Reincarnated as a Sparrow
Reincarnated as a sparrow, I find myself perched on a wire in the sky. Eight other sparrows share the wire with me and we are all chirping various conversations back and forth. Some of us had been humans before our deaths so we tend to talk to each other about that but it soon grows tiresome since we are sparrows now.
“You’re a sparrow now! Speak sparrow!” one bird who had been a grey-haired Republican Twitter troll in New Jersey chides us.
Other sparrows had been other creatures. We suspect one had been a lion because he keeps trying to roar in the sparrow language which just does not work in this chirpy tongue.
I fly to a house where my children once lived. It looks changed. I do not know how long I was in the “reincarnation queue” before my rebirth. I see a small boy playing in the backyard below who looks like me when I was maybe seven years old. The spitting image! My grandson, I suppose.
I fly around the yard chirping loudly to get his attention. He spots me and smiles broadly showing me his teeth. As I descend toward a round patio table where I hope to perch and get a better look at him, he pulls something out from behind his back. It’s a slingshot. Deftly, he gets a shot off which strikes me in my sparrow head and sends me crashing to earth.
I think it was a stone. I’m on my backfeathers and he picks me up now and starts to squeeze the life out of me. I stare into his monstrous green eyes which were once my monstrous green eyes. As he squeezes harder to see how strong the toothpaste tube of life actually is, I enjoy his weird smile and pity him. Because as life leaves me yet again, I suddenly remember why I was reincarnated as a bird. Everything is deja vu in this world. It’s just we just keep changing places.
