Corrosive

I don’t believe in what the circus is trying to peddle. It’s always been smoke and mirrors, even when wonder and joy weren’t part of the charade. It’s obscene to spend any money on pleasure these days, but it’s Ivory’s birthday and she wanted to see the elephant. I try not to flinch when the animal emerges, all bones and sinew held together by piles of falling flesh. She squeals with high-pitched joy when the beast totters. I hoist her up in my arms and try to pretend this is the world I wanted to bring a daughter into.

When the showman pulls the elephant away, the crowds dissipate, trailing into the sideshow tents. “Mommy!” Ivory cries, squirming in my arms. I grab her hand right before she darts off, and she huffs, but pulls me at a more sedated pace.

“…than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” intones another showman, as we join a small cluster of people. The man steps to the side to raucous applause, and behind him, a curtain parts to reveal a dazzling and disturbing woman. Her eyes are the color of slate by a river, and her dark hair is braided down to her knees. But what stops my gaze are the rivulets of scar tissue, starting at the line of her lips and cascading down her front like a gauzy veil.

“I present,” the man announces, “Claudia! The woman who can drink rainwater!”

I frown. Smoke and mirrors, I remind myself. No one can drink rainwater, not anymore. The man hefts a bucket up by the handle, hauling it onto a platform.

“This water was collected during the last monsoon.” He plucks his glove off to show four fingers, the scarred joints stiff and unmoving. With no hesitation, he dips his index finger into the bucket. The crowd stands at attention. When he pulls the appendage out, the skin is red and raw, already weeping and starting to blister.

He smiles, though his lips are tight. “And now, Claudia will demonstrate her undeniable talent.”

Claudia’s smile pulls at the scar tissue on her face. She grabs the bucket between slender hands and hauls it up to her lips. I can’t stop my sharp inhale when she tips the bucket, thin trails of corrosive water pouring down her gullet and falling down her front. Even Ivory is stock-still against me.

The skin around her mouth begins to steam, as though she were hot metal and not flesh. She swallows, and when she opens her mouth wider, I spot the angry flesh inside, scoured and pockmarked.

When she finishes, she throws the bucket to the side like a plaything. And then she turns to face us, her slate gray eyes stark against the devastation of her skin. I want to scream. I want to cover Ivory’s eyes. But I can’t look away.

Smoke and mirrors, I remind myself.

I Need to Go Grocery Shopping

She pauses the advertisement on a picture of a couple smiling atop a mountain overlooking a scenic valley. Their teeth are as reflective as the sunglasses they wear, and their clothing is free from any wear or tear. “Turn your memory into money!” is suspended in a cyan box to the left of the couple. She’s seen social media charging people to use their platforms, but this is the first time she’s seen one willing to pay people to post pictures of themselves. It feels invasive, as if companies are no longer buying people’s data discretely but opting to buy it directly from its users instead. She feels disgusted with the idea, as if she’s becoming a type of product for sale.

But she needs money for groceries, and it seems easy enough to sign up.

She’s swiping through pictures, trying to find something to post. The first picture she took was from a few years ago when she got a new phone. Maybe with a nice little timeline photo dump, she could afford something besides instant ramen.

Swiping through her old photos fills her with instant regret. The camera roll is filled with pictures of people she no longer has contact with—old friends, family members, and partners fly across her phone screen. Memories of the painful goodbyes that led to their departures occupy her mind, and she briefly forgets why she’s looking through them to begin with.

She notices one face among the pictures that seems out of place and unrecognizable. The person is smiling, but there’s something lacking behind it, as if someone else is trapped inside. With every swipe, every change of scenery and crowd, the person’s face also starts to change. Their eyes begin to light up, and their smile grows wider, but their face becomes softer and rounder. Their hair changes with it, from short and brushed over with an undercut, to grown longer all around, and then with cut bangs.

The face shifts and morphs with each passing picture until she recognizes them.

 Looking at the most recent picture, with a time stamp from last week, she sees herself and a couple of close friends in her apartment. It’s a candid shot of her eating pizza, desperately trying not to laugh while extending the slice as far as she can, with the cheese stretching along. Her friends are sitting next to her, staring awestruck at the scene.

She looks up from the phone and back to the computer screen. The ad reads, “Turn your memory into money!”

She takes a moment to study the phrase, the trademark symbol at the end burning through her eyes, causing a pulsating headache in the front of her skull. Glancing once more at the picture on her phone, she guides the mouse to the top right of the screen and exits the webpage.

She gets up from her chair, hungry for cheap ramen.

Flight

Just beyond the safety of our village, there was a dense thicket of trees and a mountain so tall they said no one had seen the top of it. Of course, no one had really tried. Only a few kids dared to come close to the forest’s edge. Most gave up, but I’d been coming here for years.

My last day was like any other. I dipped underneath an archway of branches that led to a winding path. Cocoa chirped on my shoulder when his head got a little too close to a thorny limb.

“You know you could just fly over the trees,” I said, but I didn’t actually mind.

He hopped back and forth as I walked, singing to himself. The only other noise was the rustle of leaves swept up by the breeze. No other birds sung with Cocoa, and no critters scurried by. There weren’t even buzzing bugs whizzing by my ear. Only the oaks hummed. I felt the quiet that today, as always, but I didn’t hesitate on my way forward.

Cocoa sung and the leaves shuttered until I came to our spot, a pond lit up by golden rays of sunlight. Beneath the water’s shimmering surface, moss grew in miniature mountains and valleys. They created a lush village for the fish below. It was so clear I could see how each school and family moved in and away from each other. But there was one dark spot some yards away from its edge. There, the water turned like a lazy whirlpool, circling something unseen.

“I asked the Seer if she’d ever heard of a pond like this,” I said to Cocoa. With one flap of his wings, he landed beside me. He didn’t move as I took off my shoes and socks.

“She said she heard of a pond with a creature that would give you whatever you wished for,” I stepped one foot into the cool water, wincing as I broke its apparent streak of purity.

“For a price,” I remembered before delving into the deep.

The pond released bubbles all around me as I swam, fizzling like sparkling wine. It was only still by the dark figure who sat comfortably beside a pack of fluttering fish. She smiled when I came to her and, while I couldn’t open my lips, she heard me speak.

“What do you wish for?” she asked

Freedom.

“It will cost you.”

I floated up to the edge of a lovely pond, feeling light despite the way the water tugged on my clothes. A little sparrow the color of oak and almond watched me swim and sang a song that sounded almost familiar. For some reason I couldn’t know, I felt a great untamable grief.

Gold is Thicker Than Motherhood

My mother was one of those too famous people that gets a museum dedicated to them after they die. It’s nice. Fancy. Big. A bit much really, but she would’ve liked that.

I never understood her work, but other people did. Or if they didn’t, they liked to pretend they did. People, so many people, would come up to me when she was alive and say how lucky I was to have access to an incredible woman every day. What do you say to that? I never knew. I would flip-flop between awkward but polite smiles or ambiguous shrugs. It’s easier now that she’s dead. A blank face isn’t rude, now that she’s dead.

I suppose I’m a bit boring compared to her. A bit plain. Bland. Bleh. People seem disappointed when they meet me. I can’t tell them anything about her they would want to hear. I’m not interesting enough to talk about anything else.

I like to think I’m nicer than she was. But is being passive the same as being nice? If I don’t do anything and hurt no one, is that better than doing everything while hurting myself and others along the way? I don’t know. I’m nothing like her. I’m nothing at all. I have no siblings, so I don’t know whether that’s my fault or hers.

Sometimes I feel like the only impact I’ll ever have on the world is this museum. I didn’t design it or build it. It wasn’t even my idea to have it in the first place. But I did one thing: I got to choose the piece that would be featured the most. As “the person closest to her,” I got to pick her masterpiece.

So, I chose the only one she did about me.

I don’t understand it. At least, I don’t understand why people love it. It’s mainly white, untouched. You notice the red splattering across from two opposite corners before you catch the watermarks dotted around. Okay. Interesting enough. She called it Motherhood. Ah. The blood, sweat, and tears that go into being a mother. Suddenly a piece that could be recreated by a child becomes an ingenious work of art.

Except that it’s her blood. This bit is public knowledge. She used her actual blood. In one go. It’s a big canvas. She went to the hospital. Caused quite a stir at the time. Started a cult following that eventually led to critical acclaim. 

What isn’t public knowledge is that the two corners of blood splatter are not the same person’s blood. See, my mother thought for Motherhood she needed a piece of the thing that made her a mother. So, the top corner of red spraying down is her. The bottom corner spraying up is me.

I go to the museum sometimes to watch people watch Motherhood. I want to see if the truth ever crosses their mind. But they just stare in awe.

At least I charged them for their ignorance.

Memory Credit Card

The year is 2200 where money is valueless, and memories are priceless. They have become the most valuable currency, traded and exchanged in markets, auctions, and more. People own and carry devices allowing them to store and capture memories, changing and upgrading them into tangible assets—the richer the memories, the wealthier the individual is.

Sasha, a young woman living with five other roommates in her New York City apartment, depressed, finds herself intrigued by this system. When she was little, she had always been fascinated by the idea of sharing experiences. Memories were the ultimate form of connection. Now she rolls her eyes when the silly memory comes to her. She’s walking through the Memory Market on an early Sunday afternoon, and as she approaches one of the booths, she notices a distant figure in a dark coat. The figure seems to radiate an aura of mystery, one that scents the air with forgotten tales and hidden recollections. She goes to approach the figure. As she gets closer, Sasha realizes that it‘s an older man with more warts on his face than features. He has something tucked away under his coat, and when she approaches him, he cautiously reveals it. The man tells her that what he holds in his hands is a device that able to extract memories from the deepest parts of someone’s mind.

Intrigued, Sasha decides to trade some of her most cherished memories for the strange device. She watches as the man clicks on the machine and sees shimmering memories transfer from her mind to the device. The man then transfers those memories to himself before handing her the device and walking away.

With her newly found and totally safe device, Sasha goes around exploring the market, carelessly trading tales of love, adventure, and heartbreak. She loves immersing herself in the lives of complete strangers, which is probably why she’s gullible enough to approach one and give away significant parts of herself. The market has become a garden of shared experiences to her, where she values each memory not just for its richness, but because it gives her new connections. She also learns of the system’s fragility.

She learns while some people hoard their memories for wealth, others cling to the past, grasping onto nostalgia and ignoring the present. Despite what others will think of her and the deal with the strange, ugly man, Sasha believes in the value of shared memories over the wealth of richer ones. In a world where memories are currency, Sasha makes every exchange of human connection valuable, receiving a wealth of diverse experiences that are priceless.

The Eye of Alice

Money made the world go round, but memories make the world a sphere. 

When they first were able to exchange memories for currency, everyone was excited. How could they not be? Trade in a traumatic memory and get paid for it? People couldn’t wait! Every single person was cashing out, especially with traumatic memories, or Traumemories. The adrenaline rush of hyper-awareness was the world’s new cup of coffee. The wealthy got addicted to the rush that came with the fight-or-flight reactions from a Traumemory—without having to actually be in a dangerous situation. What they didn’t tell you about were the side effects; they only told you about the substantial checks. 


Alice was born with the eye and mind of a creative, and she had the hand, ear, and eye coordination to create anything. She was able to make any of her thoughts into something beautiful: poetry, short stories, drawing, painting, sculpting, music—if it had anything to do with creativity, she would do it.

When memories became the new currency, Alice felt a sense of urgency to learn how to earn a decent wage without giving up her memorable moments. More and more stores and businesses were quickly switching to monetization of the mind. Fortunately, people started paying Alice with their memories. She became quite successful despite the lack of cash flow in the world; people would pay her to own a piece of her visions and to hear her play music and serenade them. Each new memory was an interestingly different perception of life, and Alice would create art from every memory that society would supply.

Life was great until the day she almost died in a car accident and was trapped in critical condition. The doctors gave Alice her options: live out the rest of her days on life support or be put in a Med-Bay and walk out of the hospital that day. A no-brainer, right? She chose the Med-Bay, but she had insufficient funds to pay—unless she exchanged some of her memories away. 

“Traumemories pay the best,” the doctor said.

So that’s what she chose. Unable to remember her accident, Alice went all the way back to her most traumatic experience as a kid and exchanged it.

A few hours later, Alice was healed and back home in her studio, wanting to create something—anything—but she didn’t feel that spark like before. 

“I’ll just wait; it’s probably a side effect of the Med-Bay.”

Days, weeks, then months passed… 

The creative seed seemed to be gone.

Alice forgot how her most traumatic memory was the catalyst that had her crafting and creating in the first place. 

“There has to be a way to get my memory back!” 

Or was it too late? 

The Art of Remembrance

Vista Concepción was seldom seen, but when she was, she was always with her paintbrush, which emerged from her fist like a gnarled finger. Her sole company in her moldy apartment was her belongings—hoarded, imbued with memories of her lifetime, and huddled together like cold children.

Vista wasn’t interested in portraits, still lives, or even the view outside her window. She preferred painting her memories. Her paintbrush was the only souvenir from her childhood. Its body was splintered and haphazardly carved with her name: Vista. A view, sight, vision. Something to behold. She liked to think she and her paintbrush were connected by fate, destined to transform blank slates into unforgettable art.

Currently, she was trying to capture the exact shade of pink the sunrise cast over her family’s farm. She couldn’t go back to witness it; her motherland was seduced by the lucrative industry of Memory Itemization, and her childhood home, once teeming with life, was now punctured by the blank faces of factories.

Vista nearly tossed the wet paintbrush in a violent streak across the canvas. She once made a humble living. People loved the realism of her watercolor landscapes. Now, with purchasable memories, no one wanted replicas. Art was a dying trade, and Vista, unable to let go of the past, often went hungry.

As her stomach growled, the unfortunate truth settled: memory is also a replica of the past. Everyone had convinced themselves that purchased memories portray the indisputable truth. Vista, too, had convinced herself that hoarding every afterimage got her one step closer to her past—but to remember is to constantly repaint a hazy ghost. Each time she conjured the fields of her childhood, the smell of cream skimmed off the top of fresh milk, and the laughter of her family, it moved her further away from the material truth.

If only there was a way to remember exactly as things were, without loss.

Remember. Each syllable reverberated like a clock striking midnight. Inspiration attached itself like a weed taking root straight to Vista’s heart. She began her work.


The Memory Liquidator hesitantly ducked under the caution tape. He’d been consulted for bizarre estate sales before, but nothing like this.

They found the woman’s body fused to her chair, and her hands fused to two bloody canvases. Police informed him that she attached herself with industrial-grade glue, but this was hardly the worst sight. Items were grafted into her scalp and skin, creating grotesque appendages. Her apartment was disgustingly cluttered, yet everything was linked to her limbs, fastened with zip ties, leaving her body a mangled amalgam of accumulation.

What struck the Liquidator most was the removal of her left breast, and the replacement of an old paintbrush shakily sewn to her skin, as if skimming the fat allowed the paintbrush closer access to her heart. A smile still graced her face. Every item here was tinged with deadly memories; nothing could be sold or taken from her, exactly as she wished.

Proof That You are Successful

She auctioned away one of her favorite memories on Instagram for a profit of 10,000 memory credits—a substantial sum. The memory had been of a reception for content creators, and she’d pitched it well. It felt like a royal ball, she said on Instagram Live. If you’ve ever wondered what a celebrity gala is like, this memory is for you. She timed the auction well, too—on the heels of the Met Gala, when people were frenzied over designer outfits and the parade of social wealth.

At the auction’s close, she launched the application linked to her memory harvesting implant. She selected the memory, which she’d titled PROOF THAT YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL, and sent it via link to the winner, who would download it to their implant.

She felt the shape of the memory’s absence, but the filling was gone—like a cavity’s rot being sucked out of a tooth, leaving behind an empty chamber. Panic, a side effect of the procedure, welled up in its place.

She looked at her phone’s screen to anchor herself. The wallpaper was a vision board, a collage of images surrounding the name Natalie. It didn’t matter who Natalie was, except that she was determined to become Natalie.

Surrounding the name were images representing Natalie’s memories: a condo in Malibu, the ocean a turquoise gem; the manicured slope of Canadian ski resort; a Mercedes with paint so glossy it was June-bug-iridescent; toasting wine glasses, women’s smiles blurred above. Natalie was wealth, Natalie was joy, Natalie was life at its finest.

And she was determined to buy memories like Natalie’s with the profits made from her drab memories.

But she didn’t have enough credits to acquire memories as expensive as these, to transform her brain into Natalie’s. She must keep selling. Perhaps even her own worst

memories—her parents’ divorce, her car breaking down in the snow, blocking her now-ex partner for the last time—could be twisted into something enticing. My dad said WHAT to my mom? Win the auction to find out! Survival tips you NEED from someone who escaped death in subzero temperatures. The Saga of a Psycho Ex.

She filmed a video thanking today’s winner, which took two attempts to get the background right—a clean white wall with succulents arcing overhead. Her followers often asked where she’d gotten the plants and their chic wooden baskets. She never replied. She filmed her videos on the bathroom floor, phone propped on the toilet. The succulent wall was a posterboard. Her followers did not need to know this, because soon she would be Natalie. Soon, she would have a filming room and a real succulent wall.

The emptiness where the memory she’d sold was caving in, becoming less raw. The pain, the panic of it, always faded. She turned to the harvesting app, scrolling through her memories, searching for her next extraction. One day—when she could afford memories of gemstone waves and friends’ parties—this would all be worth it.

Memory Man 

He comes once a month on the last day during the last hour. Never late, like clockwork, tick tock, and always on time. You gotta be lucky enough to find him, people say, but when you do, you’ll know. Only a handful of people have seen him, even with a backpack you can’t miss and a hat that covers eyes you’ll never see. People say if you’re desperate enough, you’ll find him.

You’re desperate enough. She was desperate, too.

You could go to The Center and tell them it was an accident. They’d ask you why and you’d tell them you don’t know. They’d buy It and take It away, but then they’d take you, too. You could go to a dealer in one of those alleys, the kind where piles of trash somehow tumble out of half-full dumpsters, where cats look for a feast and lampposts only ever flicker and there are rotting corpses of people who were hurt by accident—it was an accident, don’t forget that. They’d buy It and sell It, but then they’d sell you out because that’s ten times the money.

So, you look for him instead, clawing up hills like she clawed up your arms, dirt burying itself under your fingernails like your flesh buried under hers, like you buried her—

You notice his hat first. It’s tugged so far down his face that his nose is barely visible. Tufts of white hair curl themselves underneath, snaking around one another and fighting for the chance to say hello. She fought for the chance to see another day.

His backpack is twice his size, and the way it’s being poked and prodded and slammed into from the inside tells you that’s where your Memory will go. Dog tags hang off the side, limp like the overcooked noodles you had that night, limp like her when she took her final breath—your fingers pressed firmly against her neck, her mouth slack and lips drained of color when you tossed her into the now-full dumpster.

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t need to. And you, you don’t dare utter a word. His fingers are thin, delicate, smooth—hers: scratched, broken, swollenas they flick up his hat. You look into his eyes. Those big, round, purple eyes people said you’d never see. But they’re right there and they’re telling you it’s okay. It was an accident. They know.

The last thing you hear is the wind before the world goes black, and you’re being pushed and shoved and poked and prodded at and slammed into and finally—you don’t remember a thing.

He leaves once a month on the first day during the first hour. Never late, like clockwork, tick tock always on time. You won’t even know he came, people say, save for the body he leaves behind. You can find it if you’re lucky enough.

But no one who’s truly desperate ever sticks around long enough to hear that part of the story.

Both Sides of the Coin

I hold my son’s plush hands and count his pink fingers to make sure there are ten. I wouldn’t forgive myself if there were any missing, though I would forget how it happened. I have three severed fingertips—I can’t remember how it felt to lose them, but each finger fed my son for three months.

My phone vibrates like a heartbeat in my pocket, and I know it’s a request.

How much for a thumb?

I reply, $8,000.

The buyer accepts. I place my son in his playpen and kiss his soft head. He squirms like a little worm that thinks it’s about to be eaten.

When memories became a new type of NFT, everyone was quick to unload their baggage in exchange for vacations to faraway places and sex with people they never thought they’d meet. Happiness became the equivalent of fast food—cheap and of no nutritional value. These days, painful memories are scarce, and the market is teeming with people begging to feel something.

The memory must be at least ten seconds long. I take the knife I once used for cutting apples and place my thumb on the cutting board, like a nub of ginger waiting to be peeled. I know where to cut, I know how far to go. I cut through the red, counting the moments through gritted teeth. I can’t look away until it is done. I press the back of my ear to sync the memory and send it from my phone. The buyer instantly pays, and I am left with blind pain. My body moves automatically, a puppet pulled by the strings of the nurse I was before. I treat the wound with my son crying behind me, as if he feels it too. Then the world grows still, dark, and numb.


The memory from this woman pounds into my skull like a drill. I feel the sawing of her thumb, the anguish of hot flesh against cold steel. A scream rips through my throat and the skin on my forehead floods with salty sweat. It’s delicious. A rush of laughter erupts from the deepest part of my gut. I spiral in this feeling of pain that is not mine, of pain I paid for like a prime rib served on a broken platter.

It is over too soon. The memory clings to me sticky sweet, but the feeling is gone. I pull my phone out and view my collection with pride. There is the thumb, there is the fetus in a closet, there is the eye of a soldier, there is the burned flesh of a child in a war zone. It’s all there and so much more. I am rich with pain that I bought and now own.

My phone rings.

Sir, it’s time for your press conference.

I straighten my red and blue tie, adjust the pin over my heart, check my teeth, and smile.

Kids Are Like Sponges

A brusque Slavic voice ricocheted off the brick alley walls around the corner, and my level two high school Spanish was not helping me decipher any of it. My socks were soddened by the blood running down the front of my jeans. As I surveyed the empty sunset-lit block, my breaths came in jagged bursts. I didn’t recognize this part of town. My body was still shaking with the shock of what happened at the police station.  It’s not every day you see a man in a black suit and Ray-Bans shoot two cops while you are mid-conversation with them.

“Run!” That’s all I had heard. I didn’t know if it was my own voice or Sam’s. She had been next to me during the shooting. It was her blood running down the front of my jeans.

 I caught my breath and looked down at my phone. The GPS read You have arrived. I double-checked that the address I punched in while running matched the one that had come from the unknown phone number, which seemed more area code than number. I had ignored the texts at first. I had been busy climbing the unnecessarily copious number of steps leading to the police station. And I think I was finally convincing Sam to sell me her memory of the time she walked in on me mid-wipe at the movie theater’s unisex bathroom. If I had known that morally ethical inclusivity came at the cost of your best friend catching you in a frog squat with dropped trow, I would have thought twice about signing that petition clipboard.

They tell you to only sell your memories if prescribed by a licensed Memorist. Bunch of horse shit. Before everyone’s uncle owned one, Memor-link boxes were exclusive to Memorists’ clinics. That’s back when my trauma-laden shell of an aunt decided to visit one. She had been prescribed to sell her traumatic childhood memories. What they didn’t tell her was that even though the memories disappeared, the emotions stayed. And rope is much cheaper than you think. I didn’t have any trauma. What I did have was a memory of a certain popular senator guiding two blindfolded toddlers into an SUV during my alleyway pee break last week. After talking over what I saw with Sam, she had eventually convinced me to go to the police station.

I ventured down the narrow alley and found a blindfolded kid with a short buzz-cut connected to a Memor-link box. Beside him, a bald, pale man in a tracksuit grunted, “Do now. No more trouble.” He had a way with words.

Feeling resigned and chicken shit, I took the connecting pair of Memor-link wires, peeled the Giver-Tabs, and suctioned them onto my temples. I closed my eyes and brought the memory into focus. The box beeped. Then I heard hair clippers.

Worth

The shopkeeper lifted their head as the doorbell chimed. “Welcome.”

An old woman entered, her face a map of laughter and tears earned over a life well lived. She kept her crimson shawl pulled tight as she wandered the shelves, eyeing the shopkeeper’s wares. Many customers took time browsing, gathering courage before asking for what they truly wanted.

The woman paused and ran soft fingers over a stuffed bear. “A baby’s first laugh,” the shopkeeper explained. “It was sold for a new car.”

With a careful reverence, the woman picked up the bear and cradled it in her arms. “What a waste,” she mumbled, squeezing it before returning it to the shelf.

“Everyone has their reasons,” the shopkeeper said. “And everything has its worth.”

A moment passed and the woman sighed. She was ready.

The shopkeeper studied her as she approached the desk. It had become something of a pastime to try and guess what the customer wanted to sell. The shopkeeper had seen it all: first kisses, wedding days, funerals, friendships, favorite recipes, a mother’s voice. What had the old woman brought to sell?

She clutched at her shawl, finding some invisible comfort in the frayed woolen threads. “How much for a life?”

“More than you can give.”

She shook her head, “How much for my life?”

Interesting. “Do you understand what you ask?”

“I do.”

“I see. A lifetime of memories is not a simple thing to lose. What do you ask in return?”

“My grandson is sick. A heart defect. My sweet boy has fought hard, but he’s losing the fight. Unless something happens, he won’t see another month.” The woman’s voice was painted with emotion, but her eyes were dry. She had cried enough tears to know that they wouldn’t change anything. “I am old and have lived a good life. I will give you all my memories, every moment of my seventy-nine years, if you can make him healthy.”

“I can fix his heart, but I can do no more than that. I can’t promise him a long and happy life.”

“He only needs a chance. He will make his own happiness.”

The shopkeeper considered the offer before them. “Very well. If you are sure, sign your name in my ledger.”

They opened the book to a blank page and the woman signed without hesitation. When she looked up again, her eyes sparkled with tears. “Thank you.”

“You have until tomorrow morning. Until then, you will remember. I suggest you make use of today.”

The old woman nodded and the shopkeeper was alone once more.

The doctors will find a healthy boy with a healthy heart in the morning, but the woman won’t remember anything. Not her name, her family, her face.

But the shopkeeper is not cruel. Even when she has forgotten everything else, the woman will remember the sound of her grandson’s first laugh, and that will be enough.