Deva Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Somewhere in the night a lost lonely child cried. Somewhere in the
night a hungry baby wept. There were so many voices. So many noises. There were
always so many. He could hear them all. His gift. His curse. Oh God, he wished
he could shut it off sometimes. He hardly ever got any decent sleep. He didn’t
really need sleep, but he liked it, so he wished he could get more of it. Super
powered extremely precise hearing wasn’t going to help him do that.
It wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a protector of the infantile and
innocent. He shared a deep connection with them, but it wasn’t his job. He
didn’t know what his job was. He didn’t really know if he had one. He didn’t
think he had one, but he wasn’t sure. There wasn’t an instruction manual or
anything like that. Immortality didn’t work like that. Neither did
near-immortality. But he liked to think of it as just immortality. It was
simpler that way. It wasn’t exactly correct, but it was simpler. Besides, when
you’re talking in terms of a billion years or so, barring accidents of course,
a few million years here and there don’t really mean all that much. Even if
it’s not, it sure feels like immortality. And immortality can be might boring
at times.
He wondered what he had done to deserve this curse. He hadn’t
always been able to hear every baby crying everywhere. It hadn’t always been
that way. He used to have peace and quiet. He used to sleep. He was pretty sure
he remembered that. It was hard keeping it all straight sometimes, with all the
reincarnations and karma and everything else. Things could blur and get muddy
if he wasn’t careful. Entire lifetimes were forgotten. Had it all been a dream
he had once? Or was it a million years ago? Did it really happen, or was he
remembering a book he read fifty thousand years ago? Long life didn’t
necessarily mean good memory.
He was sure he had done something, but he couldn’t remember it.
Somewhere, sometime, he had crossed the wrong person or said the wrong thing or
done the wrong thing. He was being paid back for some bad decision. He had
plenty of those. There was no way he was going to remember all those.
He wished there had been a rule book. Or instructions. He could have
used those. Those would have been handy. He was sure there was something he
could do to get out of karma jail, he just didn’t know what.
He was exhausted. He was tired. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to
have dreams again. He wanted the noise to stop.
Begrudgingly he got up. Begrudgingly he set out to find the lost
and lonely child. That was the closest one. Maybe he could figure something out
and get that one to stop its crying. Maybe. It would be a first step. What else
did he have to do? It wasn’t like he was going to be getting any sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment