Stephen Snyder

Though I’ve tried, I’ve found no way to fill in the voids left by the Memory Police.

“Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here,” my mother used to tell me when I was still a child. “Transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones…wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.

Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.”

“Mama, why do you remember all the things that have been disappeared? Why can you still smell the ‘perfume’ that everyone else has forgotten?”

Identifying those wild creatures was his one true gift.

The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. When I opened my eyes, I could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The sign of a disappearance. Still wrapped in my blanket, I looked carefully around the room. The cosmetics on my dressing table, the paper clips and notes scattered on my desk, the lace of the curtains, the record shelf—it could be anything. It took patience and concentration to figure out what was gone.

realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word “bird”—everything.

The room had changed completely. The traces of my father’s presence, which I had done my best to preserve, had vanished, replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled. I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth.

There aren’t many people who can sit all day at a desk and make up such complicated things right out of their head. If your parents were here to see you, they would be so proud.”

If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever