Stephen Snyder

Though I’ve tried, I’ve found no way to fill in the voids left by the Memory Police.

I would have been about seven or eight years old, dressed in a pink lace skirt my mother had made for me. It was by then much too short, even when I pulled on the lace, and I remember being terribly worried that my cousin, coming up behind me on the stairs, would be able to see my underwear.

‘Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,’

no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.

“I know, but I worry that the earthquake changed everything too suddenly, that it was too shocking.”

“No, the truth is that I was dying under that rubble and you saved me. There was nothing to be shocked about. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done, and I’m not watching the boat out of nostalgia, but to remind myself how lucky I am.”

I was at a loss at these words, never having imagined what it would mean if the hidden room disappeared, if a time came when I no longer knew what was there, under the rug. How to raise the trapdoor. Why R was there beneath our feet.

But my words were absorbed by the tiles on the walls and did not seem to reach the doctor’s ears.

It was then I finally realized what had disappeared: my left leg.

“Stay a bit longer, like that,” I told him. Though the feeling was empty, I wanted to watch him holding on to that void.

And yet, when I see his fingers working just for my benefit, I can’t help feeling a kind of gratitude. I know it’s foolish, but that’s my honest reaction and there’s nothing I can do about it.