Flash

Encore!

His first thought after death was There must be some mistake.They said it was just a routine procedure.But here I am, standing in line, waiting to be processed by some dim-witted bureaucrat who does not at all resemble St. Peter.I must be hallucinating. That's it - some sort of post-op reaction. A chemically-induced nightmare.Is Allie ever going to laugh when I tell her about this!

All through the questioning, the prodding and poking, the scrubbing and sanitizing, the choosing of a celestial body that was a good fit for his True Essence, he expected the whole farce to end abruptly, with his wife's concerned face leaning over him. Everything would re-set to the life he knew -- not a good life, but at least a reasonably predictable one.

All through the ordeal of the Total Life Review, the endless interviews with the Life Continuation Counselor, and the final decision-making, he kept calm. Well, reasonably calm. The LCC was a horribly intrusive banshee, and he may have snapped at her a couple of times and perhaps even threatened her safety, but she was asking for it. She had no right to question him about his sexual tastes. As for her queries about what he perceived the purpose of his life to be -- pure madness! He didn't ask to be born. He came into the world yelling and screaming and demanding his own way, and never bothered examining the effectiveness of those strategies. It was a dog-eat-dog world, and he survived as best he could.

When the LCC pronounced him a particularly difficult case, and called her supervisor for back-up, he laughed.

She's just trying to scare me. But she's the one who should be scared. When I wake up, I will still be me, and she will disappear. Pfft! Gone forever.

He found it increasingly difficult to hold onto his confident equanimity during his stressful re-birthing as a lamb in some rugged countryside that he did not recognize. Once the castration and ear-tagging were over, it wasn't a bad life -- eat, sleep, butt heads with rivals from time to time -- but there was no TV, no Internet, not even a newspaper. And try as he might, he was never able to establish a satisfactory rapport with his fellow sheep and those confounded herd dogs who thought they ruled the world. Everything was reduced to its most basic level -- go here, go there, eat, drink, sleep. The food was boring too -- grass, leaves, flowers, sometimes a thistle that bit his tongue. Never steak, nachos, fries or beer.

The truth finally hit him like an avalanche on slaughtering day. He had died and been reincarnated. And he was going to die again.

Next time around, he was going to be a lot more polite to his Life Continuation Counselor.