Using a recently developed diagrammatic formulation of the kinetic theory of fluctuations in liquids, we investigate the short time behavior of the memory function for density fluctuations in a classical atomic fluid. At short times, the memory function, has a large contribution that is generated by the repulsive part of the interatomic potential. We introduce a small parameter that is a measure of the softness of the repulsive part of the potential. The diagrams in the memory function that contribute to lowest, order, in that small parameter are identified and summed to give an explicit expression for the dominant contribution to the memory function at short times. The result leads to a theory for fluids with continuous potentials that is similar to the Enskog theory for hard sphere fluids. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.