by Jess Howe

Created on: April 22, 2009

The stop sign was where Rene lost her chicken, and she didn't think she could flutter over the rainbow without it. So then that was a damn shame; Rene had already been a turtle and a monkey, and she very badly wanted to become human again. She didn't even have to be female, but it was the last gender she'd been, and she liked it.

Rene stared past the sign sadly. She could see the waterfall, and the lord of Luckcharms from whence all children come; she knew that very soon she'd have to return to the Ether and maybe wait a thousand years for a new chicken to pass. Because chickens laid eggs, you see, and Rene needed that egg to become a fertile being, to become any creature at all.

"I wonder what it's like being a bacterium," she said to the non-wind over the waterfall, still looking. Behind her were all the souls that had been waiting; they wouldn't wait much longer. "Or maybe I'll be a virus."

"Hey! Get going, if you're going to go!" someone cried behind her. She could already feel the form she'd chosen fading away; that form would probably be in the dreams of some lucky person in the world that existed. A form could not be duplicated exactly; that was Law. "Hey, wait; you aren't allowed here; you don't even have a chicken!"

Others in back took up the rumor: "Doesn't have a chicken? Then what's it doing there?" Murmurs and cries spread like rumbling thunder.

Still Rene stayed, staring at the stop sign. She didn't want to leave. She'd chosen a name and everything! It wasn't fair!

"Life is not fair," a voice rumbled to her. By then, Rene was just a group of atoms. A wisp, she watched others take their forms, watched as their chickens laid eggs that immediately combined with the chosen forms. Those forms would be the beginning of what the babies born in the world would look like, and as the forms combined with the eggs and the eggs with the forms, the babies-to-be jumped off the cliff and over the rainbow, where they were taken away ever so gently by wisps of the wind, to hospital rooms and hutches and backyards everywhere. "It hurts, you know."

She knew it hurt. Someone had squashed her when she was a turtle, bringing her back here fairly fast. She'd lived for years as a monkey squabbling in the trees and throwing nuts at hikers in the jungle who came for the "scenery." Oh, that was great fun... until one shot her, and then she was lame for awhile, till a jaguar ate her. That was life. Life hurt.

"But... I want to be a human," she complained to the voice she couldn't

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