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Write about someone who doesn’t remember their past — and doesn’t want to.

Posted in Thriller and Suspense on Jul 30, 2021

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✍️ 205 stories

The Violinist

Winner of Contest #75 🏆

The first time Alin walks by the woman in the corner, she barely notices her. There are too many distractions, detractions, voices in her ear — the harried man waving down a taxicab, the aging street vendor hawking his wares — to separate any one sound from another. It’s all noise, and Alin is used to noise. She doesn’t notice her the second time, either. It’s only luck that she ends up doubling back, returning to the bookshop to process an order she’d forgotten. The bustle of rush hour is still going strong when she politely elbows her...

364 likes 107 comments 107
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Intertwined Destinies

Submitted to Contest #75

Trigger: Suicide, violence I wake up on a hard bed, a bright fluorescent light blinding me for a second. As I try to blink the spots out of my vision, I notice that there are many people in the room. And all of them are looking at me. I ignore them and try to sit up. I immediately regret it. A sharp pain runs up my arm and my head feels like it’s about to split. I check my hand, finding an IV attached a vein, dripping liquid into my body. Those people are still looking at me. I recognize my parents standing there, looking...

87 likes 26 comments 26
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Kites

Submitted to Contest #75

He steals things most people won’t notice. Wishes on pennies from fountains. A delicate second here, winks of sleep there. Small things, it’s how he lives. But he’s never needed to steal from you. Because you would gladly drop your unwanted memories into his cap and walk away feeling new. In fact, every time you leave his bench, you never look back.The weather is sticky, with a mild chill — not uncommon for January in Alabama — and you tie your hair into a knot to keep it from dipping into your shoulders. Johannes is where he always is: on h...

61 likes 27 comments 27
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Surprising Recovery

Submitted to Contest #75

Surprising Recovery Esma laid down, flat. Not moving for many seconds. She was in a deep and quiet sleep. But this isn’t your normal kind of sleep. She was sleeping, for what felt like forever. Esma’s mind was blank. She never moved for several days. Everyone would just find her, in her deep and long slumber, and all assuming the worst — death.    She didn’t even know she was surrounded by so many people. All day and every day she was quiet, her eyes tightly closed and slept. She had no breath, her hands, or any body...

57 likes 79 comments 79
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He left me

Submitted to Contest #75

When my father came home from work late at night, I could tell he was drunk straight away, again. I watched as he was knocked off balance and tripped to our front porch. I have had enough of this. Enough of him forgetting the bills, enough of him forgetting my life, enough of forgetting about her. He wasn't always like this, my father. But it all changed when my mother died. He couldn't hold his life together, and he started letting life past him. I needed to get away from my father. He was ruining my life. But I didn't know how to leav...

51 likes 8 comments 8
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The fugue state

Submitted to Contest #75

The air smelled like fire and incense, imbued with something magical and lost to time. Taking lungfuls of it made the edges of my vision blur, and everything seemed right. The tented stalls, the lights, the giggling drunken women who passed me. All of the things that seemed touristy and tacky when I had arrived suddenly seemed perfect. I see a man with one eye, and a woman with a serpent's tongue. But I dismiss them, little glitches in my broken mind. Of course, this would be it, this was the only place I could ever retrieve what I was...

47 likes 8 comments 8
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Page 121

Submitted to Contest #75

Whoever erased my memory has done a damn good job. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, I don't miss it at all. “My name is Tansy Thatcher and I have a good life,” I whisper to myself. I am thirty-seven. I’m head of marketing at an architecture consultancy. I have a cordial but distant relationship with my co-workers—the kind that leads to just enough collaboration to get things done, but not enough to get lost in aimless oversharing. I'm okay with this. I live with my husband Josh and cat Sprüngly in a cozy two-bedroom house in ...

46 likes 22 comments 22
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Sika's Story

Submitted to Contest #75

She adds another braid in her hair for every year she survives. There are four braids missing. She cannot remember. She knows she doesn’t want to. She can tell in the way the others look at her that she doesn’t want to. She lives. She lives and does not think of her story. She does not think of her family or the home she does not know.Only at night can she remember. Only at night can she remember how her family were killed and her home burned.She wakes up screaming for the mother that she does not know.She wakes up screaming for th...

44 likes 27 comments 27
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Letters to the Girl She Was

Submitted to Contest #75

***Trigger warning for drowning*** “We put down in writing what is happening in our minds. Once it’s on the paper we feel better, we feel better. It’s like some kind of clarity when the letter’s done and signed.” The roofs were high and mighty, like the cliffs of a mountain. Below them sat many multicolored houses with their own respective roofs to sit on and watch the glory of the sunrise from outside, but alas, it was late, and no one was out.  No one, that is, except for two young girls sitting on the roof of a house, the one t...

41 likes 34 comments 34
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Miss Chagrin’s home for wayward children.

Submitted to Contest #75

~I was admitted here only a few weeks ago. Miss Chagrin’s home for wayward children. The title could be improved. The attendance could do some work too. I woke up with little to no memory of my life. I mean, I remember classes. I know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. I remember rhetorical writing. If I try hard enough, I can even remember the name of my old school. But I can’t even know my own name. I walked to the cafeteria, my hope quickly dwindling. I didn’t think I’d find someone; I just wanted to find something. And now, ...

40 likes 40 comments 40
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Victim of Drug Lords

Submitted to Contest #75

Disclaimer: Talk of drug abuse. He clutched onto his mother’s arm tightly and staggered out the sliding panels. His mother seemed to be sighing and kept casting her amber eyes downward, as if embarrassed.  “Jason, I’m telling you that it happened.” “Don’t be daft mother, of course, it didn’t,” he said with a short, almost-nervous chuckle. He stole a sideways glance at his mum, only to be met with lowered eyes. Jason’s dirty blond hair whipped around his ears in the wind. It hadn’t been cut in a while and he desperately needed ...

35 likes 18 comments 18
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The Mechanzia

Submitted to Contest #75

It’s been years she hadn’t come home. The only thought her mother suppressed, was that she had a daughter. A daughter who was her life, a daughter whom she lived for, a daughter whom she wishes to see. She never had anything to focus on but the gift god gave her. It was four years after her marriage when she conceived her, an for that reason too, her importance in the family was exceptional. She was enjoying every single day of her life. Her father used to get deputed at many different places. Being a police officer it was his duty to obey ...

34 likes 40 comments 40
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walking sideways

Submitted to Contest #75

Trigger warning - talk of murder and implied abuse. My lawyer advised – no, demanded, that I take a reprieve from the endless parade of reporters and journalists and well-intentioned acquaintances. That I allow myself some space to process what was about to come. A storm that had every intention to blow me over if I let it.   I was overwhelmed. Weighed down by the burden of proof that lies somewhere within me. I cannot recall the horrors they need me to remember, though I’ve tried and tried. Dissociative am...

33 likes 8 comments 8
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All the Dark Shadows

A J

Submitted to Contest #75

Memories are hunting horns, Whose sound dies on winds. And we forget because we must, And not because we will. -Guillaume Apollinaire and Matthew Arnold ... I was pulled into a deep abyss as darkness engulfed me. And I just kept falling and falling. Pulled away from reality. The red-eyed creatures with the black fangs kept chasing after me. Their bony and bloodied fingers with long, witch-like nails kept trying to grab my limbs. Their monstrous cackles and ghastly sounds echoing and tormenting me. And they wouldn't stop. Not until I comp...

32 likes 10 comments 10
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A woman called Mom

Submitted to Contest #75

Trigger warning: violence, self harm, mental illness.   My aunt Beth withdrew the contents of the package we received from mukobeko maximum security prison a few days earlier.  Right after the declaration of a mass execution of death row inmates following the discovery of one hundred and fifty five heads of teenage boys in the basement of a prominent business man's farm house just on the outskirts of Lusaka.  "timro daka" an act of suspected ritual killings. Ritual killings:( the act of mutilating body...

28 likes 3 comments 3
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