ONE HELL OF A MEMORY — CHRIS HAVEN
/Once there was a person who remembered everything in every moment of her life, the good and the bad, and that meant that she never forgot a birthday or anniversary or the weather on a particular day. She would get booked on talk shows so people could marvel at how she had mastered time. Her brain was like a computer before computers existed and people were reminded of the miracle of being human.
She was charming on the shows and talked fast and she never forgot a slight. She could call up anything negative anyone had ever said about someone else, or her, and she often did. She couldn’t help it. She remembered every time she said an unkind word or had a petty reaction to someone else’s success, or a petty reaction to someone else’s petty reaction to her own success. Sometimes she would report these on the shows, without the names of course, but that hardly mattered.
As the memories piled up she wondered if anyone on balance was a good person. She couldn’t control the frequency of each memory, and the bad memories seemed to come up more often and outweigh the good ones. Repetition became reality. This gift which had brought her so much notoriety developed into a hell—that was her word for it—until she decided one morning to focus on the tree outside her door.
She chronicled the exact moment she noticed the first bloom in spring and the first change of color in the fall. She made that tree the anchor of every day. She focused on turns and changes, not states of being. She never learned the tree’s genus or species—a good memory does not mean one knows all. If she would have found out the name of the tree, it never would have left her, and she wanted to preserve space in her mind.
So she focused on the greens and browns and yellows and reds, and when she began to see everything as a moment turning to change, she explained to the audiences of the talk shows that our calendars are constructed all wrong. In fact, they’re useless! No day should be separated because: when the one becomes many, it becomes impossible for the many to become one.
These audiences applauded and smiled politely. Still, they asked her what day of the week their birthdays were, what the weather was on the day their goldfish died, and how many days they’ve been alive because she had become theirs to use. They didn’t care about the unclassified tree outside her yard. They wanted her to keep telling them the dates of their lives, the weather that carried them. She would never forget how they wanted to keep being born again and again, numbered into existence, any existence, in whatever mind, and copied throughout however many lives they might be able to rustle their way through before that last drift through unencumbered air, toward their resting spot among the many.
Chris Haven’s prose appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Jellyfish Review, No Contact, Cincinnati Review miCRo, and Kenyon Review. One of his stories is listed in Best American Short Stories 2020, and his debut collection of short stories, Nesting Habits of Flightless Birds, was published by Tailwinds Press in 2020. Bone Seeker, a collection of poems, was published by NYQ Books in March 2021. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
