‘Don’t you remember?’ her daughter asked in an exasperated fashion. ‘That trip in June when we went to the beach and made friends with those people building a fire?’
Grace’s recall was not the same since the bleed but as this memory was so important to Dahlia she decided it was worth delving into that scary, cavernous place they called the hippocampus. She rarely visited it these days due to the destruction that lived there.
When she first left the hospital, she visited it daily, but it caused fatigue, confusion and the occasional outburst too.
There was nothing in there but a bunch of half-formed memories waiting to be picked up and put back together. Nevertheless, when it seemed important, she would dive in and try to extract the relevant pieces.
She entered the mind appearing as she did in her twenties; a fun time of music, travel, romance – at least that’s what she hoped it had been. In contrast, the landscape of her ruined mind adopted the image of a post-apocalyptic movie set with broken down, derelict buildings each containing moments of her life hidden within.
On the streets and pavements were decaying, dead animals that with each touch would help her recall something new but the visions and smell of these rotting corpses was as real to her as you and I are to each other.
There was a small sense of order to this damaged brain; it just took a little figuring out.
‘Beach… beach… beach… fire’, Grace thought to herself trying hard to find one small scrap of that day to hold on to.
She closed her eyes and meditated over these words. Soon she began to feel the heat of the fire, flames flickering around her. Opening her eyes in alarm she saw ashes floating down from the sky; it felt like hot snow and for a moment she lost herself in the feeling.
Dahlia’s face cut through the peace and in the distance her voice was asking more about this day at the beach.
The damaged woman noticed bigger pieces amongst the ash; possibly burnt pages. She tried to catch them but they dissolved between her fingers; she knew there was a missing slice of memory in this ash storm and she grabbed desperately at every fragment that passed her.
Turning, grabbing, grasping and sobbing like she was in an unwinnable version of the Money Booth. Collapsing to the ground she began to give up on this mission when the ash disappeared around her leaving the grey stillness of this world its place.
Ahead burned a small photograph, tinged around the edges. Grace crawled closer to it and in it she saw herself and Dahlia sat with a group of strangers around a fire.
The broken woman began to smile to herself as the scent of the beach, the sound of the waves and excited chatter filled her mind and she finally had parts of this memory to discuss with her daughter at last.
