Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

Petting dogs was good for people; it was a scientific fact. Burt was a wise man, too, in his way. All animals are.

On this particular day, Milo and Burt visited Ms. Arlene Epstein, who was dying of being a hundred years old.

“The problem with a barracuda,” said Milo, “isn’t that you aren’t being mature. The problem is that it’s a barracuda. If you don’t like being in the boat with it, one of you has to go.”

The universe doesn’t have a judge or a landlord. It’s like a river. It flows and changes and does what it has to do to stay in balance.” “Two plus two equals four,” said Nan. “It’s not personal. And it doesn’t matter how you feel about it.”

It was yesterday, or it was a thousand years ago. There wasn’t really a difference. Time was a swamp inside a giant washing machine.

She decided to dye her hair. A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.

“Everything’s fucking complicated.”

Milo found himself fighting depression. Not the full-on, soul-crushing kind that could paralyze you, but an abiding and sublime sadness that seemed to well up from across the ages.

Most nations dissolved into chaos and rioting. The Internet gasped, flashed, and went silent.

In the twenty-first century, they made it illegal to buy cheap prescription drugs online. The pharmaceutical companies paid lawmakers to keep it that way, and medical expenses were bankrupting people, killing people.

And when you go to water the plant, you pour the water over the rock instead of straight into the soil. That way the water sprinkles gently all around inside the pot and doesn’t kick up the soil and disturb the roots.” “You water the rock,” said Milo. “You water the rock,” said Gramma.

Balbeer squinted, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said. Milo was surprised. He had never heard a teacher or a serious student say “I don’t know.” It sounded frightfully intelligent.

That doesn’t change the fact that he isn’t like a normal person. He’s more like a story that lives and breathes. Sometimes the story has to be edited.”

reflections in the water. It was as if they’d run away to outer space.

There was this one idea going out to all the people on all the planets that maybe you couldn’t get people to stop being predators, but you could get them to stop being prey.

Everything makes sense to you now. Time. Gravity. Which fork to use. Zippers. Infinite dimensions. Tacos.

All good parents taught their kids this same lesson: If everyone agreed to suffer pain or death rather than be treated unjustly, greedy people could never again gain power.