Cold only a few days, already the memory of warm was fading. The bark of the long magnolia he had climbed as a child, from which he had surveyed continents, measured the continental drift of his parents’ silence; the heft of the wedding fabrics, her wedding lips; the sink of a favorite recliner, the sweat of ice on the scotch glass as equilibrium forced its way onto water. What memories he had left seemed not his own, but a shared consciousness, the waking cliché of the everyman of his generation. Already he could not remember her name, his, the words of the eulogies and elegies. Soon he doubted if he had lived at all. Was this an existence yet to be forced into the waking world? He imagined himself the condensation on the tumbler. He imagined himself the crafty drop of water that could walk through the glass. Before long, it was all he could imagine. He wondered if he had ever been scotch.
Ross White is the editor of Inch, the magazine of short poetry and microfiction, and the publisher of Bull City Press. His work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently pursuing an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He lives in Durham, NC.