Jane's trunk

Jane's trunk lived at the foot of her bed. It was quite old. It's brass brackets were pitted. The leather was nicked and scratched. But it was still solid, it's domed lid was not crushed and the sides would still withstand the jostling of travel.

Jane's trunk always arrived just after her nineteenth birthday. It simply appeared outside the front door. Once she'd opened it, her memories appeared in her head. It was not an overwhelming flood of new information. It was as if she'd walked into the kitchen, forgotten why she was there and then in the living room remembered she needed the scissors. They just appeared, comforting and familiar.

Inside her trunk were five urns. Each of them containing the ashes of a body Jane had inhabited in a former life. Each of these bodies had been adopted as infants. Each of these bodies had been female. Each of these bodies had been named Jane. Each of these bodies had loved Robert and waited eagerly for him to return. Each of these bodies had raised gardens and read cards and dispensed teas for sore throats. And as Jane was born again and again, she gained more and more knowledge.

She remembered how to weave cloth, butcher a pig, midwife to a woman in labor, make stained glass, keep accounting books, speak French and read Latin among her skills. This in addition to what seemed like a million recipes for dishes some of which contained ingredients that simply didn't exist anymore.

There were also photographs and drawings in her trunk. Rag dolls and ink pens and little china boxes were kept there along with many pieces of jewelry and her floral apron.

Once she and Robert had run into the woods in Georgia, fleeing from Sherman's advancing men. They'd returned days later to find the house burned to the ground, with her trunk resting unscathed in the middle of a pile of ashes.

The trunk had traveled with them in the Carnival train, residing in their train car. It had seen dust storms in Kansas in the 1930's.


Her trunk had gone with them from rock show to rock show, loaded on buses and planes and vans in the 1960's. David Crosby had laid out neat lines of cocaine on it while Robert had smoked cigarettes and looked disgusted.

She'd sat on her trunk in a theatre as Harry Houdini regurgitated a key and freed himself from shackles.

None of these bodies of Jane's past lives had lived past forty. Their bodies were cremated and ended up in the trunk that had belonged to them all. Where it went after that, she did not know. She knew that it found her the same way Robert found her. She was always so so happy to see them both.