The Laziest Reincarnation in History
The last thing Eliot remembered was a delivery truck's horn, blaring too late, and the peculiar clarity of thought that came with knowing, in the space of half a second, that he was about to die reaching for a dropped phone in a crosswalk. Then there had been nothing. No tunnel of light, no beatific voice, no cosmic customer service desk explaining the terms and conditions of his death. Just an absence, vast and dreamless, and then—
Straw.
He became aware of it before anything else: the dry, itchy prickle of it against his cheek, poking through a thin cotton sheet that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and lanolin. He blinked. His eyelids felt like they belonged to someone else, heavy and unfamiliar, and when his vision finally swam into focus, he found himself staring up at a ceiling made of rough-hewn beams, dark with age, strung with drying bundles of some herb he didn't recognize.
"Okay," he said aloud, and stopped, because the voice that came out of his throat was not his voice. It was younger, reedier, cracking faintly on the single syllable like a boy's voice caught in the middle of some awkward adolescent transformation.
He sat up too fast. The world tilted, lurched, and he…