Genesis in Reverse
by Fendy S. Tulodo
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
The baby’s breath left her at 3:14 a.m., or that’s what the machines claimed. Lucia could still feel the tiny chest lift, a faint and fluttering motion, like a fragile whisper, word by unsteady word. The nurses called them hiccups, those soft alarms that sounded every few hours. One nurse, a tall man whose hair was too neat for the late shift, gave a faint smile when she asked if the equipment could be wrong. The machines are always broken, he said, just not in the ways that matter.
Lucia wasn’t sure when she started calling the baby “Luna.” The name fit too well. Pale skin, silent mouth, and those eyes that never blinked long enough to show rest. The doctors said she was blind. Lucia thought, good, because I am, too, and maybe that made them even. She had lost her sight three years earlier when her own body decided light was too heavy to carry. But she saw Luna clearly inside her head, as if the child projected herself straight into the mother’s mind like a private cinema.
Sometimes, though, Lucia felt Luna’s gaze, hot and exact, crawling under her eyelids. Blindness didn’t mean darkness. It meant light that refused to behave.
The house smelled of damp linen and boiled medicine. Lucia’s husband, Rafael, worked nights digging at the cemetery. “One more grave today,” he’d mutter, kicking off his boots by the door, “same man as yesterday, I think.” She used to think he was joking. But his voice had that tremor people get when they start believing their own stories.
Rafael said the grave was always in the same spot, near the stone angel that looked angry instead of holy. Each morning, the ground looked smooth again, as if nothing had been touched. The name on the marker kept changing, but it was always close to his own. LUCIANO. RAFA. R. DEL TORO. The shovel never rusted. He said he cleaned it every night, and she could hear the wet metal dragging across the tiles, leaving a mark too quiet to be real.
He brought home flowers once, wild ones with bruised petals. “For Luna,” he said. Lucia touched them carefully and froze when she felt the stems. They were soft as skin. “You bought these?” she asked. “No,” he answered, “they were already there. Growing out of the ground I dug.”
That night she didn’t sleep. The baby’s breathing sounded different. It had rhythm, like footsteps circling the bed.
When morning came, Lucia asked Rafael to describe the baby’s face again. He sighed. “She looks like you, mi amor, but… smaller. Or reversed. Her left cheek dimple is on the right. Her hair curls the opposite way.”
“Opposite?”
“Yeah, like when you look in a mirror.”
Lucia smiled, though her hands shook. “Then she looks perfect.”
He didn’t answer. She knew he was staring again at the child’s closed eyes, the ones that reflected light in ways no blind eyes should.
At noon, the nurse visited, boots clicking, voice bright enough to hurt. Lucia didn’t like her. She asked too many questions and touched the baby too roughly. “You need rest, Señora,” she said. “Your husband tells me you’re having those, um, visions again?”
Lucia laughed. “They’re not visions. They’re the only things that still make sense.”
When the nurse left, Rafael didn’t come home that night. Lucia fed Luna with slow patience, her fingers tracing the baby’s jawline. She froze. The skin felt wrong. It felt off… cold, too smooth, like something not alive. “Luna,” she said softly, “what’s happening to you?”
Something shifted beside her. Not the baby. The space changed, like air pretending to be solid. A sound followed… dirt scraping, slow, like digging under the house.
She told herself it was the neighbor’s dog. Wait, no, they didn’t have a dog. She hated when her mind filled gaps like that, replacing the real with the easy.
Days folded into each other. Rafael worked more, slept less. Lucia began hearing voices in the pipes, soft and curious, calling her name backwards. “Aicel… Aicel…” She asked Rafael if he heard them, too. He said it was wind, or guilt, or both.
One morning he didn’t go to work. He stood by the crib for an hour without speaking. “She smiled at me,” he said finally. “But it wasn’t a smile. It was… correction.”
“What do you mean?”
“She smiled like I was the mistake.”
Lucia reached out, but his hands were cold and damp, like he’d been buried for hours. She held back the question… had he been digging again? Had the hole shifted? Instead she said, “We’re all mistakes. Maybe she’s fixing us.”
He laughed, short and cracked. “Fixing? You think this is fixing?”
The mirror in the hallway had been covered since Luna’s birth. Lucia didn’t like how it made the room feel split in two. One night she tripped on Rafael’s boots, and her hand tore the blanket away. She expected darkness. Instead, she saw light. Blinding white, like the moment before fainting.
And then… movement.
She saw herself holding the baby, rocking gently. But in the reflection, Luna was awake. Eyes wide, focused, and bright with something almost human, almost kind. In that reflection, Lucia’s face wasn’t calm. It was terrified. She felt her knees give out.
She crawled forward, hand reaching for the glass. Cold, sure, but it throbbed soft, like the surface was alive. The child in the mirror blinked, slow, careful. Then its lips curled up.
At her back, the real Luna… held close… shifted. A sound rose from her core, not breath, not voice, something deeper, like ground shifting under silence.
“Do you see it, too?” Lucia whispered.
No answer, of course.
She placed the baby back in the crib and listened. The breathing slowed again to that broken rhythm: stop, start, stop.
Outside, the soil shifted.
She could feel it even through the floor.
Somewhere below, Rafael was digging.
Morning came. No nurse showed. The phone cried out, once, twice… Lucia let it scream until silence returned. She didn’t want news, not from anyone. Her sightless eyes felt heavy with shapes, patterns pressing from inside her skull.
She followed them like instructions.
Step. Turn. Stop.
Her hand touched the wall near the crib. Something warm dripped down the paint. She thought it was water until she smelled metal.
Luna cooed softly. The sound was offbeat, delayed by a second, as if repeating itself. Lucia leaned close.
“Are you copying me?” she asked.
The baby laughed… or tried to. The sound came from two places: one from the crib, one from the mirror still uncovered in the hall.
Lucia stood there, heartbeat stuttering. “That’s… funny,” she said aloud. “Very funny.”
She smiled to prove she wasn’t afraid. But the baby’s laughter continued, small and hollow, until it wasn’t funny anymore.
That night, Rafael didn’t return.
Lucia sat by the crib, rocking slowly, whispering stories she couldn’t see but remembered anyway. Her words tangled with her thoughts until both sounded like prayer.
When dawn came, she felt light hit her face through the curtains. For just a moment, she was sure her sight had returned. Forms shifted behind her closed eyes: the crib, the baby, the open door, and outside in the yard… a deep, dark pit.
And someone standing in it, smiling up at her.
“Rafael?”
The figure didn’t answer. It lifted a shovel, pointed it toward the house.
Lucia turned back to Luna.
The crib was empty.
Lucia didn’t scream. The noise died in her chest, caught between bone and breath, where dead sounds gather. Her hand dropped into the crib again, finding only creased cloth. Still warm. That was worse than cold. Warm meant movement. Meant something had been there, seconds ago.
She called the baby’s name softly, though her mouth was dry. “Luna…?”
Silence. Then, faintly, from the hall mirror… something breathing back.
Lucia turned her head toward the sound. She knew the mirror wasn’t supposed to make noise, but blindness had taught her that objects could hum when no one else listened long enough. The air around it had changed. Thicker. Weighted, like heat before rain.
The glass shivered.
She almost doubted it. Then came that soft coo again… this time from within the mirror, not the room. She moved forward slowly, fingers skimming the wall. Floor tiles pulsed underfoot like blood beneath skin.
“Luna,” she said, “come back now.”
The reflection trembled. A figure began to form… not her, not exactly. A woman, face pale and wet, holding a child that wasn’t still. Lucia’s pulse skipped when she saw the smile, wide and wrong, eyes hollow pits.
She stepped back fast, hand dragging along the wall. Something soft brushed her fingers. She froze. Small fingers… her baby’s. But the touch came from behind her, not the crib.
Lucia spun, her breath sharp. Nothing.
Only the faint smell of soil.
Rafael’s shovel was missing from the doorway. She knew it without touching. The empty hook made a tiny whistle every time the wind passed through the open window. She could hear the garden calling… earth opening, closing, whispering like lungs.
Lucia stepped forward, counting under her breath like she did when the world went dark. Nine to the hall. Twelve to the kitchen. Twenty-one to the back exit. Her hand reached the knob. Froze.
Something breathed on the other side.
“Rafael,” she said soft.
No answer. Then a low voice, quiet as shovels on wet dirt: “It’s already done.”
She backed away. “What did you do?”
A pause. Then: “She wanted it this way.”
Lucia gripped the doorframe. “Who?”
“The one in the mirror.”
Something hit the door from the other side… soft, like a head. Then again, harder.
Lucia stepped back until her legs hit the table. Her hand found a small kitchen knife, the one she used to cut fruit before her sight failed. She held it out though she didn’t know where to aim.
“Rafael, please. Stop.”
No sound now but faint dripping.
She reached forward and touched the door. Warm. Her fingertips came away wet. She smelled iron.
“Rafael?”
Nothing.
She moved through the house like a shadow learning its shape. Every sound mattered… the clock ticking too slow, the window groaning open by itself, the faint laughter that always came from the hall mirror.
When she reached the crib again, it was full.
Her breath stopped.
Luna lay there, quiet and still but wrong. Too still. The skin under Lucia’s fingers felt cold and stiff, like old ceramic. She traced the baby’s face and froze… features changed again, different from before.
Left dimple now on the right. Hair curling the other way.
“This isn’t you,” Lucia whispered. “You’re not her.”
The baby’s mouth twitched. The sound wasn’t a sob… it was a hush, faint and low, like speech just beginning. Words she almost understood.
“Mamá… abajo.”
Below.
Lucia’s stomach turned.
She followed the voice. Bare feet on tile, then on dirt. The back door was open now. The night smelled like wet roots and something sweeter… like decay pretending to be flowers.
In the center of the yard was the hole. Deep and perfect, edges smooth as if someone had carved them with care. She heard dripping inside, steady and patient.
She knelt at the edge. “Rafael?”
Her voice came back, warped.
“Rafael?”
Then a reply… but it wasn’t him. It was her own voice, from inside the hole.
“Come down, Lucia.”
She froze. Her heart felt too large. “Where’s my baby?”
“In here. With me.”
Lucia almost laughed. “You really think I’d believe that?”
The voice sighed, low and knowing. “You already do.”
Her hand shook around the knife. She almost threw it in… but stopped. Instead, she brushed the dirt at the edge. It pulsed faintly, like something alive underneath.
She leaned closer. The air rising from the pit was warm and thick. It smelled like Rafael’s skin after digging… mud and rust and faint sweetness.
Then, from the darkness below, she saw it. Not with her eyes, but with whatever part of her still remembered light. Two faces. Hers and Rafael’s. Both smiling. Both holding the same baby.
She jerked away, feet slipping on wet ground.
Her blind eyes saw too much now. Shapes burned behind them: mirrors, graves, loops of hands passing a child back and forth, back and forth, like a game no one could win.
Lucia began to laugh.
Because suddenly, she understood.
Every night Rafael dug the same grave. Every morning it sealed again. He believed it was his punishment. But it wasn’t. It was repetition. Correction.
The world fixing its own reflection.
And now it was her turn.
Lucia felt the knife slip from her hand. It hit the dirt without sound. She stepped forward, one foot into the hole. The air inside welcomed her, warm and soft like breath.
She thought she heard Luna again, calling gently.
“Mamá…”
The ground shifted under her. She didn’t fall; she was pulled.
And then, quiet.
Morning came slow. The nurse showed up late, grumbling about time and men who never help. She shoved the door open and scowled. The room reeked of pills and wet ground.
In the crib, a baby slept peacefully.
The nurse smiled. “Good girl, sleeping all night, huh?”
She bent over to adjust the blanket. The baby opened her eyes.
They were bright. Clear. Seeing everything.
And as the nurse peered closer, she saw it… the face in the baby’s glossy stare wasn’t her own.
It was Lucia’s face.
Smiling.
Upside down.
Want more gripping stories by Fendy S. Tulodo? Read “Beneath the Boards” from Horrific Scribes, March 2025 and “Postmarked for My Bones” from Horrific Scribes, July 2025.