A Minute's Life

He remembered every small detail of his life perfectly.

He held in his mind the texture of his mother's finger when she stroked him for the first time. He remembered how strange the air outside his mother's womb had felt, how the soft towel around him rubbed oddly against his skin. Gently, his mother took him into her embrace. Her body felt warm, but she was shivering. Her fingers stroked over his face. They were sticky with sweat, and her nails scraped his face a little, but she touched him tenderly, a bit afraid, as if he was her fragile masterpiece.

He could smell the odour wafting out from the asphalt street. It was a hot summer's day, and the blazing sun made his eyes hurt. The hot, ruthless air that he breathed left him suffocating. There was a horrible dryness in his throat as if he had swallowed a palmful of sand. His childhood friend ran towards him, waving a popsicle triumphantly. It was already dripping, glistening under the sunlight. He remembered calling out his name, Connor, hurrying him to come over. He would later regret this action, as it left sand scraping at his throat and sent his friend, and his popsicle, forever under the wheels of a speeding car, both melting into pools of red under the sun.

He heard the lapping of the waves around him and the crumbling of pebbles beneath his feet. The steamship let out one long, woeful call, and the seagulls cried with it. People scrambled past him. Children and luggage were pulled along as frantic travellers grasped the metal railing and boarded the staircase leading up to the boat. Hastily, he joined them. The metal creaked and groaned under their weight, but no one cared. He stepped onto the metal stairs, leaving a town he would never set foot in again for the next forty years of his life. The screeches of the birds and the metal mixed with the shriek of a woman who had lost her hat to the wind, but it all faded into insignificance when the steamship let out another mournful bellow. All the noise hurt his ears, and they throbbed when he thought of them now.

He licked his cotton candy. It was sugary and sticky. As soon as his tongue came in contact with it, it melted into nothing but a lingering sweetness in his mouth. His heart danced with the rhythm of the jittery music of the carousel as it spun round and round, its neon lightbulbs spinning into loops of silky thread shining in the darkening night. He was waiting for her, and his heart skidded a little when he saw her coming. It was, in his opinion, the best time of the year. The summer heat had faded considerably, but it wasn't so cold that one had to wear anything more than a jacket. The smell of red, glossy sausages sizzling on a cooker wafted out from the stands nearby, but she said she was stuffed, so they went away and sat down by the water fountain. The cheery music had quietened into the background, and the gurgling sound of water filled the night. He breathed in the moist air and inhaled the smell of her shampoo as she turned around to say goodbye.

He never forgot anything. His life was his past.

He saw neither a present nor a future, only vivid images of yesterday once more, flickering by him again and again. He was the scrutinising director, pausing and speeding and enlarging each frame however he liked. He lived in it. His present, his future, his life, it was all the same to him. He had only his past.

That was how it was until he felt death creeping into his range of sight, blurring its perimeters like the edges of an old, fading photograph.

They say infants see the world for the first time a few minutes after birth, and he did. His eyes fluttered open to a blurry white, and he gulped in his final breath.

A man with neither a present nor a future had no past.

He died in his mother's arms.