Past Life
by Ross White
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.