Live, Die, Repeat

I sat up quickly, my hands to my face, as sweat broke out all over me. Yes! I was human again! I shuddered as the vision of a tire approaching my little body flashed through my head, and I lay back down, my head on the pillow as I took in my surroundings. The room wasn’t big, but the furnishings were decent. Looks like it was time to get everything in order.

Swinging my legs out of the bed, I sat on the floor in the lotus position and tried to clear my head to organize the new information in my brain. Let’s see, my name was evidently Will this time. That was easy enough, I had been a Will at least three other lives before. I was 18, as always when I was a new human, and lived in New Hampshire. Well, that was a new state, so maybe I’ll pick up something out of whatever happened here. I was a male this go around, that always seemed to be a 50/50 choice.

Parents? Nope, as usual I’m on my own, I have a little money for the rent on this apartment, but my parents left me on the doorstep of a firehouse when I was a kid, so I have been in the foster system all my life. Or at least that is what my brain is telling me. In actuality, just a few moments ago the reality in this area changed just enough for me to be inserted, with an actual backstory and paperwork to be a real person. Ereshkigal had her A game working today.

Bitch.

I was born over 4,000 years ago in the city of Nippur, a part of Mesopotamia at the time, though in modern day Iraq now. My life was quiet, I was the literal goat herder next door, spending days up in the hills with my herd and sleeping under the stars. Until one night a goddess heard me singing around the campfire and fell in love. How was I to know she was a goddess? Yes, it wasn’t exactly normal for insanely stunning women show up in the middle of nowhere to just sit at your campfire and listen to you sing, then make love to you and disappear. But still, a goddess?

But a goddess she was. Inanna in fact, the goddess of sexuality, passion, love, and war. They all seem to go together, don’t they? Her sister was Ereshkigal, and Ereshkigal was a jealous bitch. All right, maybe she had reason to be, I don’t know. There was some story about Gilgamesh and a bull, and the bull got killed and Ereshkigal was pissed, but I never understood that. I only know that Inanna was at my campsite, and she wanted me. I know, I was being used, I think I was the rebound for Gilgamesh. But she was a damned sex goddess! How do you say no to that?

But then she was gone. She left me and went to the underworld to say hi to her sister, who evidently was still extremely upset about that bull, and killed her. Now, it wasn’t like I was there, I didn’t know it at the time. I only knew because a short time later I was brought to the underworld by Enki, another of the great gods. He convinced Ereshkigal to return Inanna to the living. Since the bull was something Ereshkigal had loved, Enki would allow Ereshkigal to take something that Inanna loved.

Yeah, me.

Yay.

And she did, she killed me.

But evidently Enki didn’t feel that it was fair that I paid the price for something that I had nothing to do with, and he reincarnated me, and I awoke as a lion. The weird thing was, I still had all my memories, but now I was a lion. How the hell does that work? But it was better than being dead. Living as a lion wasn’t bad, in some respects better than being a goat herder, and I thanked Enki by roaring a lot.

But after several years I died again, as is the natural order of things. Until I awoke as a young woman in a town I’d never heard of, married to a man that looked like an ox. It was the beginning of my eternity; a constant tug of war with Ereshkigal on one side and Enki and Inanna on the other, and I was the damned rope. I’d like to think that the good lives I’d had were because Enki and Inanna had been kind, and that the bad ones were because Ereshkigal was vengeful, but for all I know it was completely random.

I’d lived several hundreds of lives, many for only a short period of time, and I remembered all too many of the deaths. I had learned many languages, and many trades as I picked up skills and the language of wherever I was. My memories stayed with me as I moved from body to body, place to place. I was never anyone famous that I know of, though I had seen a lot of big events. There were good times, like seeing South America when I was a native tribesman before most of the world even knew it existed, and bad ones, like the countless times that Ereshkigal delighted in having me reincarnated as a bull. You can’t tell me that wasn’t her! I must admit, it sucks being killed by humans only to be eaten.

I blamed most of my animal reincarnations on her. Rats, fish, dogs, and cats, you name it and I have probably been it. She even made me a damned fly once. A fly! You know that scene in the Karate Kid when Daniel catches the fly? Me. I landed on that damned chopstick, I wanted out. Death was better than being a fly, but he gets the credit. Most times being an animal was like that though, I had no animal instincts, so I tended to die quickly to the nearest predator. I didn’t mind too much if I was a pet, or something big. Though the one time I was an elephant and was hunted for my tusks was horrible. At least I took a few poachers with me though.

Being a human wasn’t always a joy either. I had been murdered or raped or enslaved more times than I cared to remember. I had died of exposure, and starvation, and the plague. I died three times during World War 2 alone, yet not once had I died of just old age, I always found trouble. I must admit, with all the bad ways I had died, I had a bit of a complex. Since I didn’t care too much about dying, since I had no attachments to anyone, and I knew I’d be reborn, so I tended to take one for the team a lot and take out anyone I thought was sufficiently evil, regardless of the consequences.

For instance, one time that happened, I had been a young woman in what Is now France, I had just started my new life and didn’t have much to my name. Evidently a wealthy nobleman thought that was the perfect excuse to pick me up off the streets, have my way with me, and then kill me. Unfortunately for him, I awoke as another young woman in Italy a short time later. It took me over a year to get close to him, but I made sure I reminded him of my old self as I drove the knife into him. I was dead a short time later, I had no intention of rotting in jail, but it felt good to take that scum with me.

And then I was a rat again.

But now I was a human once more, a box next to the bed had all my paperwork, so I had a birth certificate, a social security card, a driver’s license and a bank debit card for the local savings and loan. As always, all the paperwork showed my birthday as the day I appeared. Happy birthday to me. It even had a cell phone, that was a first. Evidently, I was a senior in the local private high school according to the transcripts and class schedule that were in the box. Well, that was going to be boring. I didn’t mind school, but I had spent thousands of years learning these things, and as much as they want to change math, you still end up with 4 when you add 2 and 2. And history? They were seriously going to teach me that? I could speak almost every language invented, several of which weren’t spoken by any living human, but here I was taking French 3.

Honestly, life itself was boring these days.

I had just lived a 3-day life of a squirrel. You know the ones that run into the street, then change their mind 10 times before scurrying away? That was me. Always trying to get the courage up to let the car hit me, and I never could. Till a damned kid in a Camaro aimed at me and hit me.

That fucker.

Before that I had lived a nice life in Spain, just running a little restaurant and being happy. I was good with that. Or I was before I found some smugglers using the fishing boats in the area for drug running and took them down on Christmas Eve. Once again, at the cost of my own life. I had rigged the system a bit, and I’m sure Ereshkigal knew it, but so far hadn’t stopped me. I’d started keeping money and weapons around for future lives. Burying what coins that I could in secret stashes that I would return to get. Pirates and buried treasure? Yeah, they stole the idea from me. It took time to get back to them before good transportation was around, but it was worth it. But now numbered bank accounts made it easier, and this was my first life where I could wake up and have all my money in easy to access online accounts. If I was going to keep coming back to life, I wasn’t going to have to scrape by or be defenseless every time.

But even with money, 4,000 years of being alone with nobody to love sucked. I had been with other people, too many to count, but it never really meant much. I’d been so many people of so many genders that all my partners, male and female and whatever animal species I had been, kind of blended together. I spent a month as a bunny once and trust me when I say I had more sex in that month than all my human lives combined. But, at the end of the day it was all just sex, there was no connection. I guess once you’ve fallen for a goddess, it was impossible for anyone to live up to that standard.

I unfolded myself from the lotus position and padded around my new living space. The bedroom opened into a common area consisting of an eat in kitchen with a large island, attached to a living room, with a second bedroom on the opposite side. A sliding glass door led out to a small porch overlooking some woods behind the building. A pair of chairs and a small fire pit were on the porch, and three more porches were attached to the building to my left. Evidently, I was in the end unit of some apartments or townhouses. It could be worse. When I went back into the kitchen, I found a set of stairs leading down that led me to a front door, and a garage containing a blue chevy pickup truck. I wasn’t really a car person, so I had no idea if that was good or not.

I went back upstairs and looked around the kitchen, it seemed to have at least a few days’ worth of meals and assorted snacks. There was even a 6 pack of beer and a few bottles of alcohol in the pantry. They should know better, I stopped that over 2,000 years ago. It wasn’t smart to get drinking and spout off about being reincarnated. It can get you killed. A lot.

I finally ended up in the bathroom. It was a decent size, separate tub and shower, double sinks, toilet, and a mirror. I stared into the mirror, trying to memorize my new face. As always, only the eyes were the same. No matter what human body I received, I could always count on my dark brown eyes being the same. The rest was different. Olive colored skin, black hair cut short, no noticeable tattoos or scars. I searched my memories, trying to determine if I knew what heritage my parentage was, but I couldn’t see anything. Not that it really mattered, color only mattered to the ignorant.

Of course, there was a lot of ignorance going around. I truly hate humans sometimes.