(The following story, and the story embedded within the story are both fiction. The poem is my own. –JJM) I’ve been reading the Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. “Suggestive” is quite an understatement, and that’s as it should be, for such a fraught topic. Children know details from the life of someone who died before they were born. Sometimes it was far away, in another culture speaking a different language. The parents had no connection, no way they might have known through ordinary channels of communication. A two-year-old who broke into Spanish to describe the bayonet combat that killed her alter-ego, Miguel, in the Civil War in 1938. A boy with nightmares about trains and a jagged birthmark on his scalp, at just the site where a small boy had suffered a fatal gash when his schoolbus was run down by a freight train in Lamont, Alberta, 1960.
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Borges and I
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(The following story, and the story embedded within the story are both fiction. The poem is my own. –JJM) I’ve been reading the Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. “Suggestive” is quite an understatement, and that’s as it should be, for such a fraught topic. Children know details from the life of someone who died before they were born. Sometimes it was far away, in another culture speaking a different language. The parents had no connection, no way they might have known through ordinary channels of communication. A two-year-old who broke into Spanish to describe the bayonet combat that killed her alter-ego, Miguel, in the Civil War in 1938. A boy with nightmares about trains and a jagged birthmark on his scalp, at just the site where a small boy had suffered a fatal gash when his schoolbus was run down by a freight train in Lamont, Alberta, 1960.