Mamou Memories

Sarah Chen had left Los Angeles three days ago with a trunk full of equipment and a pitch that promised PBS something authentic. She was planning to create a documentary on the Courir de Mardi Gras, or the "run" of Mardi Gras. Her research told her it was the original Mardi Gras; a medieval French tradition preserved in rural Louisiana like a fossil in amber. Masked riders on horseback racing from farm to farm, begging for ingredients to make a communal gumbo. It was exactly the kind of cultural moment that could revive her stalling career.

Her last documentary had barely aired before being pulled from the schedule, a sanitized piece about Portland food carts that her producer called "lifeless." She needed this film, needed to prove she could still capture something real.

The house sat on the edge of Mamou, its yard cluttered with the debris from years of rural living. Sarah had arrived on Sunday, a day early, wanting to get the local context of the event from long-time resident Céleste Guidry's before her crew arrived on Monday. The old woman opened the door before Sarah could knock, looking her up and down with an expression that might have been amusement.

"You are the California girl," Céleste said. It wasn't a question.

Sarah settled into a chair across from Céleste, her notebook open, pen ready. "Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Mrs. Guidry. I wanted to understand the history of the Courir before we start documenting it Tuesday."

"History," Céleste said, waving a dismissive hand. "You want to know history, read a book. You want to understand Courir, you got to run it."

"I'm really here to document, to observe," Sarah said, maintaining her professional distance. "Can you tell me about your family's connection to the tradition?"

Céleste leaned forward. "My husband, he ran for fifty-two years. His papa before him. The mask carries all that. You can't understand from outside, filming like some tourist."

"I appreciate that, but I need to maintain objectivity."

"Objectivity." Céleste made a sound that might have been a laugh. She went to a closet and emerged with a mask that made Sarah's breath catch. It was beautiful in its grotesqueness, chicken wire and paint and horsehair, with eyes that seemed to follow her across the room.

"This was my husband's," Céleste said. "His father's before. My grandson don't run no more. You use it. Get your inside view."

"I couldn't. This is a family heirloom."

"It's a mask. Meant to be worn." Céleste thrust it toward her, then gripped Sarah's wrist hard. "But you listen. You wear it during the Courir, that's fine. But you take it off before sunset. You understand? The masks got memory. Nighttime is different. Night belongs to the dead, and the mask don't know the difference between who's wearing it and who wore it before."

Sarah felt a chill that had nothing to do with February weather. "I understand."

"Do you?" Céleste released her grip. "Well. You will or you won't."

******

Fat Tuesday arrived cold and bright. Sarah's small crew moved through the crowd with practiced invisibility while she conducted interviews, captured B-roll, felt the familiar comfort of being behind the camera.

Everyone was so festive in their masks and costumes. Music droned in the background while riders sported about on their horses. She kept thinking about the mask given to her and felt drawn to it. At eleven, the sunlight was perfect, and she gave in. She lifted the mask and settled it over her face.

The world exploded.

She was the horse being ridden, muscles bunching and releasing. She was the accordion player, fingers flying across worn buttons. She was the child at the roadside, eyes wide with terror and delight. She was the old man at the fence, remembering when his knees would have let him run.

She was everyone and everywhere, not sequentially but simultaneously, time collapsing into a single eternal moment. The boundaries of Sarah Chen dissolved; there was only the Courir, only the run, only the ancient pattern playing out as it had for centuries.

She saw through the mask and the mask saw through her and there was no difference. Somewhere far away, a small part of her registered terror. This wasn't observation. This was something else entirely. Her senses were overloaded as the world seemed to go dark.

******

Sarah woke to the sound of equipment being packed. She was sitting against a pickup truck, the mask in her lap, the sun low and orange.

Derek, her cameraman, squatted beside her. "Hey. You, okay? You've been strange all day."

"All day?" Her mouth was dry. "What time is it?"

"Almost six. You seriously don't remember?"

Sarah looked at the mask. Her hands were shaking. "I put it on at eleven."

"Yeah, and then you got like fifty shots. Check your camera."

The footage showed her conducting interviews in French, a language she'd never studied. She looked fevered, her eyes too bright. There was something wrong with her smile.

"I don't remember any of this."

"You want to go to the hospital? You've been really intense." Derek's hand hovered near her shoulder. "Amanda thought maybe you got into the local’s home brew."

Sarah pulled up her shot log. Seven hours of footage. Three full cards. "I need to return this mask."

******

She walked to Céleste's house on legs that felt disconnected from her body. A woman in her fifties answered, her face marked by recent crying.

"I'm looking for Mrs. Céleste Guidry."

The woman's face crumpled. "Mama passed two days ago."

The mask grew heavier in Sarah's hands. "That's not possible. I saw her Sunday."

"Maman's been in hospice for two weeks. She couldn't have visitors." The woman's eyes dropped to the mask and widened. "That's Papa's mask. Where did you get that?"

"She gave it to me. Mrs. Céleste. On Sunday."

"That mask has been in the family closet since my father died in 2003." The woman's expression shifted to something harder. "Who are you, and why are you lying about my mother?"

Sarah thrust the mask forward. "Please. I don't understand what's happening. Just take it."

The woman snatched it. "Get off my property before I call the sheriff."

The door slammed. The deadbolt slid home with a sound like finality.

******

That night Sarah didn't sleep. She sat in her motel room, scrubbing through footage frame by frame. The interviews she didn't remember were in high definition. She watched herself laughing with riders, adjusting children's masks, dancing while accordion music played.

In one clip's background, she could see herself in multiple places simultaneously: by the gumbo pot, on horseback in the distance, and standing perfectly still at the frame's edge. She tried to think of rational causes: drugs, dissociation, corrupted footage. Even how people all resembled each other in crowds.

But then there was the audio.

Sarah put on headphones and listened to the raw files. In several clips, there were two voices speaking: hers, younger and uncertain, and another voice, older and raspier in French. She ran the files through translation software to try and understand the French parts.

There were conversations about weather, about making a roux for gumbo, about a husband dead twenty years. The voice called her "cher," said things like "you'll understand when you've run as many years as me."

She was interrupted by the sound of her cellphone ringing and noticed it was 2 AM. It was Derek who apparently was also working late on the footage. "I found something weird. There's footage of the old lady's funeral in your files, and you're there in full Courir costume."

"I wasn't there."

"Check the metadata. That's your camera. GPS tag says St. Joseph Cemetery, 3 PM yesterday."

Sarah told Derek she would call him back and pulled up her phone's location history. At 3 PM yesterday, she'd been at St. Joseph Cemetery for forty-three minutes. She had to investigate this further.

She drove there in the dark. The graves were old, some inscriptions in French. Céleste's was easy to find; the dirt was still fresh. Someone had placed the mask on the headstone.

There was a note beneath it, weighed down with a rock. The paper was yellow with age, but the handwriting looked exactly like hers.

"Merci pour le gumbo. C'était bon de courir encore. Au revoir, cher."

Thank you for the gumbo. It was good to run again. Goodbye, dear.

Sarah picked up the mask with shaking hands and carried it back to her car.

******

Three months later, Sarah sat at her editing desk in her apartment. The rough cut playing on three monitors. PBS was genuinely excited; they were talking about a fall premiere. Her career was back on track. The documentary was better than anything she'd done before, with an intimacy and authenticity that made previous work seem shallow.

The mask hung on the wall behind her, reflecting in her monitors. She'd kept it and no one had come looking for or asked about it.

Since arriving home, the dreams had started. Conversations in Cajun French, her voice and another's, discussing the proper dark of a roux or the best place to trap crawfish. She'd made gumbo three times, never measuring, never questioning, her hands moving with practiced certainty. In bathroom mirrors, her reflection took too long to catch up, like it was waiting for permission.

The explanations lined up easily enough: trauma response, suggestion, linguistic absorption from the lost day. Memory could be rewritten; reality was always negotiable.

But there were mornings when she woke with knowledge that had no source. It was raining in Mamou. The crawfish were late this season. Someone named Thérèse had died peacefully in her sleep. Information arriving unbidden, specific and useless, like she was tuned to a radio station that shouldn't reach California.

And once, scrolling through Louisiana news, she'd found an obituary for Mamou resident Paul Thibodeaux, dead at eighty-seven, who'd run the Courir for sixty-three years. The article mentioned he'd died in his sleep the same Tuesday Sarah had put on the mask. It mentioned his widow had woken to find muddy boot prints beside the bed, as if he'd gotten up for one last run.

Now as Sarah looked at the footage of Céleste's funeral. It appeared twice in her files: once with her standing at the edge in costume, once without her at all. Same cemetery, same timestamp, same camera serial number. Two versions of the same event, both apparently real.

The final cut was due the next day. Her cursor hovered over the footage of herself at the funeral, the delete key warm beneath her finger. She could remove it, erase the evidence, let the documentary tell a cleaner story. Or she could leave it in, trust viewers to draw their own conclusions.

In the monitor's reflection, the mask seemed to shift slightly, though it hung perfectly still. Sarah thought of Céleste, of her warning, of the note that might have been in her own handwriting. She thought of all the people who'd worn this mask over the decades, and where they might have gone when they took it off.

The cursor blinked. Outside her window, Los Angeles went about its business, solid and rational and real. Inside, the mask watched and waited, patient as only the dead could be.

Sarah's finger hovered over the delete key. She could feel the weight of the decision, the way it would shape not just the documentary but her understanding of what had happened in Mamou. One keystroke would erase the anomaly, let her return to the comfortable world of rational explanations. Another would preserve it, commit the mystery to film, make it permanent.

Her finger descended.

But whether it touched delete or escape, whether it erased the evidence or preserved the mystery, even Sarah couldn't say for certain. The cursor blinked once, twice, and the decision was made or unmade, collapsed into quantum uncertainty, existing in both states until someone else watched the final cut and forced reality into one shape or another.

The mask hung silently on the wall, keeping its secrets, waiting for the next person willing to put it on.