I awoke to a world of cold and numbness, my senses slowly returning to me. The air was thick, almost suffocating. Noises suddenly filled my ears, a rhythmic crunch of dirt, wheels turning, the soft snorts of horses, and heavy rain.
I was on a wagon? Did a group of Amish people find our car wreck? What's going on?
Another sound fills my ears, a man crying? No, it's a child, a baby. My throat strains every time I hear a cry, that can't be right, I'm not the one crying. My face is wet, it must be from the rain, I feel myself being lifted by giant hands.
What is this? I open my eyes, and the face of a woman is before me, a large woman, or am I small? She looks hungry, her cheeks sunken, her eyes tired. The baby cries again, my throat straining at the same time, and realization hits me.
This woman is not large, I am small.
The sound of a baby crying is from me. Images flash of the car crash I thought I survived, I couldn't have lived through that. I died and came back as a baby.
The concept of reincarnation had crossed my mind before, I had always thought it would be a better fate than any other belief in the afterlife, but this was different than I imagined.
Why are we on a wagon? Why does the woman holding me look so starved? Did I get reincarnated to the past?
Suddenly the woman speaks "Natho bachah nomofa."
She looks to her left towards the front of the wagon, a man sits there. He responds, "Natho Bachah tabeat wewe wentara tsukive."
I can't understand what they are saying.
Do babies have an inability to understand language? Have I forgotten english? Is this how all babies start? Do they slowly forget everything?
Suddenly I hear the sound of hooves approaching behind us. The woman looks up, her face covered In fear. I look at the man steering the wagon. He grips the reins tighter and exclaims loudly. The wagon speeds up.
The woman yells to the front of the wagon "Ohrenga kaito apo!"
The man looks back. "Ohido natho bachan!" he yells.
The woman opens a chest and places a blanket in it, before lifting me and placing me inside and then closes it.
Out of nowhere, I hear a loud crack, The wood groaning under sudden pressure, followed by the wagon jerking violently.
Trapped in the chest all I can do is listen to the muffled sound of chaos, my world is shaking, the sound swallowing me whole.
Then the world feels as if it slipped away, my stomach lurches, it twists into knots.
The sound of air rushing past fills my head as I realize we are falling. The wagon must have fallen off a cliff.
Is this how I die in this new body? I go from a car crash to a wagon crash?
The wagon hits the ground hard, I feel my head splitting as I lose consciousness, sound distorts as if I've been plunged underwater, and then nothing.
When my eyes opened, I was back in my old body In some strange hallway.
The hallway was lined with doors with small windows on them.
I looked into one of the doors and I saw my mother sitting across from a man at a desk.
"He wrote this?" the man said.
"Yes he was an amazing writer." My mother responded.
"Mom?" I call out but my voice is unfounded as if I'm dreaming.
I open the door hoping to find her on the other side but I'm met with the hallway again.
I move to the next door and again I see my mother, I open it and as the door swung open the hallway stared back at me through it.
I open the next door.
Hallway.
I start to panic running from door to door calling my mothers name, hoping she would hear me.
Opening and running through doors believing the lie that my mother would be behind one of them.
I start to scream, kicking doors open and running through them until eventually I fall.
The floor disappearing beneath me, all traces of the hallway gone until I hit something soft but cold.
I open my eyes to find I'm the baby again and I'm face first in the snow.
The cold is unbearable, It bites at my face like needles.
I'm starting to feel numb, not just from the cold but because of the traumatic experience this is.
Then I hear footsteps. Slow, deliberate, heavy against the snow.
A shadow looms over me before I'm lifted into the air and met with the face of a man, old and worn by time.
He had a bushy beard streaked with white and gray.
His beard was threaded with ice, not just snowflakes but actual icicles.
That made me realize something, I must've been out here for hours, how have I not frozen to death?
Just then the man wraps me in a cloth before tying me to his back.
As I look to the ground I see my face painted in the reflection of a frozen lake.
What I saw was not the face of a normal baby.
My cheeks and under my eyes were lined with scales.
My eyes looked reptilian.
I was not a human looking baby, so what am I?