The Reincarnation

John sat bolt upright on the park bench. His hand reached out to the girl sitting next to him. His action was mechanical, devoid of all consciousness.

The girl was looking away from John, down at the pigeons that had gathered around her sandals. Among them was a single raven that cocked its eye warily at her. She was young, and was wearing a sun dress with bright yellow and red flowers printed on it. She had brought some bread with her to the park, and just as much as the birds enjoyed this exchange, she too was lost in her own blissful world at the sight of something wild in her midst. The birds cooed and blinked their eyes at her, bobbing their heads to and fro.

The area where the girl was sitting couldn’t really be called a park, but that was what a lot of people, including her, called it. It was simply a semi-shaded half-block area where the concrete that covered everything was painted green to resemble someone’s memory of a particularly bright strain of grass. There was no real grass there, and no trees or bushes of any sort.

The girl was what John, if he were conscious, would have called a hippie wannabe. Not a hippie. But someone who wanted-to-be a hippie, adopting the clothes and outlook of a hippie, and pretending to live the lifestyle, if it was convenient enough for them. John didn’t like hippie wannabes any more than he liked punk wannabes or grunge wannabes. He didn’t like anyone pretending to be what they weren’t, especially if they were imitating a lifestyle John despised. To John, all wannabes were poseurs, enacting roles they had only read or heard about, and were rich or foolish enough to try out. They were all charades to him, much like the charade of the people he worked with during the week.

John, however, wasn’t conscious.

John’s outstretched hand reached the girl’s neck and clutched at it in what felt to what was left of his brain like a handshake.

The girl jumped at his touch, was addled for a moment, and then panicked. She flew off the bench and faced him. When she saw the somnolent, narcotic look on his face she scrambled away, walking backwards, her hands bunched into fists on her knees. Still facing him, she screamed about perverts and scumbags and molesters, accentuating her derision by thrashing her arms in his direction.

John’s hand dropped to his side and then went to his eyes, that, in a dreamlike, unconscious way, felt like they were on fire.