juliana said, and then, as neighbors began to murmur, she stumbled forward and banged her head on the low table.
"Help! Help!" she wailed, and the spectacle began.
I could have exposed her then. It would have been easy: point to the cabinet and pull out the tin proffering the ration books and the money. But I had learned that immediate spectacle sometimes created sympathy for the liar. If I wanted them to turn, I needed a longer burn.
So I played a different hand. I ditched the immediate reveal and instead set my plan in motion: buy time, collect evidence, and reveal everything publicly in a place where lies couldn't rally neighbors easily.
I walked to the police station where Camden Stevens—an honest man with a square jaw and too big a heart—kept records. Camden had helped me once without knowing why. He watched the neighborhood like an old brother.
"Camden," I said when I saw him. "Can you spare some time?"
"You again?" He smiled, because he was kind and also because he liked to be the square peg in a round hole. "What's wrong now? Juliana didn't break anything this time, did she?"
"She did more than break things," I said. "She hid tickets and accused me. She wanted me removed before the enrollment notices came."
He frowned. "Enrollment?"
"He is trying to ruin my chance to go to school," I answered. "Camden, check the hotel registry last night. Room number 388."
Camden looked skeptical, but his kind fingers moved to the ledger. "Why 388?" he asked.
I gestured to the cufflink in my pocket. "Look for Tristan Dorsey. The guest who stayed there left his mark."
Camden scanned. "Tristan Dorsey… yes. Registered. He is a foreign-returned businessman by the looks of it. Where did you get this?"
"I lived in room 388 last night," I said, and the room grew distant as a memory. "I was drugged. The truth is messy. But this man is the man who hurt me. I need to find him."
Camden's eyes narrowed. "Mae, this is dangerous."
"Everything I do is dangerous," I said. "Help me. Check the guest register. I need to know his full name and address."
"All right." Camden’s fingers were already scribbling.
That afternoon I found a small, clumsy victory. The ledger confirmed Tristan Dorsey's name. It was an old name to carry in a ledger—Tristan Dorsey, guest, foreign passport number, contact details poorly transcribed by an overworked desk boy.
"Where is he?" I asked Camden.
"City on the hill," he said. "He is not from here. He will have people who protect him."
"Good," I said. "Then we'll make sure those people never forget the name Mae Lorenz."
Over the next few weeks I learned how to make food, how to sell, how to bargain for a crust of profit. I and Esther made roasted birds and porched them to children who had not tasted meat in months. People smiled then. People were kind. It locked something warm into the hollows of me that killing never had.
"You're doing this to feed us," Esther said once, catching me with flour on my cheek as I made the batter for fried cakes.
"I'm buying time," I told her. "And I am buying the right to keep my child."
She squeezed my hand. "Child?"
I inhaled. "I am sure. And I will not let anyone steal him."
"Who would do such a thing?" Esther asked.
"The kind of hawks who sell babies to people who want them," I said. "Or the kind who are paid for silence."
Her face hardened. "We will be careful. We will hold on."
I found allies. Camden chipped in a ration here and there. A good neighbor lent us a bike. Lin Summer—Lin? No—Juliana's old schoolmate was different in this world: I called her Blythe Russo. She had been my friend before everything went sideways in my previous life; now we reconnected. Blythe's family lived closer to the fields, and she offered to help gather freshwater crayfish—little red things that people like to eat if they’re cooked right. We turned them into a small trade. The first time we sold them, the neighborhood children sat with greasy rubble fingers, giggling through something like religion.
"Mae," Blythe said once, handing me a saucer, "you're not like the rest of them. You don't ask permission to live."
"I wasn't allowed to before," I answered. "But this time I decide the terms."
We made money. People bought from us because it tasted like home. I performed the simplest magic: making a bad world feel a little gentler.
But the coal in my chest for getting even did not go away. I had found Tristan Dorsey's name. I had a ledger entry that proved his stay. I had the cufflink he left. I knew I was pregnant. The list of betrayals had to be settled.
Juliana and Daphne tried to weave petty tortures: they tried to force me into public humiliation, demanded I submit to indignities, claimed I had taken what was theirs. They conspired to sell me away in marriage for a dowry. Juliana even tried to bribe Cosmo Sanchez—the town drunk and gambler—to say he had been with me in the hotel the night the scandal "happened." He agreed for a handful of bills.
"You'd do that for money?" I asked him once, in the doorway where he lived like damp wood.
Cosmo grinned with a missing tooth. "It's bread. And I don't want the cops after me."
"You are going to speak at the meeting tomorrow," I said. "And restate exactly what you said today—every lie, every detail. In front of everyone."
He blinked. "You're mad."
"Call it boldness." I slid a coin across the table. "And either you tell the truth, or you tell them the truth I know."
He pocketed the coin. "I tell things well."
And he did. The village meeting was a circle of faces: old women with tobacco lines, men who did the city's heavy work, and a handful of officious people who liked to be seen enforcing virtue.
Juliana came in with Daphne like a pair of storm clouds, her hand rubbing the swelling on her head she had made into a theatrical wound. She shouted, "She tried to steal our tickets! She is a liar!"
A low murmur rose like a tide. The neighbors were the jury.
"Before anyone takes sides," I said, stepping into the circle, "let's be practical. If the tickets disappeared, show us how. If a hotel man spotted me, produce him."
Juliana laughed. "They will. By tonight it will be done."
"Then wait and see," I said. "Because truth is not always quick to the stage, but it's slow and stubborn."
The day bleached out. By evening, I had what I needed: a copy of the hotel registry Camden had procured with difficulty, the cufflink Tristan Dorsey had left, and a witness—an old desk boy who would admit in private he had seen the wrong man dumped into room 388.
That night we arranged the reveal.
The public punishment was not my pleasure—revenge is a trough, not a dessert—but it was necessary. I would not let these people become experts in my demise.
The square filled. Women traded gossip like currency. Juliana climbed onto the small platform and began to speak. Daphne stood beside her, prim and vicious.
"You must not listen to Mae!" Juliana cried. "She is the liar!"
"Stop!" I said, and the crowd turned. "Juliana, Daphne—sit."
Juliana's face bloomed scarlet. "Get off my stage—"
"Do you want the truth?" I asked.
There was a pause, like the narrowing of a throat.
"I have papers." I put Tristan Dorsey's cufflink on the board for everyone to see. "I have a hotel's registry. I have witnesses. Juliana accused me of sleeping with a man so she could stop me from going to school. She did more: she stole my future and she stole grain and tickets meant to feed Esther. Daphne enabled her."
The murmurs swelled. People leaned forward.
"You can't prove that," Juliana said.
"Watch," I said.
Camden read the ledger in my stead. "Room 388, registration: Tristan Dorsey. Registered at 22:14. Guest signed in. Desk boy will confirm he saw the guest leave at dawn." His voice was flat, but the ledger was there in his arms like a bible.
"Then show the desk boy," Juliana said.
The desk boy came forward, cheeks flushed, eyes wet. He trembled when he spoke. "I—I saw her. I saw someone in room 388. I saw blood. Then I saw Mr. Dorsey leave. I—I thought it was a quarrel. I didn't think… I didn't think she would be accused. I don't want to be wrong again."
People's faces changed, some with guilt, some with the slow horror of being used as a chorus for cruelty. It was then that Cosmo staggered forward with a crumpled paper.
"I said things I shouldn't have," he slurred. "I said she was with men—because I thought if I said it, they'd throw me coin and hush me. But I saw the wrong man. I was buying drinks. I didn't see the room's door open; I saw someone go by the hall, but I—" His voice broke. "I'm sorry."
Juliana's eyes narrowed. She tried to conjure a rage, but the crowd had slipped from her hand.
"Where are the tickets?" I asked, turning to Daphne.
Daphne's mouth trembled. "They are—gone. I thought—someone came in and took them."
I calmly walked to the old cabinet and opened it; the tin box inside was where Juliana had hidden the ration coupons and a small wad of notes. I set them on the platform.
"No," Juliana croaked. "What is this? You stole from me!"
"I borrowed it for Esther," I said. "Because she has done more for this house than you ever will. You hoarded the tickets for power. You used them to bludgeon the rest of the family. You sold kindness for leverage."
Neighbors began to shout. "She kept the tickets!" "To starve Esther!"
"They used words to take my reputation," I said. "They are liars who sold their names cheaply to stop me from standing tall."
Juliana's expression shifted—first to rage, then to the thin panic of a trapped animal. "You have no proof of that!" she screamed. "I will sue you!"
"Will you?" I said softly. "Because right now, you've told enough lies that people remember them, and your hand is full of stolen goods. People will talk. People will count what's owed. You will be seen."
She lunged to the crowd like a woman who could still steal the narrative with noise. Daphne stumbled back, as if the world had cooled at her feet.
A neighbor raised a hand. "We have heard too much," she said. "We've seen them bully your mother. We've seen them keep tickets. We will not have that."
People began to gather in different groups—some to support Juliana in habit, but many more turned to look at Daphne. She looked like a woman who had been propped up and now had no props left.
Juliana's face changed again. "You—" She started, and then something raw opened in her voice. People heard the path she'd taken: envy and its rot. The crowd's tone shifted from curiosity to contempt.
Daphne's denial stripped away. Her shoulders sagged. "I did what I thought would keep order," she said. Her voice broke on the word order, and the crowd hissed.
"What about your plan to propose Mae for sale as a bride for dowry?" someone asked. The question was a stone thrown into a pond. Ripples forced answers.
Daphne's eyes went glassy. "We thought—" She could not finish.
Juliana finally erupted, then collapsed under the combined weight of her own lies and the public’s eyes. Her voice collapsed into a shriek, then into babble, then into a plea, then into silence. People around her began to sing songs that had nothing to do with me—songs of livelihood and the obligation to care for elders.
It was cold to watch their faces change. It was colder to realize public humiliation was the exact currency Juliana had used on me. The crowd turned their backs on her jawing and pointed now instead at what mattered: the theft of tickets, the false accusations.
That part of the punishment lasted a long time—the kind of public reorientation that would leave them with fewer allies. People who had been willing to trade gossip for harmony now considered whether to associate with women who would starve a grandmother for the sake of a petty advantage. They turned their backs.
Juliana's reaction was a map of collapse: a first flush of anger, then fevered denial, then a long slide into pleading and denial, then a last, silent withdrawal. Daphne did not plead as loudly; she moved like someone who had miscalculated her life in small increments and now watched it summing to ruin.
Neighbors recorded, in small, ordinary ways, what we all saw. Someone took a sketchy note; someone else whispered the ledger numbers to another neighbor. The town does not easily forget patterns. The day they were punished, Juliana lost a good part of her social currency: people no longer left bread at her door. Daphne lost the moral high ground she had sold for a false sense of dignity.
Cosmo, who had been a small man of selfish acts, came with tears, saying, "Forgive me." His repentance was not theatrical but messy and real; he had been used as a tool, and then he had to face what he had done. The crowd did not cheer him—he did not deserve a standing ovation—but it was clear the town preferred truth over performance.
It was not an execution. It was a public unmasking with consequences: a loss of trust, a private mop-up of reputations, and a social cooling that would not melt quickly. The pain in Juliana's face was not a spectacle I wanted, but it was the consequence of her choosing cruelty as a daily bread. I watched, and I felt the old machine of revenge inside my ribs whine and then slow.
"Will this make you feel better?" Esther asked later when the square was quieter and the people returned to their small houses.
"It makes it right here," I said, touching my sternum. "It sets a line."
"Don't become like them," she warned softly. "Don't let the hunger for payback make you cruel."
"I won't," I promised. "I will be smarter. I will be kinder in ways that matter. But I will be ruthless with lies."
The system in my head—a strange, whispering presence I had not mentioned to anyone—chimed softly then. 'You have earned points,' it said. 'Use them wisely. Return to the space to train.'
The space was quiet and miraculous. When I closed my eyes, the sky opened and I sat in a room that was not actually a room: a garden, a small temple to a different life. The book that appeared in front of me had a simple title: The Soulcraft Manual. It taught me to breathe the kind of breath that changed bone memory.
I trained in the nights. I turned my hands into tools that could open locks, unsnarl lies, and keep small lives safe. I ran errands in the small hours, tracing Tristan Dorsey's footsteps, catching whispers of him with people in the city on the hill. The ledger had given me a name; the cufflink gave me a direction.
One morning I went to the hotel again, smelling the dust and the old perfume stains in the lobby. I found the ledger on the cleaned desk, thumbed pages of names like pages of an arrested history, and under the midnight entries I found Tristan Dorsey—an address, a business affiliation. He had a car, and he had money.
"You can't find him yet?" Camden asked as he handed me a small paper with an address.
"He hides after people who annoy him," I told him. "But he left something. He left a chain of people who know. We'll walk that chain."
"Be careful," he said.
"Always," I lied. Then I smiled the way I had as an operator: small and determined. "When he meets me, he'll remember the cufflink."
People kept helping in small ways. Blythe smuggled me a sewing kit to mend clothes. Esther cooked me porridge that tasted like a childhood I had never had. Camden kept an eye on things. Cosmo, for all his cowardice, started to do small acts of kindness to repay the day he tried to sell me.
My belly rounded slowly. Each night I sat with the calendar. July 1980 stared back. I had one small badge of the future I had lost: not the way to a city skyscraper, but a small promise that I would teach my child that dignity exists apart from the world that tries to strip it.
I opened the system's door more often. The space showed me how to strengthen a soul—how to breathe into a scar and make it a map. It showed me how to cook using two stones and a pan and how to count coins. I was learning not just how to survive but how to win by a careful, human charm.
And I planned the day I would find Tristan Dorsey.
The day I found him, he tried to be a gentleman and failed. He tried to paint his way out of ownership. "I don't remember," he said, like a man pulling on a thin robe.
"You left a cufflink," I told him. "You left a trail. You think memory is a garment you can remove, Mr. Dorsey?"
He looked at my belly then, and fear crossed his face in a way that meant more than any lawsuit.
"Please—" he began.
"No," I said. My voice was quiet but hard. "You will accept responsibility."
He sputtered, buying lawyers and whispers. He offered money, a house, anything to stop the quiet machine of justice that had already engaged. But I had more than paper and threats; I had community, witness, and the stubbornness of a soul who had been burned and handed a second life.
In the end, he agreed to the only thing that mattered: he would acknowledge the child publicly and do right by us.
When the papers were signed in a small office, the clerk's pen clicked like a metronome. I watched the ink dry and felt the small scrape of a victory.
"Will he be in my life later?" I asked Camden later that evening when we sat under the half-dead tree near the courtyard.
"He will be present," Camden said. "That might be enough."
"It is enough," I said. "For now."
I kept training. The system's space taught me to make tinder from nothing, to plant the first small business seeds, to trade flavors into currency. We grew our little stall into something people wanted to walk past on purpose. People began to stop by for the taste and stayed for the warmth.
One morning Juliana approached our stall, face thinner, and asked for work. Her voice was small. "Mae," she said, "I—"
"I won't be your enemy or your friend," I said. "But you should know—right begins when you make the choice to do it. You chose badly."
She began to cry, and I felt the old machine stir its cold joy. But I remembered Esther's voice: don't become like them.
Instead, I gave Juliana work that patched holes rather than opened wounds. She mended a cloth and learned to earn her bread. Daphne went away to live with a sister in another town. Cosmo tried to mend his debts by honest work selling coal, and his hands grew steady with labor.
As for Tristan Dorsey, when he came to the house—briefly, once—to see the child he did not yet know by face, the businesslike man I had seen recorded as a guest looked vulnerable. He fumbled with his cufflink. The child blinked and reached for his finger.
"Mae," he said, voice tight, "I will make arrangements."
"Make sure they protect this child's name," I said. "Not just in law, but in story. Do not let them drag it through their own mud."
He nodded, and some part of his face smoothed like wet clay. He left, and we never saw him in the ways the newspapers like to print. I had no desire to make a drama of his life.
I taught my child—two small people who loved to wail and sleep and pull at my hair—about being brave in small ways. I taught them how a hand can open a lock and how hands can hold a bowl to feed someone hungry. I taught them to make fried cakes and how to read the ledger with care.
And at night I still visited the system's garden. The space gave me more points: seeds of knowledge that felt like currency in a world that needed practical miracles. I used some to strengthen the child's constitution and some to keep my own dreams stitched tight.
When the time came that Juliana and Daphne faced the social consequences of their actions—neighbors refusing to trade with them, community duties peeled away, and public mention of their theft and false accusations—the pain was rough but fitting. Juliana's fall from the catwalk of malice had its own long, humiliating arc. People who had once joined her chorus now treated her like a story told to keep children obedient. Daphne's respect evaporated into the long, cold fingers of reputation loss. Neighbors who once shielded them wore the new armor of small integrity.
I never reveled in watching them fall. I watched to mark the truth: that lies have costs, and a community can choose to break the market for cruelty.
When I fold the old blue cufflink into the box where I kept small proofs—hotel registers, a signed note from Tristan, a simple bracelet the children made—I still sometimes think of the operator I had been. I miss the iron clarity of purpose sometimes. But this life, with Esther's thin hands and the children's constant small noises, is a different kind of purpose. I sleep better now.
On my last night of telling this tale, the calendar above the bed still read July 1980, though the edges were softer from time. The palm fan Esther had used to wake me at night lay by the bed, worn and warm with the patina of use.
I close my eyes and feel it: the fan's palm leather against my fingers, the cufflink's blue gleam, the system's soft hum. I am not the same woman who died in a fire forty years from now. I am Mae Lorenz, and I have learned how to make a second life count.
The End
— Thank you for reading —