Stephen Snyder

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

I could read the words out loud, but I could no longer understand them as parts of a coherent story with a plot to connect them. They were just characters on the manuscript page, and they evoked in me no feeling or atmosphere, no recognizable scene.

His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he’ll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea

My mouth was dry as dust, my tongue glued to the roof.

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.