Do you remember when... (#001-#003)

Stories from your life you may have forgotten.

Photo by Kay Enn on Unsplash

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This week I’m trying something new - a series of micro-fiction pulled straight from your memories! Don’t forget to vote to tell me which you remember.

#001: Do you remember when you skinned your knee as a child?

It throbbed like the whole joint would never move again. The blood beaded on your skin, but didn't want to run for help, so you watched it, observing the hot pain, trying to get distance from it.

You poked the wound, making more blood drip there, then you squeezed it. The world faded as you focused on this piece of your life-force oozing away. What was you becoming not-you.

In that moment, a chasm opened inside: you knew you could break, you could leak and leak and leak until you were hollow and there’d be nothing wet left inside. You imagined yourself as a wet thing, sloshing around the fragile shell of a body, swirling around bones and tendons, and ready to be pierced by the graze or trip or pin or blade.

A drop of your blood trickled down the side of your knee, tickling as it reached the back, then plopped to the dirty ground. This seemed to break the spell, and you limped inside to get your knee washed and have a nice brightly coloured plaster put onto it.

As you hobbled, you sensed yourself as fluid, caught inside your skin, awaiting the next puncture, and the next and more and more, until the final puncture would come one day. You are still in there, rippling and wet, awaiting that last ebbing release.

#002: Do you remember when you got lost in a department store as an adult?

You were browsing T-shirts. Row after row were printed with logos and album covers of bands that you thought no-one listened to anymore. Most of the shop staff probably weren't born when half the bands released their last album.

You needed to buy something. Everything you owned was falling apart from age, but nothing appealed.

Yet more railings hung before you, but at least they had bands you'd never heard of. You flicked through them and wondered if your eyes were playing tricks. The lettering stopped looking like words, more like drawings by someone who'd seen countless band logos and was sketching patterns of names without knowing what any of it meant.

Each T-shirt was different from the last, like they were all one-off pieces. Every design became stranger and more garish than the last, pictures with arms where there shouldn't be limbs, faces made only of teeth, and bodies writhing as masses of flesh adored with necklaces and leather wrist-bands. Some images appeared okay on first glance, but the longer you looked, the more wrong they became.

You wanted to find a staff member to ask them what was going on. Were these randomly generated designs? Was it an avant-garde art experiment? Were there hidden cameras, wondering if anyone would notice the wrongness of the T-shirts? But there was no-one in the store.

Instead of cashiers, naked mannequins stood at the check-out islands, and the walls of the store seemed to be miles away. In one direction, the strip lighting overhead continued in endless rows for as far as you could see. Your head throbbed and eyes watered as they tried to comprehend the distances.

You could hear others nearby, but there wasn’t anyone in sight. Then you noticed the buzzing conversations and shop-noises sounded wrong, too tinny, and you focused until you found their source: small grey-yellow speakers piping in shopping ambiance. Beyond this chattering and your breath, the room is still and silent.

Heart thumping, you pulled your gaze from the emptiness and walked backwards, retracing your steps and actions, flicking the T-shirts back into place, hoping they would lead you home.

Only when you saw the front cover of an album you once had on CD—a baby underwater grasping for a dollar bill—did you look up. A bored teenage cashier was removing security tags at the customer service desk.

You didn't buy anything and never went back to that store.

Secret last memory for paying subscribers: