The Forgetting Time

by Sharon Guskin

The bourbon swirled warmly in her belly, did a misty rain dance around her panicked brain.

Opened window after window, each one looking out on some new horror, until the bourbon drained slowly from the bottle into her mug and her eyes felt as if they were bleeding. She held the liquor in her mouth, feeling it burn her tongue.

with the dismay of a diabetic facing a troop of cookie-bearing Girl Scouts.

he had worked hard for his obscurity.

powerful and nauseating, like a mistake it was too late to fix.

It had been a long winter and it kept on coming, continuing its victory laps halfway into spring.

a man’s voice oozing sanity and sameness,

smoothing out the wars and the earthquakes and the hurricanes with its peaceful and predictable rhythms. The world could end, it did end, and you could count on that voice still being there to tell you how it all went down.

Could the suicidal urge pour like a phobia or a personality characteristic from one life to the next? Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken? He was not a praying man, not at all, never, but he said a prayer anyway, standing on the bank of the river he couldn’t bring himself to look at, that her next life would be far from here. He had pulled himself out of his despair only with brute will. He had gone cold turkey on the long train ride back to Calcutta,

the flashlight in his hand

sending its futile trickle against the broad, smirking face of the early evening.

three dead bugs in a jar: dry, ugly, black-winged things that looked like ordinary beetles, as if someone had come in the night

and drained the mystery right out of them.

You Only Live Once. That’s what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered more because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and continents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?

the craggy mountains cradling the water,