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  bullshitters that is! 

Doug Mathewson:  continues his love/hate relationship with reality from his home in eastern Connecticut.  He favors hats, and rarely turns down desert. His work most recently has appeared in The Boston Literary Magazine,  Cezzane’s Carrot, Gloom Cupboard, and Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). Sporadically he is grasped by fits and starts of inspiration,  equally he can be swept away into infinite worlds of busy-signals, radio static, and elevator-music. To read more, comment, or just poke-around please visit his current project, True Stories From Imaginary Lives, at www.little2say.org.


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