The heron flew overhead as I pedalled along the main road. It flew parallel to me on my right. I was torn between watching it and the road. When nature intrudes sharply on the urbane, it's compelling. Thus, the car door opened by someone desperate to put an order in for their dinner at the local Chinese takeaway went unnoticed.

My main issue throughout life has been that people never take enough care.

As I flew over the front of the bike, for a moment the heron and I shared similar paths. Sadly, my weak, flapping arms couldn't keep me aloft, and our paths diverged. The mathematics of parallel lines meeting in eternity was the last thing that came to mind before I struck the ground. As I lay dying, the voice of the woman who'd opened her door was both loud and far away,
"Bloody cyclist! It weren't my fault! Not my fault. Did you see him?"

With my last breath, I said,

"Madam, no need to say it twice, and your view is a common one. This does not mean you're right."

I had no time to reflect on death. There was a brief, giddy ascent, and a terrible wild plunging before I was able to open my eyes again. The road, the woman, the heron, my bicycle, all were gone, and about me was a mist above which was a darkness familiar as night. Yet, a pale light suffused each tiny droplet in the air. How gothic, I thought, and not strange given the circumstances.

I felt no pain, but I did feel the ground I lay on, damp and uneven, my head cradled in a tussock. Being dead was the next thing to strike me. That I had persisted after my body had ceased its business in the material world. Was this the immaterial one? It didn't feel that way. It was the same, apart from a few things, the light in the mist and the warmth of the ground.

I put my hands out on either side and pushed myself up into a sitting position. This was the first time I looked down at my body. I wore no clothes, no boots. My chamois padded cycling shorts were gone. I felt a pang of loss. I'd loved those shorts: top quality, Swiss-made, wide straps over my shoulders, a snug high waist behind which I could tuck my little belly and imagine I was thin and fast like Eddie Mercx.

Following this mild loss, came surprise at my feet being covered in thick black hair. They looked more like hands in truth, the big toe much more like a thumb. I flexed them and had the first new sensation deep in my nervous system. The big toe felt like a thumb, and moved like one, strongly, with pronounced flexure, the sole of my new foot more like a palm. I gripped a tussock, and damned if I didn't pull it up by its roots.

My legs were similarly covered. I began to realise my transformation. My feet were like hands. My hands were covered with more thick, black hair, and all up my arms, chest and stomach too. I felt round my back, and with little surprise found it covered in thick, coarse hair. I assumed it was black there too. I plucked one to make sure. That hurt, but at least I knew it was the same black as the rest, and I could still feel pain.

I moved to explore my face with my new hand, found it covered in hair, with no nose to speak of. In life I'd had a large straight one. Next, I tried out speech. I intended to say, how now brown cow. I heard something quite different; a call of a kind, not a howl or cry, but three loud, deep grunts of an animalistic yet alluring power. Was I a wild thing at last?

My second surprise came in hearing a response from somewhere away to my left, similar grunts, five in total. There were no other sounds, that I might mistake them. Apart from my three and the five in reply, silence ruled the underworld until there came a rustling from the same direction as the grunts; something, or someone moving through long grass. The mist parted much like a curtain, and a chimp came into view. The most surprising thing of all, I recognised her.

My wife had passed away two years before. I loved and grieved for her, but after she died, I felt somehow free. I'd never quite got relationships. There'd always been a sense of being trapped somehow, of being forced to fit a smaller space. I'd been alone for such a long time when we met, and my joyful solitude had become loneliness. I found in her sympathy a companionship that endured. We helped each other bear loneliness, and recognised the loneliness remaining was not any fault of ours, but natural and to be nurtured too.

I was so happy to see her again, even transformed into a primate. Naturally, we embraced, kissed with our new lips, though hers were not quite as new as mine. I assumed she'd been here longer than me.

The kiss was a strange affair, our lips being dry and strong. Her breasts and nipples were pressed into my chest. God! Was I going to become aroused? So soon after death? Wasn't that a good thing? Surely it was. She broke away. She must have understood or felt my concern becoming alarm.

Grunting, she made me understand there was time enough. We sat together a long while, content. The strange light within the mist declined. It must have been the moon. The night gave way to dawn, and to the sun. The mist evaporated as the warmth of the day strengthened. All about us were trees, the deep green of foliage, and sound returned, all manner of noises from other creatures alive in this place, or dead of course.

A rainforest, surely? I'd watched enough nature programmes. I knew how they looked and sounded. The heat and damp, the soaking light, above all the growing sense of abundance, of life teeming here, and the air itself filled with being. It must be reincarnation. Not death at all, but another go at life. But how come I still remembered my previous life? And how come I wasn't a baby monkey, but full grown? I grunted at my wife, but she had no idea what I was grunting about. She just knew she was my wife. And that she was a monkey. She didn't seem to remember our previous existence together.

The final surprise dawned more slowly. As the day went on, little by little and bit by bit, as we picked at each other's fleas, of which there were many, my human memory faded. Soon, I would simply be a monkey in love with another monkey. I looked forward to it. We'd never had children. My feigned impotence turned out to be a genuine sterility.

Wait! Tigers! What about tigers and lions, and crocodiles, hyenas… That was about the last thought I had with language, and it became the basis of my new fear. There is always fear. This new life's overarching fear was being eaten alive. I must prevent my wife or our future children from being eaten. That was the last thought. No, there was a last thought after that: to have children, lots of them, and to love without question, with no demure: to allow the heart to be free. That would be great. And if that's what would follow then there was mercy, and therefore God.

I wasn't happy to have died, neither was I sad. It was true, after all, to have had an ambivalent view of living. I was glad above all, to have been correct.