LongStoryShort.us
700 words

Effacing Memories

From the recesses of the mahogany cabinet out flew Lucy’s memories: cards with time-blunted edges, letters as yellow as decayed teeth, photographs whose colors were mere ghosts of the originals… but not the photograph she wanted. She searched frantically, as if another moment’s delay could not be borne; as if one more minute over the forty years since she had seen him last, or over the one month since his death, would be a minute too much.

In those forty years, the precise instant at which his face had escaped her memory, she had no way to determine. Perhaps it hadn’t gone with one brutal wrench, but either faded away like the colors on those photographs, or disappeared piecemeal, like the eclipse of the sun: first the hair, then the eyes, the nose, the mouth. Now she recalled nothing.

That realization had come suddenly, when Sophia told her, her usual accusatory look even more piercing, that he had died a month ago. Still alone, with Lucy’s name on his lips. (Lucy of course recognizing that the last was Sophia’s own contribution.) But his death was a fact she could not deny; the guilt that she had managed to evade for so long, despite Sophia’s muted censure, finally clung to her. And now her memory obstructed her in expiating that guilt.

An uproar of howls and shrieks interspersed with the tinkling laughter of her granddaughter came from the living room. How blissful it was, Lucy imagined, to be able to believe in those cartoons in which bombs exploded and people fell from skyscrapers but no one ever died, and nobody’s face was ever obliterated. Where was the photograph? It had to be in one of the secret drawers of the cabinet because she remembered caching it there and never taking it out.

She remembered other things. He had kind eyes, but that she remembered only as a fact she told him once, and not how his eyes actually were. They were blue and kind, brown and kind, black and kind--she could believe anything now.

Of their photograph she could recall every single detail, from his neck downwards. He had worn a light shirt, with narrow dark stripes; sleeves rolled to just above the elbows; and indigo-blue jeans. His left arm wrapped her shoulder in his embrace. They had asked a stranger to take the photograph, and he had obliged with a smile and wished them luck.

The photograph had to be in the cabinet because it was the only one she couldn’t bring herself to throw into the incinerator. When she knew she couldn’t marry him, she had destroyed all their letters and photographs save that one, hoping that the removal of all those sweet souvenirs would, with time, pave the way for those which lingered in her mind.

She had had her reasons, important then, but which the passage of time had made trivial, and certainly not as insurmountable as she had thought at first, though by the time she realized that it was too late. But you move on, you don’t get stuck in a time warp, she said, flinging her arms at Sophia to counter her incriminating glances, you don’t take a vow you will not marry anybody else. And you certainly don’t keep that vow until you die.

It was his tribute to his love for you. He didn’t ask you for anything in return. He just didn’t want to debase his love by sharing it with someone else, Sophia told her, letting her expression imply whatever she had left unsaid. The least he deserves are your tears.

Another round of explosions and laughter from the living room brought her mind back to the cabinet. She remembered, all at once, an innermost chamber, a recess within a recess. The photograph was there. She drew it out and gasped in horror.

Her picture was intact, and so was his arm around her, but not his face. That side of it was nibbled away by termites or silverfish, in a grotesque parody of her memory, as if time and nature both had conspired in forcing her to pay homage to a man who would remain faceless forever.