Written by Ken Carman
“Damn it all to Hell…”
This has NOTHING to do with Hell, or Heaven, but I said nothing, for I am polite.
“…you kept me waiting AGAIN.”
“How long has it been this time?”
Of course I knew the answer to my question, but asking was the polite thing to do: permission to continue her rant.
“20 years. 20 years I’ve been rotting here in this damn hospital bed, and where were you? Chasing after some young thing? Hovering like a mosquito, waiting to suck the blood out of…”
I listened. I am polite. Oh, I can be nasty, that’s true, make you scream in anguish to see me again. Make you feel like you’re rotting from the inside out, waiting for me. Make you wonder how you made it this far. But once we meet again, I am always polite.
80 year old woman: tubes bringing in fluids in a hopeless quest to keep her alive. We have met many times, through many lifetimes. I remember them all, and that’s an anomaly, for she remembers them too.
We met when she was a soldier in the Civil War, hiding her femininity… barely. We met when she was about to eat the poisonous fruit, when humanity was just climbing out of the ooze into sentience. Yes, I do remember, as so does she. Most people don’t remember their former lives, and when they do it’s usually some charlatan’s trick and so no former life at all. There’s a part of the brain that simply doesn’t transfer postmortem, that doesn’t travel with the soul unto its next destination.
But for every rule, every truism, every biological fact, there are always at least a few slight exceptions. She is one. She remembers each life. And since we tend to meet the same souls we met before, only under different circumstances, she remembers those she met before… though she has learned not to say, for no one believes and she has died as a “witch” for admitting she remembers, died in a straight jacket being raped by an orderly, died all alone as “that crazy woman who thinks she has had past lives.”
“I was hoping to see you sooner than this. Let’s do this.”
So, even though we have meet hundreds of times before, and she knows who I am, I introduce myself, for I am always polite…
“Hello, I’m Death…”
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©Copyright 2012
Ken Carman
all rights reserved
