It was a cold spring morning in Everett. The construction crew in charge of relaying tarmac at the junction between Maine Street and Emerald Way were sitting on boxes and smoking on posts, the signal to the start of another long shift. An elderly couple moved deftly across two paving slabs riddled with concrete, they’d made good time having turned from the last block before the sun had risen. The sun was now at least two suns above the horizon.

Walt’s dog was taking Walt for a walk, a wolfhound breed it moved like a swampy ghoul had put its gym membership to good use. Some dandelions had discovered a breach in the pavement defences – Walt’s dog sniffed them, a communal gathering of litter had convened in the sticky corner of a bus stop – Walt’s dog’s nose made short work of their smells, a man sat on the bench of the bus stop, picking at his foot with his sock hanging out of his mouth – Walt’s dog’s nose sampled his chemical aura as well. Walt’s dog’s nose was walking Walt’s dog who was walking Walt.

Walt was Jesus reincarnated. In fact, this was Walt’s fifty-ninth reincarnation and he was excited to use this life to prepare for his diamond reincarnation, his sixtieth go at occupying conscious matter in this universe. The diamond reincarnation was extra special because, prior to Walt, only two other recarns had made it. Recarns never died, or vanished, or passed on in their higher soul plane. Every reincarn that ever lived has always lived and will still live tomorrow, but taking into consideration the vast number of possible entities in the universe one can reincarnate into, its as unlikely as a meteor carving itself into the Statue of Liberty as it falls through the atmosphere for a reincarn to come back as anything with real substance to its awareness, like a human. Or a muskrat.

Rocks, the great colonialists of the universe, are abundant and very likely to be the next body of a reincarn. Second likely are the Gooloos, a species that evolved on planet G and due to peculiar evolutionary Yahtzee live indefinitely no matter how many times they are halved. Their population explosion through the galaxies has been a point of disdain for the reincarns. Gooloos can’t locomote or do anything through freewill, and they bred themselves to be born with tinnitus. No clear evolutionary advantage decided on for the constant humdrum they keep in their head, the popular choice among zoologists is that it is a telepathic mate signaling. Existing as rocks and Gooloos is all that most reincarns have ever known.

Today was the third time that Walt had reincarnated as human, which is as unlikely as an asteroid field breaking up in the atmosphere and every piece of debris carving itself into Statues of Liberties by the air pressure and then landing one apiece to every city on planet Earth. It had to happen to some planet at some point and so it had to happen to Walt aswell.

The first time Walt reincarnated as a human he had just finished a long stint as a Gooloo. His Gooloo had been on one of the first deep space programs, helping to test the flight technology that would make them the passively dominant species of their galaxy. Gooloos have no freewill to control their bodies or to steer ships, so spaceships were fired once and then rocked through the waves of gravity. No member of the crew of the first deep space program had any freewill to protest partaking and so when Walt and crew nosedived into a blackhole and gravity huddled them all onto the head of a pin, there was neither remorse nor celebration in the empire of the Gooloos, they just carried on.

Blackholes are the only way to destroy a Gooloo. After his brief interlude in the reincarn soul void where Walt has a fleeting moment to find out what friends and family have been up to, the next thing Walt knew he was making terrible screaming noises and he was on his back kicking and waving four appendages trying to hit invisible objects in the air. A quadrupedal screaming maggot he thought? because reincarns still have some notion of their being reincarns even if they lack the developmental skills to express it in their new form. There were two reasons, he posited, that he might be screaming: either this bright dot in the sky above his head spelled danger, or it was the itch on his naked rear and how he wished he was less flabby to to somewhere more comfortable. A giant pink starfish made of meat leaned down and picked Walt up from the hay that he was lying on. The thing was horrifying, it had large holes everywhere that seemed to pulse, stretch excitedly, and slap open and closed, open and closed. Despite the horror, Walt as a baby human found himself warming to the presence of the giant meat starfish. Three bearded pink starfish then joined the first, each one was squeezing baskets in two of their appendages. Bundled in the starfish holding Walt, he couldn’t overcome the weight of a deep sleep.