Someone must remeber

I stared intensely into the certain eyes of Samantha Smith. The last name Smith was ironic because usually such a common last name represented a larger group of people yet here she was, the only person from the incident who wanted to remember.

As was customary I asked her again “Are you sure?” In response she nodded her head. “Are you sure you want to remember this incident?” I asked again. I maintained a monotone voice and a straight face, for my line of work it was vital that I made no judgement to the decisions made either good or bad.

“It wasn’t an incident, it was murder” she said boldly. The word murder invited small gasps from the group of seven sitting in the waiting room. She turned to them and spoke even louder, “what we did was murder.”

They all either looked down to their feet or into a magazine pretending not to have heard her. I suppose they felt her words only applied to them if they made a response, like the ‘we’ was only we if they included themselves.

“You make it easy, you know?” she said in a softer voice now addressing me. I didn’t cower from her stare. “It’s easy to just decide to forget. To move on and never look back. But for those four people, for them someone must remember, someone has to. I may be the only one but I must remember.”

“Okay then Mrs Smith, you will be escorted out of the building, we trust that you will still abide to the confidentiality agreement you signed upon entering the building and have a good day.”

No one expected her to but it was customary to say.

I watched her leave the dimply lit room to be escorted back to her regular life with all the knowledge of the horror she had committed.

As soon as her thin figure was out of sight I turned by head to the ten other people who felt differently to her. They did not feel the need to remember, instead they would do what so many did they would forget.

I confidently marched up to the ten took a quick register then called the first man Armstrong Steven into my office.

He walked in shyly with his eyes focused on the floor and sunk his well-fed body into my chair before I even had a chance to offer it to him.

“I find that there is really no need for formalities here so let us begin. What is your full name”

“Steven Armstrong”

“So Milton is not your middle name?” I inquired already knowing the answer to my question. He shyly confirmed that it was.

“Born on the twenty-seventh of February in nineteen ninety three”

“Yes. I’ve never done this before, how exactly does this new life thing work” he asked keeping his eyes down with slight worry in his voice.

“First I take down a few details about you Mr Armstrong, your name, age, next of kin etcetera. Then I will take you down to collection chamber 7 where we will connect you to a machine. You will tell me one last time your version of what happened and as you speak the memory will be extracted from your brain. The second you finish your account the memory will be completely gone from your mind. We will store it on a flash drive with the accounts of the other ten people involved-”

“Don’t you mean eleven?”

“No, I mean ten”

“Once all the memories have been collected we will terminate them. I will explain the next part of the process after memory extraction.”

Soon after I walked Mr Armstrong to chamber 7 where he was strapped the extraction machine.

“A few weeks ago” he began.

“When?” I asked, our machines were the best of the best, and only of their kind but it was custom that we tested them.

“Well………um…………….I-”

“It’s alright, please continue” Just as I had expected, the machine was working fine.

“Eleven of us we got together. Prior to then I didn’t even know those guys, I just knew Captain Preston. We met at a Navy Academy a while back and he called me out of the blue.” Steven Armstrong spoke slowly and cautiously as though anything he said might still be used against him.

“Remember Mr Armstrong if you want to forget it you must say it, every detail of it. Nothing you say will ever be repeated, okay.” I reminded.

“Well I knew Mrs Smith too, I live about five minutes from her house or she lives five minutes from mine, we saw each other in the grocery store sometimes.”

“Good you said you lived how many minutes away from Mrs Carrington?”

“Um………..about” he said dragging the words while snapping his fingers as though that would help him remember.

“Never mind, please continue.”

“We all knew Captain Preston, but to each other we were all strangers. The only thing we did have in common was that we had all at one point or another worked in law enforcement.”

Steven Armstrong went on to explain through tears that they had all thought terrorists were in the church.

“He said they were terrorists, that’s what he said that’s what he said” Steven cried. “We fired into that church because we thought they were terrorists, we didn’t know, we didn’t know” he sobbed. “There were four people in that mosque, praying. I’m sorry I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

Now his once white face was red and hot tears were racing down it. He made no attempt to whip them off, he just kept sobbing.

“What didn’t you know?” I asked.

Then man then looked up at me in shock. He whipped his tears and quickly regained his composure even finding himself comical. He sat up and laughed. He laughed at himself.

“I don’t remember.” Just like that, he would never ever remember. He would now be given a new life, one where the horror he had committed meant nothing to him. One where he did not have to live with it, he did not have to remember.

But Samantha Smith would not be the only one to remember

Mohamed Abdul

Saadiyah Abdella

Amir Baten

Parni Rad  

I would remember.