The Reincarnation

Grey waited for a report about the car. He still silently cursed himself for following the tracker’s signal instead of Johnny Rotten. Despite this, he was happy. He had spent the day introducing new smells to himself; cataloguing them, learning their secrets.

He wondered aloud why he had avoided nature in the past. The smells here were wonderful, so different from the barren world of buildings and concrete. He was growing used to the soft lines he saw around him, the randomness of nature. As he studied it he realized it only looked random to him because of his past perspective of neatness and orderliness. Studying it deeply, he saw not chaos, but a perfect order. The discipline nature presented was so huge he hadn’t seen it at first.

He had only ever been exposed to nature in bits and pieces, in isolation. Because of this, he always felt the need to control it, to dominate it. As a young boy he had caught flies. He would pull their wings off and call them “runs” and “hops,” or if they flipped onto their backs, “spins.” Then he would pull their legs off – carefully, if he was careless their guts would come out with their back legs and spoil his fun – and call them “wriggles.” He then moved on to larger prey.

He kept pigeons as a teenager, and once he took one of them and drew a line with a pen from its head to its tail, on the top and bottom. He then proceeded to pluck out all the feathers on the right side of it. He did this slowly, meticulously, and it took him the better part of a day. He had planned to stop there, but couldn’t. With the tweezers he had used to pull the smallest feathers out, he extricated the bird’s right eye. He did this with soft pets and coos, as if trying to convince the bird it was for the best. He then brought the bird to school and kept it in a brown paper bag in the bottom of his locker until recess. Then he took it out and carefully held it so that it looked whole to anyone who saw it. It was hard keeping the bird’s neck still, and he held it tight, the bird’s bare skin bumpy and warm under his fingers. He presented it to a group of children who had gathered around him on the playground, asking him how he caught it. At an opportune moment, he turned the bird around. At first there was silence – which he relished as he did the moment between the flash of lightning and its thunderous retort – and then screams, high pitched from the girls, and low growls from the boys. He was sent home early that day.

He sat peacefully in the grass, further studied the landscape – taking in the whole picture – and almost forgot he was waiting for orders from the Lab.