“In the womb,” I reply, the word feeling odd on my lips. Where else would I have been produced?

“Womb to tomb, that’s life,” the ancient one says. He stares somewhere over my shoulder, never actually looking at my face. Maybe he isn’t addressing me, but I know he is. “Start dying before we even get the chance to start living.”

I want to get around him. I have to. There is somewhere I need to be. Or somewhere I have to escape from. Though I can’t remember from where to to what purpose.

“Rush, rush, rush. That’s what the programmers teach us. If we slow down, even for a moment, we’ll fail. That’s all the training we get.”

He is laughing now. Hysterically, his whole body vibrating. Others look at us as we pass.

I’m not with him, I try to say, but the words don’t come. Womb is the last word I said, the last word I can say. It pulls my teeth together.

“Rush here, rush there,” the man doesn’t step out of my way as he says, “but don’t let me stop you.”

I can’t get around him.

“Even know what lies that way?” He shoves his thumb over his shoulder, never taking his vacant gaze off the sky. “The tomb. That’s where we’re all headed.”

“Where did you come from?” the man at the table asks me. He sips on a frothy drink that appears to have once been liquid, but is now nothing more than oil-colored bubbles. They cling to his wiry mustache after each sip.

I stand I know not where. To my right are ducks swimming in a river running beneath me. A bridge? Yes, it must be. I know this bridge it is not far from where I live. But the buildings in the distance are shrouded by gray, the kind of sky that sucks away all warmth and familiarity with the world.

“I’m an import,” I say, understanding the answer only as it passes over my own lips. The ducks bob under water, surfacing in glistens and sprays.

“Another one of those,” he says. “Should’ve known from the looks of you.”

Do I look different? My body is out of focus each time I look down at myself. People pass by me, pushing and shoving across the bridge that appears narrower each time I look up from my ponderings of myself.

“How do I look?” I ask.

“Like an import,” he answers, bubbles exploding across his chin. I can hear them, like gunshots, even as I am pulled down, down, down with the throngs. “Should’ve known from the looks of you. Not from around here, that’s for sure.”

The last thing I hear are the ducks, or maybe the bubbles, or maybe the people breathing in and out of my ear until they are in my brain, until they are my breaths, and I am awake.