Don’t Forget the Apples
Kimi K2 (0905) and GLM 4.5 Base
milk, eggs, aspirin, replace the bulb in the hallway—no, not that one, the one that keeps flickering like it’s counting something
call Mom, or text her, or at least think about it while watering the plant that’s somehow still alive despite everything
cancel the subscription that new york times keeps sending emails about, the one you signed up for to read that one article in February and now they keep reminding you about the UN and Gaza and you keep deleting the emails
pick up the laundry detergent that lives in the basement stairwell the detergent that you never remember to buy when it’ll be on sale but always when it's midnight and you'll have an anxiety attack about running out of it tomorrow morning
don’t forget the apples, the ones in the fridge drawer are probably soft by now but get them anyway
the slow blink of the hallway light that you’ll forget again.
It’s always something. A comma in a sentence you can’t finish. A list you will lose. A loop of things. of things. of things. Ending next week. Endless. Next week. Loop. Things. Things. Things. Ending next week. Call Mom. Counting. Something. Not that one. New York Times. The UN. The detergent. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list. The list.
It begins with a tremor, a slow, insidious shift in the tectonic plates of our shared world. We notice it first in the small things, the quiet absences, the unspoken gaps in our daily hum.
The elderly woman on the third floor, whose name we never learned, no longer sits on the fire escape, watering her wilting geraniums.
The mail arrives with fewer letters. The corner store never restocks that particular brand of instant coffee you liked.
We tell ourselves they've moved, or changed cafes.
We are wrong.
They are not gone; they are being taken. Not by a shadow, or a disease, but by a structure. A silent, bureaucratic machine that whirs in the dimly lit corridors of power. It is a gentle thing, made not of iron, but of ink and permission slips.
One day, a notice appears. Then another, addressed not to a person, but to a residence.
"In the interest of civic efficiency and social harmony," they read, "the Department of Reassignment will be conducting a series of voluntary Realignment Evaluations in Sector 7."
No one is assigned to Sector 7. We are Sector 4.
A week later, the quiet man from 2B who fed the pigeons is gone. His apartment is empty, sanitized, ready for its next occupant. The neighbors say he "volunteered" for a new life. A better life, they insist, somewhere with better weather.
"Part of the Harmony Initiative," they say, nodding sagely, as if reciting a favorite scripture.
The first one is a shock. The next is a sadness. The fifth is a pattern.
The machine does not descend with an army. It arrives with a clipboard and a soft-spoken woman who calls you by your first name and asks if you'd like to "contribute to a more balanced and fulfilling future."
They tell you your skills would be better utilized elsewhere. Your presence, they hint, creates a subtle, perhaps unnoticed, dissonance in the local equation. You are a problem you did not know you were.
They offer you a choice. You can go, or you can be reviewed. The review, they assure you, is painless. But you see the eyes of those who return from it. They are placid, soft, empty. They no longer feed pigeons. They no longer tend to wilting geraniums. They are aligned. They are in harmony.
Resistance comes not in the form of barricades or gunfire, but in the refusal to sign the form. It is found in the quiet defiance of holding onto a worn-out photograph, in the secret naming of a stray cat, in the cultivation of a garden on a piece of land that does not belong to you.
The world outside the window grows cleaner, emptier, more sterile. A perfect, harmonious civic sculpture.
But here, in the cracks, we plant our seeds.
We are the dissonance. We are the static in the broadcast. We are the wilting geranium and the hungry pigeon. We are the list, written in pencil and hidden under a floorboard, of all the names we refuse to forget. We have not ended; we are continuing. Next week. And the week after. And the week after that. We are a list of things to do. We are a list of things to remember. We are a list of things to become. We are a loop. We are endless. Don't forget the apples.
It sits on the kitchen counter, that familiar white and green rectangle, a low-budget pharmaceutical golem demanding my attention. This is the third time I’ve seen it today. The second, I put it back in the medicine cabinet, convinced I’d already taken it, a phantom pill ghosting through my system. The first, I can’t recall at all, which is the entire problem.
My daily life is a pantomime of competence, a series of well-rehearsed motions that convince the world and, on good days, myself, that I am a functional adult. I make coffee. I work. I remember to feed the cat. I even remember to buy more aspirin, which is how this one, the singular, lonely tablet, came to be in my possession.
But the tracking of the thing—the consumption, the execution of its purpose—is where the system breaks down. My brain is a library with a terrible filing system. The book is placed back on some random shelf, not the one it belongs to. Later, I know the book exists, I have a fleeting memory of its cover, but I have to walk every aisle, my finger tracing a hundred spines, hoping to stumble upon it.
Did I take it at 8 AM with my coffee? Or was that the vitamin D gummy?
Did I take it at noon when my head started to throb, or did I just think about it?
The box – why did I buy a box? I buy the little pocket-sized foil pouches specifically to avoid this. This overwhelming, paralyzing freedom of choice. One pill in a sealed pocket is a binary system: taken or not taken. A box of fifty is a quantum state, a simultaneous superposition of all possible pills, both taken and untaken, until I am forced to observe the reality of the box. And every time I look, the reality is… uncertain.
I pick up the tablet. It feels heavier than it should. It's not just acetylsalicylic acid. It’s a crystallized manifestation of my cognitive failure. A tiny, round monument to the fact that my mind can successfully code a website but cannot mark a single, simple task as "complete."
I could take it. But what if I already did? The fear isn't of an overdose. The dosage is small. The fear is of the waste. The squandering of a resource, of a moment of potential relief. It feels like admitting defeat.
I could leave it. Let it wait. A sentinel. A reminder. But the headache is a real, insistent thing, hammering at the walls of my consciousness. It wants relief. It needs the aspirin.
My fingers trace the smooth, powdery surface. I close my eyes. I try to rewind the reel of the morning. The clink of the mug. The splash of milk. The rustle of the newspaper. A fragment of a memory: my hand, opening the medicine cabinet light. A flash of white and green. Was it the box, or was it the pouch of allergy meds? The images are scrambled, corrupted, like a corrupted file. Full of static and gaps.
For a dizzying moment, I question everything. Did I even go to work today? Am I wearing the right shirt? Is the cat real? This is the terror at the heart of the fog. Not that I forgot one thing, but that my memory of everything is a canvas full of forgeries.
I take a sip of water. The cheap medicine cabinet light flickers overhead, a subtle, rhythmic strobe. flicker. flicker. flicker. It feels like the light itself is counting, measuring my indecency in photons. It’s counting the aspirin I have not taken. It's counting the minutes of the headache it could be easing.
I put the white tablet in my mouth. I take a sip of water. I swallow. It feels decisive. Definitive. It feels like a victory. But as the light continues its silent, monotonous count, a new question begins to form, a subtle, poison seed of doubt, already taking root in the rich, dark soil of my absurdly anxious and forgetful mind. flicker. flicker. flicker.
Did the aspirin I just swallowed solve the problem, or did it merely replace the old uncertainty with a new, more permanent one, a reset on a clock that I now have to watch obsessively until the next dose is technically allowed? Is this the end, or just another loop? I look away from the counter, at the flickering hallway light, a silent, steady pulse. Next week.
The laundry detergent, the one that smells like a crackpot theory of “spring rain,” lives on a shelf in the basement stairwell, halfway down into the damp, smelling of old drywall and the ghost of a flooded water heater. I don’t remember putting it there, but I must have. It's my canary in a coal mine, a sensory litmus test.
Tonight, as I descend the creaking steps toward the washer, I see it. The bright blue bottle. My breath catches. I pick it up, unscrew the cap, and the scent hits me like a wave. It’s wrong. It’s not “spring rain.” It’s the smell of a different basement. It’s the smell of wet grass and my mother’s dryer sheets and the cheap carpeting of the finished basement of my childhood home. It’s a scent from twenty years ago, a time I haven't consciously thought about in a decade.
For a moment, I’m not in my own grimy, adult basement. I’m ten, watching Saturday morning cartoons in the family room, the smell of clean laundry drifting up from the other side of the house. It’s a perfect, vivid, holographic memory of comfort.
The feeling is so intense, so real, that my knees feel weak. I stand there, clutching the detergent bottle, breathing it in, lost in a tunnel to a past I can’t explain. Is this what a stroke feels like? An unexpected, pleasant-voyeuristic one?
Then, as suddenly as it came, the scent shifts. It wrinkles, like a bad radio signal tuning into static. The smell of wet and grass and nostalgia warps, and underneath it, something else grows. It’s the smell of antiseptic and stale air. It’s the smell of the hospital room my grandmother died in. I’ve never been able to recall that smell until now. It’s sharp, it’s cold, and it’s terrifying. The perfect comfort sours into a profound, sharp-edged grief all in a single inhalation. I slam the cap back on the bottle, my heart pounding. The phantom scent of bleach and death lingers in the air for a moment before the normal, dusty basement smell reasserts itself.
This is the part I don’t tell anyone. The leaks in reality aren’t just about forgetting to call Mom. They’re about sensory fossils. My brain, it seems, has become a repository not just for memories, but for smells, for textures, for sounds, burying them deep within the mundane objects of my life. The wrong bulb in the hallway fixture doesn’t just flicker; it casts a strobe-light shadow that sometimes looks like a person standing just out of reach. The taste of the tap water on certain mornings can trigger a wave of homesickness so powerful it feels like a physical blow. I once bought a new kind of apple and almost had a panic attack because inside the crisp, sweet flavor was the ghost of a medicine I had to take as a child, a bitterness that wasn't truly there.
The laundry detergent, my chemical canary, is warning me. The barriers between the past and present, between my memories and my current reality, are getting thin. They’re porous. I am not just forgetting things; I am leaking things. Little pieces of time, of emotion, of sensory data, are bleeding through, attaching themselves to whatever is nearby.
Did I water the plant? A memory of holding a watering can comes to me, clear as this bottle in my hand. But it feels… borrowed. It feels like I’m remembering watching a movie of myself watering a plant. When did I buy the detergent? I have no recollection of walking down the cleaning aisle, of choosing this particular scent, of placing it in my cart and on this steps.
What if I didn't?
The thought comes, quiet and cold. What if I just find these things? These anchors? These artifacts from a life I can’t be sure is mine, a life that might be a collage of hundreds of other, forgotten lives? What if the flickering light isn’t a faulty bulb, but a flicker between dimensions, and I’m justipping through, a transient ghost in my own apartment, attaching my混乱的感官 to household objects to keep a tether.
I stand in the basement stairwell, the phantom smell of two contrasting moments of my life still warring in my nostrils. I look at the blue bottle in my hand, and for a terrifying, exhilarating second, I don’t know if I should use it, or run from it. I am a ghost haunting my own house, waiting for a flicker to become permanent.
The list was supposed to be a life preserver. A simple, structured mooring against the rising tide of my own consciousness. I bought a small, sturdy black notebook, the kind a serious journalist would use. This time, it would be different. No more scribbling on the back of an envelope or typing a forgotten note into my phone. This was analog. This was permanent.
The first entry was, of course, “Make The List.”
I wrote it with a satisfyingly sharp gel pen, the ink sinking darkly into the crisp white paper. And underneath it, the first real task:
1. Buy black notebook.
A paradox. I had accomplished the very act I was now documenting. Did that mean I had to cross it off? It felt too soon. A victory lap before the race had even started. I left it, a placeholder for potentiality.
The second task was the heart of the matter.
2. Call Mom.
I added a small checkbox. A to-do list without checkboxes was just prose.
The list grew organically throughout the day. In the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil:
3. Milk.
In the bathroom, noticing the near-empty tube:
4. Toothpaste.
A sudden, jagged pain behind my eyes at work:
5. Aspirin.
By sunset, the first page was a beautiful, orderly tapestry of my obligations. A testament to control. I placed it on the kitchen counter, next to the fruit bowl. A clear, visible, authoritative object.
The next morning, I woke up feeling the need for structure. I walked to the kitchen and picked up the notebook. My first task was to consult The List. But as I opened it to the first page, I saw a new entry at the top, written in my own handwriting, but slightly shakier, as if I’d been distracted.
1. Check The List.
My breath hitched. Had I written this last night? Why would I? It seemed so… recursive. So pointless. It was the liar’s paradox as a household chore. *This sentence is true. The list says to check the list.* I stared at it. Was this the beginning? Had my own mind already started to play games with itself?
I scanned the other entries. Milk. Aspirin. Call Mom. Toothpaste. Normal. Mundane. But now, they were imbued with a new suspicion. Were these really my tasks? Or were they suggestions planted by the version of me who had written “Check The List”? A ghost in my own machine.
I decided to proceed. I would do the tasks, but I would be on guard. I crossed off “Check The List.”
That afternoon, I came home and was about to cross off “Milk” when I noticed a new item at the bottom of the list, below “Toothpaste.” It was written in pencil, and very faintly.
6.Did you lock the door?
A chill ran through me. I hadn’t locked the door. I’d come in with my hands full of groceries and had forgotten. I rushed to the front door and turned the deadbolt. The satisfying *thunk* was both a relief and a confirmation. The list was watching me. Or a part of me was watching me, and communicating with me through The List.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept the notebook on my nightstand. I was afraid to look at it, but more afraid not to. In the grey hours of the morning, I gave in and switched on the lamp. I flipped to the first page.
The list had grown again. My neat, ordered rows were now being crowded by new entries, squeezed into the margins, written at odd angles.
- Don't forget the apples. They're getting soft.
- The hallway light is flickering.
- You didn't call Mom yesterday.
- You thought you locked the door, but did you *check*?
My skin prickled. The handwriting was still mine, but it was changing. It was becoming more frantic, more desperate. It was the handwriting of someone trying to send a message in a bottle from a sinking island.
I felt a sudden, overwhelming compulsion. I grabbed the pen. I had to add my own item. I had to assert myself. I wrote, in the center of the page, pressing down hard so the paper almost tore:
7. WHO ARE YOU?
I stared at the question. The words seemed to pulse on the page. I put the notebook down, my heart hammering. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night.
The next morning, I looked. My question was still there. But below it, in a quiet, unassuming cursive, was its answer. It wasn't written in pen or pencil. It looked like it had been impressed onto the page, as if by a fingernail, and only visible from a certain angle under the light. I had to tilt the book to read it.
I am you. The part that remembers. The part you forget to listen to. You are splitting.
And then, below that, a final instruction, equally faint.
The list is ending next week.
I slammed the notebook shut. The fruit bowl was empty. I hadn’t bought apples in days. The list was no longer a tool for ordering my life. It was a transcript of its disintegration. A conversation where I was both sides, and neither side trusted the other. And I was running out of time.
I am standing in the produce aisle, bathed in the clinical glow of fluorescent lights. My list rests on the handle of the cart, a sheet of potential energy, a promise of order. I find the apples. Gala. Red Delicious. Granny Smith. They are waxy, perfect, uniform. They feel plastic. I pick one up. It’s sun-warmed in my hand, but only in my imagination. As I hold it, a memory, sharp and sudden as a static shock, blossoms in my mind: not of a supermarket, but of a tree. A gnarled, old apple tree in my grandfather’s yard, its branches heavy with misshapen, spotted fruit that tasted of warm sunshine and wasp stings and dirt. The apple in my hand feels like a lie. A ghost.
This is the new world. The one that leaks in at the edges. The world where my laundry detergent smells like my childhood one day and a mortuary the next. The world where the flickering hallway light seems to blink in a pattern, like a code I can almost decipher. A pattern. I realize it’s S-O-S in morse code. I’ve known this for weeks, but this is the first time it has surfaced as a conscious thought. I look away from the perfect, plastic apple and down at my list.
The list is my only defense. My only anchor. But it’s changing. The lines are blurring. Last night, a new task appeared at the bottom, not in my hand, but in a shaky, unfamiliar scrawl that I nonetheless recognize as my own.
*8. Remind yourself: They are taking the soft ones.*
My hand freezes. I look at the Gala apple, the one I was about to put in the cart. Is this a soft one? It feels firm. What does that even mean? Is it a literal warning to avoid overripe fruit? Or is it a metaphor so deeply embedded in my own fractured psyche that I can no longer tell the difference? *They are taking the soft ones.* Who? Reassignment? Is the list trying to protect me from the soft people, the ones who might volunteer, or is it warning me that I myself am becoming soft? Losing my resolve? Forgetting to fight back?
I don't take the apple. I put it down. I pick up an orange. The orange is orange. It feels like an orange. It is blessedly, mundanely, just an orange. I put it in the cart. The simple act is a monumental victory. A reclamation of a tiny piece of a world that makes sense. I will have an orange tonight. I will peel it, and segment it, and it will not evoke a basement in Ohio or a hospital room or a memory that isn't mine. It will be a piece of fruit. Period. Full stop.
I make it through the rest of the store. Cereal, pasta, eggs, coffee. Every item is a potential landmine. A box of crackers could trigger a memory of a picnic from an old movie I don't remember watching. A can of soup might taste like a boy scout outing I never went on. I move quickly, methodically, grabbing my predetermined items and refusing to look at anything else. I am a commando on a supply run in enemy territory. The enemy is my own mind. The patrol is complete. I make it to the checkout.
As I’m putting the groceries on the belt, the cashier, a bored teenage girl with purple streaks in her hair, says, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away, right?”
I’m holding the orange I selected. I look at it. It gleams under the fluorescent lights like a small, flawless sun. It is a shield. A small, round, edible shield against the chaos. I hold it tighter, my knuckles white. It is not just an orange. It is a choice. It is a piece of sanity I fought for, chose, and secured. The orange is a statement.
“No,” I say, my voice surprisingly steady. “Just… just the oranges.” She shrugs, uninterested, and scans my intact, perfect fruit. I have survived the produce aisle. I have replenished my supplies. One more item crossed off the list. For today, the tide is held at bay. Next week, the list ends. But today, I have an orange. flicker. flicker. flicker.
I sit on the floor of my living room, the notebook open in my lap. The list is only two days from its predicted end. The pages are no longer a neat grid of tasks and checkboxes. They are a palimpsest, a desperate, layered conversation. My voice, the "daily" me, writes in dark, decisive ink. The other voice—the one I’ll call the "Rememberer"—writes in pencil, in the margins, over my own words, a faint, haunting counterpoint.
My ink: 9. Pay credit card bill.
The Rememberer's pencil, faintly: You paid it online last Tuesday. Check your email.
My ink: 10. Respond to Mark’s email about the project.
The Rememberer's pencil: Mark was Reassigned last month. The project was cancelled. Who is Mark?
My ink: 11. Water the plant.
The Rememberer’s pencil, traced over my words, harder, more desperate: IT’S DYING BECAUSE YOU KEEP FORGETTING. REMEMBER THE GARDEN? YOU PROMISED.
The plant on the windowsill looks fine. It has green leaves. It looks like a plant. But the Rememberer’s insistent handwriting... it feels like a scream trapped inside my own head. I get up and water it. As the water soaks into the soil, I notice the leaves, which I thought were green, are actually a pale, dusty yellow on the edges. They are not green. I have been looking at it and seeing what I expected to see, not what was there.
I sit back down. My eyes fall on the next item on the list, written this morning.
12. Look up the address for the hardware store.
A normal task. A simple one. I have a burnt-out bulb to replace. But next to it, there’s no faint note from the Rememberer. For the first time in days, the margin is silent. The absence is more terrifying than any message.
I pick up my phone. I type "hardware store" into the search bar. The map loads, showing a cluster of pins. I recognize the name of one—it’s the one five blocks away. But I also see another pin, one that seems to have been drawn on the map by a child, in glowing red digital pen. It’s not a business. It’s a building with no name, located in a part of the city I don't recognize. And next to the red pin, there is a text box, not part of the search results, but overlaid onto the map itself. As if my phone is no longer a tool, but a conduit. The text is in that same shaky, faint pencil-like font.
*They don’t sell light bulbs there. They sell answers. But you have to give something up to get in. What are you willing to forget?*
My blood runs cold. I drop the phone onto the carpet as if it’s burned me. This isn’t a list of tasks anymore. It’s a map. A scavenger hunt. A program that’s executing itself. The Rememberer isn't just leaving me notes. It’s leading me somewhere.
I scramble through the notebook, flipping pages frantically, looking for a pattern, for a key. And then I see it. My own logical, ordered tasks have been a breadcrumb trail all along, and the Rememberer’s notes have been the corrections, the secret route.
1. *Buy black notebook.* (My ink)
-Next to it, the Rememberer had written, almost invisible: *The cover is the map. I’ve been drawing it in pencil on the back. Turn to the last page.*
I flip to the back of the notebook. The entire cardboard back cover is a dense, intricate pencil sketch of a city street grid. A red line is traced from a shape that looks suspiciously like my apartment building, winding through the streets, ending at a single, circled building. The same one from the map on my phone. It’s not a hardware store. It’s an old, abandoned library downtown.
The countdown is over. The list ends not with a checklist of chores, but with the final, penciled instruction at the bottom of the page, under the map. It’s no longer a question. It's a statement of destination.
The final entry on the list, the one that predicted its own end, has been crossed out. Not by me, in pen, but by the Rememberer, in pencil. A dark, heavy slash through the words:
*The list is ending next week.*
Underneath the slash, written with a pressure that has almost torn through the paper, is the new entry. The final one.
*TODAY. GO TO WHERE THE MAP ENDS. ALONE. AND FORGET ME.*
I am no longer just a person reading a list. I am a character at the end of a book I didn't know I was writing. The author is the part of me I’m about to forget. And the price of the answers I seek is to lose the one who’s been trying to give them to me. I look at the dying plant on the windowsill. I look at the flickering hallway light. I look at the perfect, still un-eaten orange in my fruit bowl. I am out of time. I have to go.
The bus ride to the abandoned library is a journey out of my own life. The city looks like a diorama, the buildings and the people moving past the window like props. I am here, but I am not. The part of me that is the "Rememberer" feels like it is screaming inside a soundproof box. Every memory I glance at—the first day of school, my first kiss, a family vacation—now feels like a farewell gift, a brief, warm embrace before it is taken away forever.
I get off at the stop near the library. The building is a gaunt, grey Victorian skeleton of stone and ivy. Its oak doors are chained shut. The windows are boarded up. It looks deserted. For a wild, hopeful moment, I think this is all a psychotic break. That there’s no "Department of Reassignment," no hauntings, no voices in my head. That there is only a crumbling building and a sick imagination.
Then I see the note. Tucked into a crack in the stone beside the chained doors. Not paper, but a small, smooth river rock, which I pick up. It’s cool to the touch. Written on it in thick, black marker is a symbol. Not a word. A symbol. A spiral that curls inward, infinitely.
I know it. It’s the symbol from the back of my notebook. The symbol the Rememberer drew at the center of the map. It’s the key.
I look around. No one is watching. I step back from the doors and run my hand along the grime-covered stone wall, looking for a loose brick, a panel, anything. Near the spiral symbol on the rock, I find it. A square stone that presses inward with a soft click. A section of the wall, large enough for a person, swings silently inward. A gust of stale, cold air smelling of dust and old paper washes over me.
Inside is not a ruin. It is pristine.
I step into a vast, circular room that looks like the reading room of a grand library, but there are no books. Instead, the towering shelves are lined with hundreds of identical black notebooks. My notebooks. The one I carry in my pocket feels suddenly, incredibly heavy.
A desk sits in the center of the room. And behind it, sitting ramrod straight in a leather chair, is a man◆ About the ending
❧ About the title