Saturday's Storyteller: "Have I ever told you about when I was a carrier pigeon in the Great War?"

by Belinda Roddie

"Have I ever told you about when I was a carrier pigeon in the Great War?"

There was a heavy but hearty sigh of affirmation in the space. Aloysius smiled. He swirled the Barbera in his glass so that the red glazed the brim, waiting to sip it as he eyed his dear brother, Zac.

"Ah, yes," he murmured. "It's a tired story, I assure you, but 1917 - that was the year to fly. It all went very well until just the right amount of shrapnel hit me in the right wing. Took me down quickly, into the mud of a war-baked Germany. I died rather quickly."

Zac nodded solemnly before turning to his beer. Nestled beside him was his wife, Claire, whose deep oaken eyes resembled very much those of a fawn nestled in the spring of the suburbs. His cousin, Sweeney, sat in the easy chair closest to the door, smoking one of those newfangled electronic cigarettes that breathed out plumes of vapor instead of smoke. Zac never would understand the appeal, but to him, it was indeed better than ash in his lungs. He had died of throat cancer at a very young age in his second to previous life - when he was an Amish physician in the thick of rural Pennsylvania.

The family had indeed convened on this very muggy July night to discuss their reincarnations - something they could not do candidly in any other social space. Claire had some very fascinating stories of her past existences - in fact, she was completely convinced that she had once been Susan B. Anthony, and her deadpan expression of feminism was a definite clue to it. Sweeney's lives had been unorthodox, even if not particularly notable historically. Zac had always had an utmost interest in how Sweeney carried a bit of her more masculine past selves with her, resorting to a short haircut and a vest over a tight shirt which collar cut away just enough to reveal the orange dragon tattoo. Her past life as a wolf also attributed to her more aggressive and wild attitude.

But out of all four of them, Aloysius had the most interesting stories. True, Zac, Claire, and Sweeney had heard them all before, and they still enjoyed them, being that again they were the only listeners of their kin's tales without having the slightest notion of sending him to an asylum. Aloysius spoke like Lincoln, walked like Napoleon, and had all the candor yet cunning of Odysseus - though he confessed that he had never lived the lives of any of those men. He had, however, been through a roller coaster of existence for what he perceived to be two hundred years now, beginning as a slave girl who had died very suddenly while protecting her brother from the whip of their plantation master. Aloysius did not like to talk about that past life. He claimed it made him feel very small and frightened, which was a surprise to Zac given that he had always known his brother as a large, tough, determined youth who had only become larger, tougher, and more determined upon reaching the breach of adulthood.

Yes, the four Terceros had a gift that not many others could claim to have: They remembered their paths of reincarnation, and they all could tell the stories well as if they were reliving the very essence of their former toils. Zac and Aloysius had discovered their gift at a very young age, promising each other to write down their dreams within their diaries after they appeared to have a consistent plotline. The journeys into their subconscious fortresses only seemed to grow longer in duration as they grew older, and thus the chronicles that they documented began to grow threads and become massive webs within only a few months by the time they were teenagers. Once Aloysius and Zac had recorded more than half a dozen lives each, they were willing to share their stories with only very few people. Were it not for Claire being open with her similar story, Zac never would have married her, and the monthly get-togethers would not ever occur.

Now, as Sweeney put aside her electronic cigarette, all eyes turned to her. Aloysius had always been somewhat of a Homer among the group, and now it was time for him to take a breath and allow someone else to orate while he refilled his glass of Italian wine. Zac's cousin, seven years younger than he was, seemed to hold more of a burden in her gaze that he had noticed prior to the current hour. The heat was taking on a movement similar to that of swarming in the small one-story house that evening, the dust very noticeable in the drifting sun that had begun to nod off against the grassy temples of the hills behind the group's heads. The faint trickle of water from a leaky faucet in the kitchen signified a nearly diegetic ambiance to the entire scene, as Claire lifted her reddish head from her husband's shoulder just enough to reach for her lukewarm pint. Indeed, even Zac's beer felt sweaty in the glass against his palm, the beverage taking on the slightest taste of salt once it had reached his stubble-stained, desert lips.

Sweeney leaned forward in her chair, and tossed her head back somewhat as she cleared her throat, so that the bangs bobbing along her creased forehead swept to the side somewhat and revealed a spread of scarring from bad acne. Twenty-seven years old, and she still endured the pettiness of adolescent hormones, though she didn't seem to mind. She stared straight ahead at the wall, where a knitted portraiture of Benjamin Franklin hung languidly against the floral paint job - a blurred quotation muttering under its breath below his wattled neck.

"There is one life," she intoned, "that I have not spoken of yet. And that it is because I've only just finished writing it down. At least, I think I have - you all know that our past lives have a funny way of adding more detail years after the idea that we think we know it all."

"I'd like to hear it," Claire whispered, her voice light and frothy and somewhat muffled due to the thick porter still coating the back of her throat.

"You will," replied Sweeney. "You all will. It is an interesting story, one I'll try to reiterate from memory as best as possible. I wish I had brought my diary, but sometimes, even when you remember fifty years before your latest birth, the short-term disappears."

Zac chuckled, and Aloysius raised his glass of wine in silent agreement. Acquiescence soon simmered in the air as the three awaited Sweeney's story. And she began.

"In a previous life," she spoke, "I was a part of a fabric that had already started to fray in the years before the Renaissance. When life was very much uncharted, undocumented, so that in many ways, not even the Western geniuses of today could figure out this existed. It may seem perhaps unfathomable, indigestible - but I assure you it is nothing but truth.

"In my past life, I was an alchemist who was killed upon finding the elixir of life."

***

Nicolas Flamel had nothing on me, back in the days before electricity and commodity and the ill-fated attempt to conquer something material as the end-all, be-all of immortality. I cared not for the inscription on plaques hung in corporate buildings - the natural elements can strip the metal of the print, and no one would even care to notice the faded name. No, I was known as one Jenci Wibo. A female! Yes. With a scarily masculine persona, by the standards of the territory I lived in. It was a territory we now know as California - but I was of a race and tribe entirely different than that of those recognized by the Spanish conquistadores. You see...we killed ourselves before they killed us.

The Wibos were very tall, and very dark, and they had eyes as silver as the bay before being tainted green by the strangers of San Francisco. But their appropriately fatal anatomical flaw was that they died young, and without warning. We did not encroach upon other tribes' lands because of the fear that we would drop dead before planting our flag - and truth be told, we could be snuffed out easily by those smart enough to sharpen a spear. In fact, when other groups of natives came and demanded our property, we departed, and resettled, for we knew we would disappear from this earth quickly. My ancestors repopulated as quickly as possible, but it was futile - some even died before birthing the firstborn. So in the end, there were few of us left. Very, very few.

So few, in fact, that it was only a group of six of us, residing as teenagers in the wilderness. And it was there that I discovered an herb in my hunting days, when I still felt strength in my muscles and excitement in my humors at the prospect of energetic activity. I found a plant that is surely by now extinct that, when boiled with the proper fruits, could become a potent and relaxing potion for my family to drink. We drank it together, the six of us, laughing and talking over a spit of bird meat, which we shared. We shared everything back then, knowing it could be split, and when it couldn't be divided equally, we left it for the sake of unity.

It would not be so with the elixir, for we knew, as we grew older, that we were not dying as planned. My brother, Jirai, awoke one morning at what we perceived to be the ripe old age of nineteen. And he was just as able as ever to throw a spear and fire a bow. He demanded more of the elixir, and we were able to find more herbs and boil them with the proper berries. We drank it, and we grew all the more powerful. We each reached the ages of twenty-five easily, all six of us - I was the second youngest, my sister Aymee the youngest. Indeed, I was twenty-six by the time I found one last herb, meaning we would have to travel north to find more.

It was around this time that we stumbled into an explorer - Dutch, in fact, and very, very old, by the name of Lars Geert. He was very feeble, and due to his inability to walk fast, he had been abandoned by his team of poachers and left to starve in the Shasta mountains. We took him into our tents, and we fed him the brew of life, and he grew all the springier in his step. He was amazed. He demanded to know our secret. And we told him, blindly trusting the Dutchman.

"It is derived of an ancient herb," my elder sister, Hamal, explained over firelight. I remembered how vividly her silver eyes stood, polished like the orb of the moon above. "A rare one. We drink the brew together, and when we have run out, we die together."

"Nonsense," Geert interjected. "We shall find more of it, and I shall drink the greater weight of the potion."

Of course, we all silently eyed him with judgment and a wariness over the still bubbling pot. The elixir was cooking there, you see - and now we had become too vigilant to ladle out the stuff in bowls to share. We were worried the old geezer would burn himself in his passion for it.

"Why," asked my other brother, Itlan, "shall you be obliged to drink the most of the potion?"

"Because I am very old," Geert replied, "and I grow older by the day. You, however, bear youth. I cannot imagine you needing the stuff more. No, let me drink the most of it, else I turn to ash where you stand."

"We suffer from a weakness in the blood, causing us to die early were it not for this elixir of life," Jirai, always outspoken, intervened. "You cannot drink the most of it."

"You lie!" screeched Geert, and that was when he moved to strike my brother with his open hand.

I stood in front of his path then, reaching out slowly with an open palm. I may as well have pushed against the wind, for the old Dutchman toppled from my touch easily, and he nearly knocked the cauldron over. The pot was very large - stone, and very difficult to haul - and very, very hot. One tumble could strip the skin off one's face.

"Stay out of my way," Geert ordered me, but I shook my head.

"I am the creator of the drink of immortality that you take advantage of," I snarled. "You will not kill my brother without killing me first."

Geert sneered. He dared to challenge me. He reached for his belt, made of fur, and made ready to draw a knife. And it was then that I shoved him, hard, and let him fall into the pot.

The screams haunt me to this day, even hundreds of years later, as the Dutchman died in the very medicine that was meant to keep him alive. I tried my best to fish him out, but half of his skin had been seared off by the time I reached him. The hand holding the knife was still intact, not yet scalded, and he cut deeply into my chest as I leaned toward him. The blood trickled down into his melting flesh, and the elixir was forever tainted.

My brothers and sisters could not find more elixir in time, and I died slowly, in my sister Aymee's arms. Death, in that life, was like an old friend waiting for me to acknowledge him. I had worked so hard to avoid him, for twelve long years, knowing that were it not for my elixir, I would have most likely died at the age of sixteen. But as I bled and my oldest brothers scrambled in vain to find more herbs, I could see Death's visage in the distance. He was very short, and he wore pelts, much like Lars Geert. There was an age in his eyes that I was not accustomed to, nor were my Wibo ancestors accustomed to. He felt all too real as he beckoned me, a smile glinting the right corner of his mouth. Not a taunting smile. A comforting one.

He was telling me to follow him, and his sister, Acceptance. She took my hand with a very thick and wrinkled thumb. She was not as world-weary as her brother, but her blue eyes held the warmth of a thousand years. It was as if Mother Nature herself were carrying me. And I let them.

They were my family then, in that brief moment of clarity, against the California mountain range. And ironically, it was when linking arms with my friend, Death, that I felt the most immortal.

***

Sweeney finished her story laboriously, sinking back into the easy chair closest to the door. She reached for her electronic cigarette again, inhaling sharply and letting the fumes circulate. In the corner, dust scurried in the shape of a tumbleweed, unsettling the planks leading to the bedroom. The chorus of frogs had begun outside as the crepuscule bled through the cracks in the walls.

Zac raised his head and almost believed that his eyes had left shadows against the floor. He had not dared to look at Sweeney as she told her story, for it had been filled with a nostalgic vigor that he had not expected from her. Beside him, however, Claire could not break her gaze from his cousin, her deer eyes never blinking, never swiveling, in the light of the ceiling lamp. She clutched his arm tightly, with the strength and worry of over twelve other women and men in so many decades.

It wasn't until the clinking of a wine stem could be heard against a wristwatch that Sweeney appeared to reemerge from her past, back into the present, where Aloysius was straightening himself up. When he talked, he filled the space with the sound, and smell, of wine-flavored reverie. Back to lives that Zac was familiar with, ones that did not shock him.

"The tiger tamer," Aloysius declared, without even addressing Sweeney's Jenci Wibo. Jenci Wibo, who held hands with Death as well as a buddy. "Back in 1849. Gold rush, running away from the circus instead of to it. I hit pay dirt then. Four ounces of fresh, shiny ore."

This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.