[Writing Prompt] Everything is balanced through Karma. Karma means that whenever something bad happens to you, you suddenly remember what you did to deserve it. One day you are hit by a car and get a flashback to the 1500s.
Karmic Retribution
My mother had a saying – not my current mother, but one of my mothers a long time ago – “be careful what you sow, for all crops come to harvest.”
She was a wise woman.
I’ve done my best to live a good life. I can see now, I’ve been doing my best to live good lives – my best just ain’t that great. The nearly infinite path stretches out behind me, back and back through the iterations. I see my original self, a mere ant.
Literally, an ant. A big ant, mind you, some prehistoric thing. But still, just an ant, not much going on in that brain. From there, it’s been a long and arduous struggle to get to my current level of sentience. Apparently, I was a bit of an asshole for a very long time.
But roundabout 500 yeas ago, I must of have done something right, because I made the big leagues – human. Boom, gone were the days of licking my own ass, eating my own placenta, murdering my neighbor’s cubs, cause “lions, you know?” I was a human! A real boy!
And also still a real dick. It’s just the way things go, I think. You get so excited at your new possibility, your new powers, essentially, in that first iteration in a higher form of life that you become intolerable.
It’s not just animal to human mind you. I’m looking back to the transition I made between horseshoe crab and raptor, for example, millions of years ago, and damn was I an asshole of a raptor. I would seek out nests, eating other folks’ eggs, even when other prey was readily available. What kind of an asshole dinosaur does that? Hell, I didn’t even like the taste of eggs, I just thought it was funny!
But I digress. My first stint as a human was, I’m remembering now, pretty assholic. I was stuck up and self interested, and I didn’t care a bit about other people. As a result, I’ve been karmically paying for that first human lifetime for the last five centuries.
Thing is, I thought I’d paid off my debts, so to speak. In 500 years since then, I’ve only ever had a human life that was 30 years, at the longest. Each one has been a little better than the last, but they all ended early and painfully. A stabbing, consumption, starvation – you name it, I’ve died of it. And each time, the connection is there, plain to see. Fate highlights it, sort of.
“See here,” fate seems to say in its ephemeral way, “you burned to death in that cabin because back 500 years ago you started that forest fire and hid it from everyone, you asshole.” Not in so many words of course, but you get the idea.
But this last lifetime I went into thinking I was done. I racked my brains before reassignment for any outstanding bad Karmic act I had not yet paid for, and for the life of me, no pun intended, I couldn’t think of one.
When I was reborn in America, in the late 40’s of all times, before my universal mind went into hiding – something that happens to each of us within the first day of birth – I counted my lucky stars and got ready to live the high life. And, for awhile, I did. I grew up after the second world war and the world was my oyster. My daddy was rich and he got me a good job, and soon I was selling real estate, getting on Time magazine, making a name for myself. Hell, I even had aspirations of running for president.
But then it all came to a screeching halt, literally actually, when a 1983 Mazda RX-7 slammed into me at 70 miles per hour outside the office building that bore my goddamn name on it. Killed me instantly – hell it nearly cut me in half – and now I’m back in the waiting room, wondering where I went wrong.
Except, I don’t need to wonder for long, cause there’s Fate, that pretentious ass, showing me exactly what I did to deserve this one. And, truth is, I can’t blame anyone but myself.
I can see the whole scenario as if it were played out on a movie screen. There I am, having drunk about a barrel’s worth of mead, driving my carriage home, pulled by two donkeys. It’s a dark, moonless night and I should not have been on the road. But there I was, driving drunk.
To be fair, the kid came out of no where, and it was so dark I didn’t even notice I’d hit him. But now, with the power of Fate’s hindsight, I watch the whole thing, as it went down, and it’s pretty brutal. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance, and I left him there on the road, broken and alone. His parents found him the next morning. Tragic. Don’t drink and drive kids.
I guess there’s a moral to this story – We all get what’s coming to us – everything we sow really does come to harvest.
Anyways, I gotta go, I’m next in line. Fingers crossed I get better hair this time.
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