Tupelo Regressions

by Doug Mathewson

So in this dream me and Elvis Presley are about eight or nine years old, drinking big glasses of cold milk at his Mom’s kitchen table. We’re telling each other about our past lives, all of them we can remember anyway going way back. Every single life of mine had me as one kind or another of dirt farmer, just digging Polish potatoes, picking Alabama cotton, pulling weeds under the Mexican melons, and I don’t even know the name of what I was growing when I was Chinese! Elvis had this funny look on his face, eyes half closed and mouth half smiling but was all serious business when he told how he remember every single one of his amazing lives. He told me about driving a golden chariot pulled by six jet-back horses, he told me about fighting with a sword in The Crusades, he told me about being a merman with a long beard and a tail, he even told me some darn fool story about being the first man to walk on the moon. All I could do was sit there in my Leave it To Beaver striped shirt, swinging my legs back and forth drinking my milk while I thought: Elvis surely is the King, king of the bull-shitters that is!

6S

Doug Mathewson, whose full catalog is here, lives on the Connecticut shoreline and writes very short fiction that occasionally turns into essays or poetry. His current project is "True Stories From Imaginary Lives." He has been published online by PenPricks, Micro-Fiction, Creative Soup, and Tuesday Shorts. Lately he seems fascinated with writing stories that are six sentences in length. More of his work is available at his blog.