When No One is Left to Remember

Beatrice does not celebrate Halloween. It’s a wicked holiday, for one, and what anyone finds satisfying about scaring themselves and each other, she cannot imagine. 

Ridiculous, the whole affair.

Not that Beatrice is judgmental. Of course not.

But surely no rational person would ever spend money on decorating their house to look infested with spiders?

Surely we have some dignity?

And the doorbells — those are the worst part. 

Somehow, it has become socially acceptable to let children run around harassing people in their homes at ungodly hours of the night. As if no one has anything better to do than supply limitless amounts of chocolate.

It must be nice to enjoy so much leisure, Beatrice thinks.

She’s filling in a scrapbook, something that keeps her tremendously busy. Hers is a real scrapbook, you must understand — not one of those modern photo-copy ones you order online. Those are abominations. Their pictures get printed right on the page and bound together by machines, as if people are too lazy to pick up a pair of scissors. Beatrice purses her lips at the thought. The day humanity is too lazy to scrapbook is the day she will truly know there is no hope left for the world.

The photos sprawled out before her are the old kind — edges worn, colors faded. A few are blurred with fingerprints that used to belong to someone else. She smooths them with care, her hands hovering a moment longer than necessary. No one else would bother with this, she thinks, but that’s precisely why she has to — she alone knows what’s worth saving. 

The doorbell rings again. 

Beatrice ignores it.

She bought the scrapbook for Ned as an anniversary present. Forty-one years they’ve been married. Its cover reads, Our Story, and she is determined to make it as perfect as their story has been. 

Someone presses the doorbell in rapid-fire bursts. Ding ding ding ding ding.

Beatrice is assorting pictures into rows by date from a little cardboard box she keeps in the back of her and Ned’s closet. One row has them as children, another when he began courting her, another when they were engaged, and continuing on and on throughout their marriage. She even has the pictures he sent from his travels: him and his army buddies, their camp, the letters he’d written under the glow of a flashlight beam in a tent. Anything sounds romantic when it's been written under the glow of a flashlight beam in a tent, Beatrice thinks. It’s the effort of it all. Like scrapbooking in a real scrapbook when you could order an abomination online.

Since the doorbell has failed her assailants thus far, the children outside resort to knocking.

She picks up an old grainy photo of Ned at the lake. He holds up a fishing rod with no fish to be found. On the back, in blue ink, a younger Beatrice has written, “Third time’s the charm?” Ned’s always saying that. Her optimistic husband. He’s terrible at fishing, and this photo is from one of the many times he insisted he was going to catch something big. He has a remarkable ability to laugh at himself, her Ned. More men could do with that skill.

A slam at the window causes Beatrice to jump. Her knee knocks into the coffee table and several photos flutter to the ground.

“No one’s home!” She shouts.

A ghost pops its head up through her window. Small human hands are splayed on the glass, leaving fingerprint smudges that make Beatrice incensed. 

“Yes you are! I see your light on!” They pause. “And I can hear you!”

Feeling personally victimized, Beatrice sets down her glue stick and stands up, opens the door in what cannot be called a wholly cheerful manner, and, quite harshly, says, “Hasn’t anyone taught you how to read?”

The ghost on her doorstep looks surprised. It’s a young boy wearing a bedsheet, eye holes cut out to make a face. 

“What?” he sputters.

Beatrice points to the sign next to her door that says, in no uncertain terms, No candy here.

“Oh.” The ghost laughs. “I’m not here for candy! I already have plenty of that, see?” He then presents Beatrice with a plastic jack o’lantern full of high cholesterol.

“Then what are you harassing me for?” She tries to ask this in as polite a manner as she can, but it’s possible it doesn’t come across as very polite at all.

The little ghost glances side to side, then whispers, “I need a place to hide.”

“Aha.” Beatrice looks as though he’s just told her he has a gun. “So you’re a hoodlum, are you?”

“A what?”

“Take your threats somewhere else! Some of us have important matters to attend to!”

“But—”

She slams the door closed.

The knocking starts up again almost immediately. Harder this time. Beatrice turns down the volume on her hearing aids and walks back to her couch. Ned always insisted that children were God’s gift to the world, but Beatrice has her doubts. The only children she‘s ever been able to tolerate were over thirty and knew how to keep their elbows off the table, and those were generally referred to as adults. 

She tucks a newspaper clipping of a local music event into the corner of one page with a paperclip; runs her finger tenderly over Ned’s smiling face in the crowd.

A small gasp from behind her. “Is that a scrapbook?”

Beatrice jolts, the scrapbook slipping from her hands and tumbling to the floor. It can’t be good for her blood pressure, startling like this.  

The little ghost boy steps back, eyes wide. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you! “

Beatrice is still too horrified by the torn letter to process the fact that somehow this boy has broken into her home without breaking any locks or windows or homes in the process.  

“Look what you did!” she cries.

The boy shrinks into himself a little. “Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry!” Beatrice shouts, quite angrily. 

She drops to her knees and begins flipping through the scrapbook to make sure it is alright. A couple of pages are bent. One of Ned’s army letters has ripped down the middle. She lets out a choked breath.

“Miss?” says the ghost nervously, head swiveling as Beatrice runs around the house looking for tape. “I really didn’t mean to break your note, and I know you’re mad at me… but… could I stay here tonight? Please?”

She locates the tape and hurries back. “Absolutely not!”

“But I don’t have anywhere else to go!” the ghost insists.

“Well, you don’t have here either.” She picks up the torn letter and scrapbook and cradles them to her chest. “Go on. Get!”

The ghost, however, doesn’t leave. The bedsheet over his face shifts to suggest he’s opening and closing his mouth in search of the proper words to express himself. “I think... I’m supposed to be here tonight.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“You can see me,” the ghost says, without elaboration. 

Beatrice points at the door. “Young man, if you don’t leave my house right this instant, I will be forced to call the police.”

The ghost only crosses his arms over his chest, looking for the first time like he doesn’t like Beatrice very much. He plops on the floor in a cross-legged position and glares up at her. “You’re welcome to try.”

Beatrice decides that he is strikingly rude. 

She does call the police, and to her astonishment, they look right at the boy and tell her he isn’t there. 

Is this some sort of joke? A prank by the local children? But surely the police wouldn’t be roped into such nonsense? 

And yet:

“Ma’am, please, it’s late,” says the tired cop, his hat held to his chest. “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking tonight?”

This is so insulting she slams the door in his face. 

The ghost is eating his candy on the floor. He devours the stuff in single bites, hardly bothering to chew. “I told you,” he says between bites.

This behavior appalls Beatrice, who's lost any hope of regaining her solitude. She crosses the room and takes the jack-o’lantern out of his hands. 

“Hey!”

“My dear boy, we’re not at war. Hasn’t anyone taught you how not to eat like a pig? Who raised you?”

At this, the ghost goes quiet. His small hands settle in his lap, unnervingly still. Beatrice recalls with some discomfort what he’s said about having nowhere to go.

“Oh,” she says. “I suppose you don’t have a family, is that it?”

The ghost boy looks down, and for a moment she swears he’s faded, like a thin mist caught in candlelight. “I… I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “They might be gone. Or maybe they just don’t remember me.”

She wants to ask how a family could simply “forget” a child, but instead, she clears her throat and says, “Well. Sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened.” A strange kind of chill fills the room, and she pulls her sweater a bit tighter, glancing at the thermostat like it’s betrayed her. “What is your name, anyway?” 

“My friends called me Fox.”

“That’s not a name,” she informs him.

“Well, it’s what everyone calls me. You know, ‘cause my hair is red.”

“What terrible friends you have, then.” Surely no one deserves to be reduced to an animal, however rude they are? But the boy only laughs. 

“They aren’t teasing me. It’s, like, a nickname.”

Beatrice isn’t sure what the word ‘like’ is supposed to mean in this context. “Fox? A nickname? For what?”

“For me!” 

Beatrice humphs — not a sigh, because she isn’t judging — but a sharp exhalation of breath. It doesn’t indicate annoyance at all. “Well, Fox. If you’re going to overstay your welcome, then you should know I don’t entertain Halloween costumes.”

After a brief moment, the ghost pulls off the sheet from his head. An ordinary boy materializes beneath. His hair – ginger, as stated previously – is rather long. Like a girl’s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not at all. Beatrice has no prejudices about such things. She merely notes that it’s… modern. He’s wearing a white shirt and pants, to blend in under the costume. His complexion is of the type that freckles in the summer. 

Beatrice nods once. “Very good. It’s not suitable for young men to run around in bedsheets.”

Fox looks confused. “What if I don’t want to be a suitable young man?”

“Then you will have a very hard time ever finding a wife.”

Fox scrunches up his nose. Then he laughs. “You’re funny.”

“I’m nothing of the sort.” 

She turns sharply on her heel and takes her seat on the couch. They sit in silence for a while, Beatrice hunched over her scrapbook, Fox gazing at her hands as she flips through old photographs. She doesn’t say anything to him—doesn’t even look at him—but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits there, still and watchful, like he’s waiting for something. Finally, Beatrice sighs and shuts the book. 

“Well?” she says, her tone sharp, “Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re doing here? A boy your age ought to be with his friends, not pestering some old woman. It’s really rather uncouth, you know.”

The boy’s eyes flicker, and for the first time, she notices how hollow they look. He stares down at his small, pale hands, rubbing his thumb over his knuckles, like his next words need coaxing in order to come to the surface.

“I don’t…have friends,” he murmurs, so quietly she has to lean forward to hear. “Not anymore.”

Beatrice blinks, taken aback by the heavy ache in his voice. “No family and no friends? Well. That’s a sorry state of affairs.” She pauses, seeing the sadness in his eyes, and sighs. “Young man, if I may speak frankly, you’re being rather dramatic. Surely there’s someone who cares about you.”

The boy shakes his head. “If there is, I don’t remember them,” he murmurs. “I don’t remember where I came from, or who I’m supposed to be. I don’t even know how long I’ve been…” his voice trails off, and he swallows hard. “It’s like I’ve been forgotten. Like no one remembers who I am, or even that I am. Sometimes I get scared that I’ve just slipped from everyone’s memory. Even my own. Like I never mattered. Like I was never here.”

Beatrice notes the use of past tense but doesn’t remark on it. She shifts in her seat. The shadows on Fox’s face seem sharper now, his skin almost translucent in the dim light of her living room.

“But tonight,” he continues, looking up at her, “tonight you can see me.”

There’s a long, still pause. Beatrice can feel the chill of the room settling in her bones. She doesn’t know what to say, but something inside her stirs, and she looks down at her scrapbook.

“Is that why you’re here?” 

Fox nods. “Halloween is the only night I can reach out to someone. Every year, I try to find a person who can still see me, just to know I haven’t faded completely. It’s like… I just know who to go to. But it gets harder each time.” He pauses, then adds, almost shyly, “This year, I found you.”

Beatrice swallows, feeling the weight of his words press against her, heavy and cold. But there’s a kinship in the feeling, too, because she knows this fear: the terror of being erased, of having no one to remember you.

“My husband, Ned, was the only one who really knew me.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the scrapbook when she says it. “We had a beautiful story, Fox. A beautiful life. But now it’s just me. We never had children, so there’s no one to remember any of it when I’m gone.”

Fox shuffles on hands and knees to sit behind her on the floor, peaking over the edge of the coffee table to see the pictures splayed out in rows. He studies each photo for a very long time, as if he’s trying to memorize them. “You look happy,” he says.

Beatrice gives a faint smile, tracing the outline of Ned’s face with her fingertip. “We were. Very happy.”

He asks her questions then about happiness and memories, and she answers. He points to photos, and she starts to tell their stories: her wedding, the tiny hotel she and Ned lived in when they had no money for a house, the road trips they took in that old blue sedan Ned insisted on repairing himself. One by one, she shows him the slightly off-kilter snapshots of her life. They’re full of imperfections, unpolished and spontaneous, but genuine, full of love — just like Ned. 

As she speaks, she feels her fear and loneliness soften, bit by bit. Here she is, an old widower on Halloween — a wicked holiday, a ridiculous affair — sharing her memories with someone who will remember them, even if only for tonight.

Fox listens intently, his gaze moving from her face to each photograph, holding onto every word like precious things. He nods now and then, a faint smile appearing, her words anchoring him to something more tangible than any scrapbook.

They sit like that, close together, turning each page into a testament to a life lived and a love remembered, until the boy looks up at her, his small face soft with gratitude. Beatrice reaches out to squeeze his shoulder, and for a moment, she wonders if her hand might pass right through him. But no—he’s there, faint and cold beneath her palm, but real enough.

As dawn creeps through the curtains, Fox stands, his figure growing faint in the morning light. Beatrice feels a sudden ache, realizing how much she doesn’t want him to leave. She opens her mouth, uncertain what she’s even about to say, but he smiles gently, as if he understands.

“Thank you,” he whispers, his voice so distant it barely stirs the air. “For seeing me.”

Beatrice huffs. “Seeing you?” She gives him a long look. “You didn’t exactly make it easy for me to ignore you.”

Fox laughs, and it’s with that buoyant sound that he fades, leaving only the quiet of morning behind.

Beatrice’s eyes sting. She sits alone in the silence. She looks down at her scrapbook, its pages heavy with the years she’s tried so hard to preserve, and in a gentle moment of clarity, she decides that there will be no more fussing over perfect arrangements, no more polishing what’s already been lived. She has no proof that Fox existed, no photographs to preserve his memory like she has for Ned, and slowly over time, the details will fade, as all things do. 

But whether anyone else remembers them or not, these moments mattered — not because they’re preserved or witnessed, but because they happened.

They will always have happened.

Even when no one is left to remember.