Ryan often contemplated the idea of reincarnation.  The                                                                      general idea, he thought, ranged from coming back as                                                                          another human to working your way up the sentient ladder;                                                              first as an amoeba and on up to a human, depending on how                                                              you lived your life. Does that mean everyone has been an                                                                    amoeba at one time? An ant? What determines the                                                                                hierarchy? Would you be a shark before a bird? Would you                                                                  have to work your way through every species of lizard?

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                                                         He mostly thought about these things on his way home from work.  In the rush hour traffic, he got bored listening to music or podcasts and preferred to ride in silence and explore his thoughts.The mornings we different; he listened to shock jock radio and mindlessly laugh at crude jokes, but in the afternoons, his thoughts were his own.

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Daily he would pass accidents.  Most were fender benders, men and women in professional dress ignoring each other next to their crumbled in rear-ends or crunched hoods.  Every once in awhile there was a pretty serious one; firetrucks and ambulances, flashing cop cars and strewn wreckage. Then there were the deadly ones, the ones that shut down the highway for hours.  The ones where people died leaving parts of themselves smeared on the asphalt.

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How do you repay for that? Ryan thought.  If you die in a car wreck that wasn’t your fault, do you come back as another human? Have another try at it? It depends on your life, he thought.  If you were a good person maybe you just go straight to heaven, or nirvana or whatever. If you were a shitty person, do you get demoted? Go back to being an amoeba?  As he thought this, he noticed a smashed bug on his windshield. What about that bug? It probably didn’t even know it was about to die. It was just flying along and BAM! Dead.  Like an ant making its way across a driveway then gets run over by a kid on a bike. Neither one would’ve been aware of each other, but now something was dead, just like that.

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Can an ant have a good life? How does it earn the right to reincarnate into a…what, a grasshopper? Does it need to serve the queen as it should, bring an abundance of food to the colony? Maybe doing its job was enough, maybe not.

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Do ants have to earn their souls?

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Ryan always came back to this question when confronting the idea of death. It came from the first time he read Walden, where Thoreau described a battle between ant species. Battles like that undoubtedly occurred constantly hidden from the eyes of humans.  Did those ants earn their souls from the fight? Did the winners move up the spiritual ladder, or perhaps the losers because of their valor?

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Ryan had a few family members who passed away, grandparents and great uncles.  He also had a hand full of friends who’d died. Where are their souls now? If they had souls.  Was that asshole from high school who crashed into a tree, working off his sins as a squirrel? What about gran-pap whom everyone loved? Was he done with this world altogether?  

  

The afternoon traffic was always worse than the morning.  Ryan tried every lane, sometimes waving in and out, but he found if he stayed in one lane, it was usually less stressful and he arrived home around the same time anyway.  He always stayed in the left most lane. It generally moved the fastest anyway, even if he was only going 25 mph. Next to the left most lane was a toll lane separated only by a line of short white vertical divider poles streaked black from the road dirt and slightly shimmering from a reflector on top.  It would be easy to skip lanes, just run over the plastic poles, they’d bend. Ryan once saw a firetruck do it. The poles bent but just popped right back up like nothing happened. But he never did. He rarely took the toll road, it didn’t seem worth it unless he was in a hurry.

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One day he noticed a dead raccoon.  It lay on the white line between two of the white plastic poles.  The highway was a busy one, there were residential buildings on one side, but it was hard to imagine how the raccoon got so far out into the highway. It had to have crossed at least three lanes of traffic, or maybe it got hit so hard it landed a lane or two away.  Did it come from the other side? Then it would’ve had to cross over 4 or 5 lanes of traffic and a barrier before getting hit in the toll lane.

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It’s head was pointed against the direction of traffic. It had probably been killed instantly, and landed just right so it wasn’t run over but knocked between the lanes to remain safe from further mutilation.  

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Ryan noted it and in his musings he wondered if the raccoon had earned its soul or was now somewhere else on the spiritual ladder.

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Occasionally traffic slowed to a halt and once or twice Ryan stopped right next to the raccoon.  It lay on its side, eyes closed. Its front paws side by side, but it’s back legs were sprawled awkwardly behind it with the ringed tail in between.  Its mouth was open exposing yellow stained teeth and there was no pronounced stain underneath.

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Day by day Ryan drove.  Some days faster than others. Weeks passed as they do, then Ryan realized, the raccoon was still there.  The weather had changed, he thought. It was cold when he first noticed the raccoon, now he was going to work in short sleeves. Had the raccoon been there for months? At least a month.  How many weeks? He knew it’d been there for a while, but had it been weeks?

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When he first noticed the raccoon, its fur had an earthy tone to it.  Distinct browns, the jet black around the eyes. Now it was faded. The coat was more of a grey.  Its body even seemed smaller. When Ryan first noticed it, he thought it was a full grown adult, but now every time he passed by, the raccoon looked as if it were a juvenile when it was killed.  Its body looked deflated, and after a time when he stopped or slowed enough in traffic he saw its eyes had rotted out leaving crusty empty sockets and its teeth were not longer yellow but grey and flecked with black.

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Poor guy, Ryan thought, or girl.  It had to have been young. Its tail was short.  Even the husk that remained still held an air of youth or immaturity. It was probably inexperienced, unaware of the dangers of the highway.  It may have ventured out late at night or in the early morning when traffic was lightest, but it was always steady. Then some unknown driver smacked into it.  To the driver it was probably a shock, a thud under their car or truck and then the raccoon went off into oblivion while its young body rolled to a halt in between the lanes. The driver may not have even noticed, or did notice, and had a twang of remorse, or a reluctant chuckle, but soon forgot.  

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Did the raccoon learn its lesson? Ryan thought. Was it out again, alive, reincarnated? Maybe this time it was in a forest having another go as a raccoon?  Maybe it was in another city, subconsciously knowing not to cross highways. What if someone buried it? Gave it a proper send off thereby releasing its soul from the purgatory in which it lay.  Some cultures believe that. The soul could not be free until the body was burned or buried or given the correct funeral rites. Could Ryan do it? Could he take on the responsibility of cleaning up that poor dead animal? That’d be a good one, risking his life by stopping in the middle of rush hour traffic, getting out with a plastic bag to scrape up the rotten corpse of a varmint.  He wondered if it would even hold together or if the tail would just come off when he tried to pick it up.

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No, he’d never do that.  Eventually the raccoon would be picked up.  Swept up by a street sweeper or shoveled up by a road crew repairing the plastic poles.  It was not his job. He wondered what those workers would think. The street sweeper might not even notice and the bag of bones that were once a raccoon would be shredded into pieces.  Or some road crew would shovel it up, toss it in a trash can to travel to a landfill where the corpse would get lost in the rest of the garbage.

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At least Ryan noted it with some reverence.  He wondered about its soul, about its life, about its afterlife.  Ryan wondered how many other people noted the raccoon. It had to be hundreds.  Did they even notice? Give the animal pause? Or were they too distracted by the road, the radio, or too disgusted by a dead animal to pay it any mind? Could that be a way to earn a soul?  Show the body some reverence, have pity on it so it could move on? Or was that how Ryan earned his soul? Though the respect, the remorse, the sympathy to other living things?

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One day, Ryan went out of town to visit some family. He only planned on staying the day, but time got away from him. He decided not to stay the night, so he headed home even though it would be late by the time he got there.  Soon it was dark and Ryan kept his stereo off, lost in his thoughts. He wasn’t afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. He knew he would make it home, even though it would be well past midnight.

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He traveled on the highway, the one he drove everyday on his way home.  It always seemed different when there was no traffic, and at night it was almost an unfamiliar place. The lights streamed down hiding much of either side of the highway.  Reflectors flashed in his headlights and the overpasses flew above his head like silent beasts. He even drove in the right most lane with the cruise control set about 5 miles per hour slower than the speed limit.   

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It was silent in his car except for the constant hissing of the air outside and the slight purr in his engine.  During the day and in traffic, the sound was different. He heard the rumbling of trucks around him, his AC compressor switching on and off, occasional honking and sometimes sirens.  But now, late at night, with no traffic around, and hardly any lights even going the opposite direction, Ryan sat in a constant white noise, peaceful, and wasn’t even thinking about anything in particular.

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Suddenly up ahead  he saw two small specks of light blink on the left side of the road. A strange bobbing shadow was making its way across the highway and Ryan realized if he didn’t slow down he’d run into whatever it was.  He pressed the brakes and as he did a grayish figure came into view in front of his car. Its head turned and two bright eyes stared back at him with almost the same intensity of his headlights, but they were small and close together.  

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Ryan pressed his brakes harder, his car groaned to stop.  Ryan gripped the wheel, locked his elbows and gritted his teeth.  He felt the seat belt tighten on him as his body pressed against it and the car all, but skidded to a halt.  

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Standing in front of him was a smallish raccoon.  It stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air toward the car.  Ryan’s eyes were wide and his heart thumped against the tight seat belt.  The raccoon put its feet back on the ground and hopped away at a trot. Once it was out of the glow of the headlights it disappeared into the night.

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Ryan snapped himself out of his shock, took a quick glance at his rear view mirror and slowly pressed on the gas again.  He realized he could’ve caused a wreck, or killed that raccoon, but his quick reflexes, sturdy brakes and a little luck, saved him from potential disaster.  He made it the rest of the way home without incident.

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The next Monday Ryan went to work, laughing at the shock jock radio in the morning.  Rush hour on his way home was bad though, traffic was slow, there must’ve been a wreck.  He drove slowly in the left hand lane as he always did. He noted he was approaching the spot where the dead raccoon lay in between the lanes, but he no longer saw it.  The raccoon was gone.

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