Chapter 1 - Vince

This world is dumb…

Everything seemed fine after I was born, but I didn’t even get a name. Rather, my parents are just calmly waiting for me to gain the ability to talk so I can tell them my name, but I don’t have one. What I have is just the ridiculous awareness that the expectations these people are placing on me are absurd for a newborn. The awareness of how ridiculous my awareness is also concerns me since I can’t even make my mouth do the necessary gymnastics to form words and my tiny sausage fingers can barely articulate well enough to move independent of each other. I’m trapped here after a month of confinement in this crib and every time I get hungry while alone, I have no choice but to cry out for feeding.

“I wonder who you might have been?” this lady I suppose is my mother wonders aloud with me in her lap.

“…” I can’t reply as my mouth is full of nipple, not to mention that whole motor skill issue.

“I guess I’ll tell you about mommy then. My name is Clarice and before I came to this world, I was the daughter of a wealthy crime boss. My father back then was the leader of one of the most violent groups in our country and I fell in love with the son of a rival gang.”

Really? I may be a baby, but this is a bit weird. ‘Before I came to this world’ she said… what does she mean?

“One day after I ran away with him, my father from then chased us down and murdered him in front of me. Unfortunately, I was caught in the crossfire and died.”

At this point, I’ve stopped eating. My appetite is gone and I’m confused.

“Next thing I knew I was in your situation. ~Ahhh, being reincarnated was so interesting!”

Reincarnated? Is this lady some sort of light novel author telling a baby a bedtime story? But… hold on, I’m a baby and she’s talking about a story where she dies? What’s a light novel anyway? My developing stomach is lurching from the confusion.
Next thing I know, I have given back the meal.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you were sensitive about death. You must have had a fairly horrible time before!”

Of course I have no idea what she is talking about. I’ve only been a baby once after all and I’m still confused as to why I can understand all this talk in the first place. Mother and father just one day started making sense only a few weeks after I was born.

“baba..buu”

Obviously I can’t say ‘what are you talking about?’ still, so things will continue in this way for a while.

“I guess it is rough still, but you can get to talking as soon as you are used to your tongue. It will help much more when you have your teeth as well.”

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A couple of months later I start getting the hang of the syllables and can get some more complex sounds out. I have also learned that my father’s previous life was that of an unfortunate stunt man who had a critical instrument failure in his biplane before it crashed into a barn and exploded. His name is Dan.

“Hey sport, I hear you got your tongue working! You think you can tell your mother and I your story?”

At this point I’ve pretty much grasped that everyone in this world is reincarnated in some form or fashion with the memories of their past life. I, however, don’t remember anything like that. I just know that I’m absurdly aware of it and most everything else in ways that a baby shouldn’t be. I feel it’s my own common sense nagging at me, but this whole situation is weird.

“It would be so neat if he was someone I knew from before, don’t you think so, honey?”

“There’s also a lot of people that like to keep it secret too, I suspect. Especially the good-for-nothings”

I have nothing to say. I don’t even know.

“Honey! I don’t care if our son was a good-for-nothing, but I would like him to at least tell us who he was.”

Clearly, I have to say something, or father might suspect I was a good-for-nothing and treat me differently since he is always going on about them as wastes of space who never learn no matter how many times they die. As I see it, I can either make something up, or admit I don’t know anything about a previous life. I don’t have any material to go on for making something up, so I will have to go with the boring truth.

“eye doh noh [I don’t know]. eye doh theenk eye wa reencarnaed [I don’t think I was reincarnated]”

My parent’s serious faces look at me.

“I guess it’s okay if you don’t want to tell us, son, but if you have a name you want to go by, please tell us.”

This is pretty frustrating, being looked at as though I’m trying to hide something when I’m telling the truth. It is a new feeling much worse than when I’m hungry or itchy or gassy. I can’t stop the tears from coming to my eyes and I don’t know if I can in the first place.

“WAAAAAAHHH!”

Mother and father look at each other guiltily and mother quickly scoops me up and calms me down with hugs.

“Sorry honey, this world’s common sense is just like that. There hasn’t been a person we’ve met in this world who wasn’t someone before and you picked up on talking so quickly that we just assumed…”

The rest of the day was spent with my stomach all twisted in knots while father and mother traded off interrogating and consoling me.

At the end of it, I wound up being given the name Vince as well as some minor trauma.