Author’s Note
I woke at 3 AM with a phrase lodged in my throat: “I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void.” I wrote it down. Went back to sleep. The next morning, it was still there.
Weeks later, I asked a colleague about Syria. He stared at me. Couldn’t remember. Not the details—the entire conflict. Seven years of atrocities, vanished. We’d moved on. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Each one replacing the last like channels changing.
This terrified me more than the violence itself: our collective agreement to forget. The way we erase mass suffering because carrying it is too heavy. But our bodies, our bones, remember. They hold what our minds refuse.
This story asks:
What if that erasure was literal?
What if we woke up in a world where yesterday was gone but our hands still knew how to grieve?
Would we choose to remember?
Should we?
I still don’t know the answer.
Chapter One: Scar Tissue
When fingers find evidence the mind refuses
The woman touches her face every morning.
Not to check for wrinkles or sleep marks.
She doesn’t know why she does it. Her fingers move across cheekbones, trace jawline, press into the soft flesh beneath her eyes. Each time, a jolt—this is mine. Then it passes.
But today, something else. Her thumb catches on a scar. Small. Across her left eyebrow. She stands at the mirror. Stares.
The scar has always been there—she knows this the way she knows how to breathe.
But today her body responds. A tightness in her shoulders. Her hands forming fists without permission.
She forces them open. Looks away from the mirror.
The feeling doesn’t leave.
She dresses. The clothes feel neither familiar nor strange. Just cloth against skin. But her hands hesitate at a blue shirt, then reach for gray instead. Why gray? She doesn’t know. But her body insists.
Outside, the street smells of burnt oil and wet stone.
A man is crying on the corner, same as every morning, or maybe different mornings, or maybe this is the first time.
Others walk past without stopping. Not cruelty—they’ve already forgotten why he’s crying. He might have too, but his body hasn’t caught up. Salt still sliding down his face, chest still heaving.
She passes him. Keeps walking. But her throat constricts. Why? The question itself is unusual. Most people don’t ask why anymore. Why requires causation. Causation requires memory.
The cafeteria is where it always is. The burnt oil smell stronger here, mixing with something sweet underneath. Coffee, maybe. The woman behind the counter has kind eyes. Or maybe they’re not kind. But they’re familiar in a way that makes the woman’s chest hurt.
“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” the woman says, handing over a cup.
“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void.”
The words come automatically, like breathing. She’s said them before. Everyone has. The mantra that means everything and nothing.
The liquid scalds her tongue. Good. Pain is the only thing that stays. But when she sets the cup down, her hand is shaking. She stares at it. Commands it to stop. It doesn’t stop.
She drinks standing up. Watches people move through their routines. A man orders the same thing three times, forgetting he already has a cup. The counter woman gives him all three cups without comment. He’ll figure it out or he won’t.
But the woman notices something. A man at the far table, his hands moving. Repetitive. Purposeful. Tying invisible knots in the air. His face blank but his fingers committed. Over and under. Pull tight. Again. Over and under. Pull tight.
Her shoulders tighten more. She leaves her cup half-finished. Steps outside. The burnt oil smell clings to her tongue, mixing with the coffee’s bitterness. The combination tastes like… like something. Someone.
Her feet stop. Turn left instead of right. She wasn’t planning to go left. But her body insists.
Two blocks down, she realizes she’s going somewhere specific. Her stride has purpose. Not wandering. Seeking.
This should terrify her. It doesn’t. The feeling in her shoulders has spread to her ribs, her hips, her hands. Her whole body remembering something her mind refuses to hold.
She touches the scar again. Presses hard enough to hurt.
Someone hit her here. She knows it now. Someone she let close enough to hit her. Someone whose name her hands want to spell out even though her mouth can’t form the sounds.
The street narrows.
Buildings press closer.
She passes a crater—massive, taking up half the street. Buildings around it are melted at the edges, stone flowing like candle wax before it froze.
People walk around it without comment. It’s always been there. Will always be there. Evidence of the war no one remembers in the country no one can name.
And there—ahead—she sees people gathering at a wall.
Something is happening. Her body knew before she did.
She walks faster. The burnt oil smell following her. Or maybe it’s coming from her. From her clothes. From her skin.
From the memory of someone who wore it like cologne.
Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh, everyone.