Time in a Bottle

“You know, you really shouldn’t drink that stuff,” Corey lectured his sister, half looking at me, half at her. “People have gone crazy and killed themselves.”

“Which people, Corey?” Angela laughed. She took a bigger swig of the deep purple liquid from that colorfully-decorated glass bottle and used her pink crocs to set the porch swing where we were sitting rocking again. We were sitting warm leg jowl to leg jowl. It felt nice to tease gravity that way.

“I heard Sue Hilyard’s mother ended up in the loony bin drinking that shit.”

“Yeah? Well, Sue Hilyard’s mom was in the loony bin at least three times before this stuff even came out.” She laughed and elbowed me to enhance the laugh track of scorn.

The Iekami Beverage Company of Japan had found a way to bottle human memories. It had weirded everyone out at first and everyone said they were using dead people’s memories, but it was later proven in a lawsuit the company wasn’t. Some Norwegian guy, an Olympic athlete, had indeed died after they had bottled his memories, but that was a fluke. He had died young in a car crash. People die. There’s nothing weird about that. The point is they weren’t getting the memories from corpses on slabs. But even if they were, what’s the big deal. Maybe people didn’t like the idea that someone’s memory might outlive his body. Maybe people figured our memories owed it to us to die with us.

“Want a sip?” I asked Corey and held out my bottle, smiling at Ange, but he shook his head no and then spit off…