karma's a bitch

Karma's a Bitch

[meaghan igel]

Lenny never thought the Great Hereafter would look anything like this. He had pictured a long tunnel and a hopeful beam of light leading to the conventional pearly gates, St. Peter, and God-with-a-long-white-beard-and-a-big-ass-book-of-names view that seems to be the typical view of what comes after death. Instead, he faced a huge, menacing, snarling, drooling, three-headed dog.

An angry dog.

A bitter dog.

A female dog.

“What happened?” he wondered aloud to no one in particular. “You’re not God.”

“Of course not,” her left head growled maliciously. “You picked the wrong religion, you fool.”

“He didn’t pick one at all, idiot!” retorted her right head. “He’s all out of luck now!”

“What they say is true,” intoned the right head laconically, with the faintest touch of malevolence. “I am Karma. After careful inspection of your life, I have determined that you are obviously in no way prepared to advance to nirvana, so we will have to assign you a new identity. Hopefully you will learn from this experience, and you will be allowed to advance again.”

“Sorry – what?” questioned Lenny.

“You could have passed ‘Go’ and collected $200, but instead you wasted your life taking advantage of others and living for your own selfish gain. Stealing candy from babies? Cheating off of the class nerd’s test? Taking ramen noodles from a donation box meant for a food pantry? Inexcusable. You learned nothing from this life. Now you’re on to the next.”

“But ramen’s my favorite, and I was really hungry,” Lenny whined as Karma turned him into a newt.

He didn’t get better. He wallowed and festered and slithered through the mud and didn’t give a rip about the other newts. He took the best sunning spots. He took the juiciest worms. He got the best spots under rocks of choice. Once again, he was selfish – a hard thing to do as a lizard. Alas, however, his selfishness came back to bite him on the ass when the other newts threw him directly into the path of a wayward dog (who just so happened to be hungry). “This looks familiar,” he thought. Once again, he met Karma.

“Demoting you to a newt wasn’t enough? I suppose we’ll have to try harder, won’t we, ladies?” crooned the middle head. His fate again determined by a bitch, Lenny went into the downward spiral of planthood.

A sunflower. How can you get any happier than being a sunflower? Lenny couldn’t. He soaked up more of the sun’s rays and blocked the other sunflowers, making them wither and die for want of nourishment. Of course, he sucked up the choicest bits of Miracle-Gro. He was tall and strong, which was exactly the reason a tall, strapping lad cut him down for his girlfriend. He withered and died days later, after an unfortunate encounter with the girl’s Yorkshire terrier. “For some reason, I feel like this is a trend,” he thought as the yappy canine’s canines closed around him and everything went dark.

“You just don’t learn, do you, dumbass?” barked Karma’s right head. Lenny shrugged his shoulders (or would have, if he had had any). Karma glowered at him. “All right. Try again.”

A blade of grass. A low-down, boring-as-hell, simple blade of grass. How in the hell do you screw that up? Somehow, Lenny did. He just had to be the greenest. That didn’t last long after an infestation of grubs drained the life out of every single blade of grass in Mr. Jones’ meticulously kept and clipped yard. Karma grinned and patted one of the fat, slimy grubs. “That’ll do, grub. That’ll do.” She turned to Lenny. “I’ve got bigger plans for you, my friend,” she crooned. “We’ll make you realize just how much everyone hates your very presence and your selfish ways. We’ll make you sorry anyone had ever heard of you. You will be more hated than anyone or anything else in history.”

And that, kids, is where politicians come from.

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