The Antidote by Karen Russell

 I am here to depsit the first time I drank a strawberry soda.  Mountains of ice and underneath a greiny pink slush, a taste like what I imagined kissing to be.  The fizz rose to my brain and I heard God and God said: order a second strawberry soda, Bertie.  I never want the memory of that first drink to fade.  When I'm an old man and all my senses have dulled, I want to taste my twelfth summer again--

The Antidote is a prairie witch.  Maybe you are like me and haven't run into a prairie witch before.  Maybe after the WWII they all retired.  But a prairie witch is a person who absorbs the memories of her clients into herself and stores them.  The client is thereby freed of the memory but can collect it back at any later time- so long as he retains the receipt with the identifying number.  Sometimes people want to bank special memories to relive later (see above) but, more often, they want to forget something horrible, painful, and, particularly, shameful.

Q: What is the evil this world runs on?

A: Better you than me.

 

 



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