The ball felt clumsy in my hand. I threw it against the side of our home, and when it bounced off, I almost tripped with every step I took to recover the ball again. Over and over, I played the game, because it was one of the few things I could do for fun. I had no friends, because they all laughed at me for having such a fat pig for a mother.
I wanted to hug myself and tell little David everything would turn out all right. Eventually.
My adult self didn’t remember any of this. The memories of my childhood were gone, and even re-living them didn’t help me recall anything.
After about twenty minutes, the younger me grew tired. We were sweating and our T-shirt was wet.
“Oh.”
My younger self was worried, but I didn’t know why. He hung our head in shame and thought about peeing his pants, but thankfully he didn’t.
We were worried about sweating.
Everything was confusing. It was hot, we sweated. So what?
He turned our head to stare at the back door to our home. He was afraid to go in, but he had to find the bathroom or things would be a lot worse.
One step, then slowly, another. Little David kept his head bowed down. I wanted him to lift his head and smile, to realize childhood is a privilege that doesn’t last very long, but he carried a dark cloud around with him.
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t really like my younger self.
He was scared and beaten. It shocked me to realize the “beaten” part wasn’t about him being verbally knocked down. We had been abused physically, too. Many times.
We pushed onward and finally opened the back door. The house smelled like dirty laundry and rotten fruit.
“David.”
“Hello, Mommy. I have to—”
“Come here.”
“I have to pee.”
“I said come here!”
Molly Abelman was sitting on a couch in the living room watching some TV show I didn’t recognize. She had a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth and three empty beer bottles on the table beside her.
I knew Little David wanted to do anything at all except go to our mother. The only thing that kept him moving forward was knowing what would happen if he disobeyed her.
“Yes, Mommy?”
“You were sweating again.”
“I’m sorry.”
Our legs were weak and Little David couldn’t help himself. He grabbed his crotch with one hand to help relieve the pressure of having to urinate.
“What are you doing grabbing yourself like that?”
“I have to pee.”
“Let go of yourself, right now!”
We reluctantly let go. Little David felt himself getting ready to cry. I tried to force him to raise his head and stand up to the crazy bitch on the couch, but he didn’t want anything to do with that, and I didn’t push hard.
“I need you to get me a beer.”
“Okay.”
We slinked back to the kitchen and found another Coors in the fridge. Once we handed it over, she shook her head and said, “You’re a disgusting pig.”
That was all it took. Little David burst into tears and then ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. He immediately got scared that she would be mad about the slam and he panicked and hid in the corner behind the toilet. He knew there was a good chance she would beat him for that.
He wanted to get out.
To make matters worse, he had peed his pants.
There was no chance avoiding a beating for that.
He cried, and I cried with him.
After a few minutes, panic came over us. I knew I should take control of the body and get Little David out of this situation, but I was fighting an overwhelming and confusing anxiety. All I wanted was to get out of there.
So, I did.
With the little sense I retained, I floored my imaginary accelerator, to get me back to my true time as fast as possible.
Life flew by, a steady stream of random images, colors, and sensations. I felt sadness and laughter and love and hate and every other emotion fleeting through my mind like tiny stardust sprites. With each passing glimpse of time, I relaxed. I was safe from my mother.
Then everything went black.
For a long time, there were no sounds bombarding me, no images flashing onto my eyes, no feelings. Darkness. Nothingness.
That’s when I realized what I’d done. In my panic to get away, I’d pressed the reverse pedal in my mind instead of the forward pedal. I’d been traveling younger and younger, and now I was in a time before I’d been born.
As I figured out my mistake, a new set of images lit up my consciousness.
What the hell? I thought. How could that be?
I stopped pressing the pedal and let time slow to normal speed.
Without a second’s hesitation, my mind melded with the body I was riding. It wasn’t mine… but, it was.
My name was James Peller. I was fifty-two years old, a coal miner in West Virginia. It was now 1996, three years before “I” was born.
But the body I was in was mine, just as much as when I’d gone back to see Little David.
James Peller was a gruff man. We knew that and to be honest, we didn’t care. He was married but had few friends. There was Olav and Roger, but we only met them at the local bar to down a few after climbing out of the damned coal mine.
That mine was slowly killing us. Our lungs were filled with black crap and the doctors had given us only a couple more months to live.
Shelby was sitting beside us in a chair, knitting some damned fool thing. Probably another sweater. We kept telling her that we don’t like to wear fucking sweaters, but that didn’t stop her from making yet another one.
She looked old, much older than her forty-four years. Her hair was unkempt, and gray streaks ran through the brown locks. My own hair had thinned, but who gave a shit about that?
All of a sudden we started coughing. It got worse and worse, with us wheezing and waving our arms to try to get air. Shelby rushed to us and hit us with a fist on our back, but it didn’t help.
Maybe it was our time.
We grabbed the bed rails, shaking them, and barely noticed when a doctor ran inside. He put some kind of mask on my mouth and injected me with something.
Sleep took us from the coughing.
When we woke again, we were breathing fine. Shelby was asleep in her chair. The David part of me wondered why she stayed. I knew her life was hell with the James part of me. Fortunately for her, she would be free soon.
I was in a past life.
Living a past life? How’s that work?
Well, sometimes it turns out that science doesn’t have all the answers, yet.
A hundred years ago, no scientists had guessed DNA or genes existed, so they had no real clue how children could inherit blue eyes from their parents, but they took it on faith that the answer would come one day.
Two hundred years ago, the only known electricity was in lightning, which wasn’t very useful. Benjamin Franklin and others figured out how to generate their own electricity.
Science doesn’t have all the answers. Yet.
So, before this day, I would have laughed at people who claimed to remember previous lives. They never had the slightest proof.
Now, I have my own proof that past lives exist.
I didn’t much like the person I once was. James wasn’t nice to anybody, especially the woman who shared his bed; he was a drunken fool, and he was willing to fight anybody at the slightest provocation. He was angry a lot and had been his whole life.
I didn’t want to share this body anymore, so I decided to get out.
Carefully this time, I used the Shelljah to move into the future. I wanted out as quickly as I could, and it wasn’t very long before I was flying into the darkness between my lives.