The Memory Eaters
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
She found the room again by accident, between the laundromat and the pet store that used to be a church. The brass numbers—3½—were new, or perhaps they had always been there, waiting for her to notice them. Inside, the air tasted like the moment before rain, and someone had left a single teacup on the windowsill, still warm. There was no place to sit, only the windowsill and the fireplace, but when she lay on the floor and closed her eyes, her childhood room opened up around her. Her stuffed animals sat in a row, her pencil drawings curled away from the walls, and the record player spun out a waltz.
She had known, somehow, that the room would be different for her. When she had heard the people in the coffee shop talking about it, she had gone looking for it right away, and as soon as she had stepped inside, the room had rushed into her mind. But in the coffee shop, they had talked about rooms filled with flowers and mud and strange shapes. They had talked about rooms that were hot enough to burn, or so cold that the air felt solid. They had talked about rooms with fountains, with music, with the sound of rain, and she knew, somehow, that they were all describing the same place.
What she did not know was whether she had made the room into her childhood home, or whether it had done so by itself. She did not know whether her dolls and stuffed animals had simply come with the room, or whether they had been taken from her memories and laid out, lovingly, on the floor. They never spoke to her, not even in the last, fevered days, when they came to life in other ways, melting into the ground, or floating to the ceiling, or spinning in their own pools of light.
The room took her time. It wasn’t that she could feel it happening, or that the years disappeared as she stepped across the threshold, though she often imagined it. It was simply that she was in the room, and then her friends had new jobs, or husbands, or children. It was simply that she was in the room, and then the thrift store closed, and the woman with the hole in her cheek was gone. It was simply that she was in the room, and then it was another room, and another, until all that was left was a rusty tea tin, sitting in the sunlight.
She held the tin on her lap as the bus rattled along, clutched it to her chest as she climbed the hill and walked through the gate. She did not know what was inside. There had never been a tea tin in her childhood room, so she did not know whether this was another memory, or whether it had come with the room, or whether it was simply the one thing that had remained when everything else was gone. But when she set it on the porch and went back to the garden for the shovel, the lid had been opened, and she knew, without looking, that there was nothing inside.
Rachel Halpern is the author of the chapbook Double-Geared Threshing Machine◆ About the ending
❧ About the title