Recollection Day

Intro

Seven days after Recollection Day. President Don Wills.

He’s a tall man in his fifties. Medium build with a beard. He isn’t handsome, but he isn’t ugly. He just is. He wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, but he did a have a sense of gravitas around him when he spoke. The kind that makes you feel like maybe, just maybe, he could hold the country together while it tries to come apart at the seams.

He sits behind the desk in the Oval Office, hands clasped and face serious. This was the first official address since it had happened.

Recollection Day.

When every living soul in the world woke up with a past life memory.

When the whole world lost it’s collective mind.

He was trying to put out the fire. Good thing, too. Because it was raging and threatening to burn society to the ground.

Blue eyes stare out of his serious face. He doesn’t talk immediately, but takes a moment to breathe and exhale before he speaks.

“My fellow Americans. Seven days ago, the world changed. Not with a bomb. Not with an election. Not with war or disease or anything we could’ve prepared for. It changed in our sleep. And we woke up… remembering.” He takes another breath. Not rushing his words or delivery. Letting the moment land, letting you know he was there. He starts to speak again.

“If you’re scared—you’re not alone. If you’re confused—you’re not alone. If you’ve been walking around with someone else’s life in your head, trying to work, trying to hold your family together, trying to make sense of the impossible—You are not alone.”

“Now I know there’s been talk. Conspiracy theories. Panic. Grief. And for some, joy.

Here’s the truth. The Recollection is real. We don’t understand how. We don’t know why it happened. But it did. And we’re living in the aftermath.

And we will not fall apart.

Because that’s what this country does when the unthinkable hits—we grit our teeth, we hold on, and we find a way forward together.” His hands come together, fingers interlacing.

“I’ve spoken with the best minds in science, psychology, theology. No one has answers. Not yet. But they’re looking. In the meantime, I want to speak plainly. Because you deserve plain speak. Not political theatre.” He takes a breath again, eyes unfocusing a little as he remembers.

“I remember a life, too. I remember being a man named Elias Brand. A farmer in Ohio in the year 1872. I buried two children. I never left the county I was born in. But I died with a good woman’s hand in mine. And I carried peace into the dark.

That’s what I saw. That’s what came for me.

And I won’t pretend I wasn’t shaken. I won’t pretend it didn’t make me cry when I woke up and realized I’d never see my past children again. I loved them so very much.

But I tell you this now: That memory didn’t break me. It reminded me of what matters.

Not just in this life—but in every life.

Kindness. Dignity. Courage.

These are not just values of a nation. These are the things that follow us through the veil.

So I tell you—if you must grieve, grieve.

If you must scream, scream.

But when the dust settles, when the sun comes up tomorrow—and it will come up tomorrow.

Do not let go of each other.

Do not weaponize your past.

Do not kill because of what was.

Do not abandon your future because of a memory.

Hold your children. Check on your neighbors.

And if someone remembers being someone else—listen to them. Even if it makes no sense. Even if it scares you.

In this life. We are Americans.

We’re not strangers to reinvention.

And we are not strangers to each other—no matter what lives we’ve lived before.

This is our moment to prove that we’re not just a nation of individuals. We’re a people. A story. A family. Woven through time and tragedy.

So let’s write the next chapter together.

Thank you.

And may God guide us through the strange days ahead.”

Chapter 1

One month after Recollection Day.

She checks her makeup again with the camera on her phone. Wants to look perfect for this. She’s young. Beautiful. She’d hardly ever worn this much makeup. Never cared to. But today had to be perfect. He deserved to see her at her best. She was thirty two but felt newly born. Like a new person.

Or maybe an old one.

She’d always felt empty in this life. A hollow spot in the center of her she could never fill.

Now? She felt whole.

They’d found each other again. Against all odds, they’d found each other.

She hears shoes crunching through the unusually late season snow before she sees him come around the curve in the path. His face was tight. His steps slowed when he sees her, unsure of himself. He looked completely different in this life. Not a tall white army officer, hardened into steel and leather from war but a soft looking Indian man that was balding early. He looked to be her age this time around, not older like last time.

They’d made contact on the Recollection site. The digital equivalent of a message in the bottle—but they had found each other. There were millions of people on the site. More. Shouting out past life memories, looking for lost loved ones and bitter rivals.

They’d reconnected. Like they were meant to be. Like they were inevitable. It was fate and she was convinced God had willed it.

She smiles, displaying the perfect teeth she hadn’t had back then. He goes to shake her hand, but she brushes it away, stepping into a hug instead. She grips him hard, like men hug each other.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispers in his ear. He relaxes some, returning the hug and holding back tears. That makes her smile even more. She breathes him in, trying to remember his scent. Tries to burn it into her grey matter, to keep in this life and to carry on to the next.

The knife slides from her palm to her fingers. She lets it sit there for a moment and time slows to a crawl. The weight of it in her palm anchors her. It feels so… right. She knows she’s doing the right thing. The proper thing.

One last deep breath before she buries it deep into the side of his neck. There’s no resistance. It surprises her how easily it slips into his artery. His flesh gives way like cheese paper. She pulls the handle towards herself, ripping it out the front of his throat, speckling her face with the warm red drops.

The human body is so fragile.

He sucks in air, gasping but unable to scream through his surprise. He clamps his hand to his neck and takes a step back while she smiles at him. Blood on her blood red lips.

No regret. No remorse.

After all, he had killed her once. Now she returned the favor. As blood hits the snow she remembers again.

In a past life, she’d been a British infantryman in World War One, sixteen years old and fresh off the boat. All it had taken was a lie to the recruiting officer. He’d looked at Frank—her name then—with knowing eyes, but had stamped her paperwork anyway. The gears of war demanded flesh, and men were running low.

One moment, she was ecstatic to fight for Britain. The next, she was in hell, drowning in bodies and the pieces they left behind. A charnel house nightmare she couldn’t escape then—and one that was forcing its way into this life.

Artillery shells rained down as she and the men who’d gone over the top tried to sink into old shell holes. Tried to survive the shrapnel rain. The urge to fight was gone, beaten out of her by the relentless shelling. It seemed like it’d never end. A never-ending drumroll that shook her bones and spirit till they turned into jelly. All that shiny courage she’d had rusting away into a flaking cowardice.

A shell screamed then boomed overhead, spraying metal splinters into the mud and corpses around her. She remembered the whistling sound the shards made as they sank into the mud beside her head. The little plopping sounds they made whispering to her that she was inches from death. To just hold on and lay there, it would find her shortly.

She remembered now.

Remembered all of it.

Remembered the bowel-clenching terror.

The graveyard cold coming from the mud.

Remembered the men starting to scream, “Gas! Masks on!”

She lifted her swimming head and saw it creeping over the land—a slow roll of poisonous death.

Chlorine gas.

Oh, the horror men visit upon each other, she thought to herself.

That memory was one hundred and fifty years old, and it still made her teeth clench hard enough they almost cracked. Her fingers fumbled for her gas mask, numb and clumsy, the straps tangling as the green fog rolled slowly in.

Finally—desperately—she slipped it on and tightened the strap. The landscape was a blur, the lenses crusted in mud and dirt.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw motion—a flash of brown. Then a rough hand seized her arm and yanked her to him, flipping her on her back as he pawed at her.

She looked up. It was Tom—her Lieutenant—the one who had been surprisingly kind to her during training, when all the other men had placed wagers on how long she would survive. A gas mask hung from his other hand, pierced with a metal shard—making it useless.

There was a look in Tom’s eyes. The look of a man who had already made up his mind, but still felt bad about it. Doesn’t matter what he felt, he’d still done it.

He ripped her gas mask off and started to pull it over his own head, keeping her away from him with an outstretched arm. She put up a fight, a hell of one, but she was only a sixteen year old boy, and Tom had a strength that not even her survival instinct could overcome.

Tom got tired of her trying to wrestle the mask back and punches her in the mouth, bouncing her head back into the mud and making lights bloom and dance across her vision. She can feel that her teeth are broken and her lips are busted. That took all the fight she had left and snuffed it out.

Her mind broke and she lay still inside the shell hole. To break cover was to die. To be torn to pieces. Shrapnel still buzzed around the battlefield, laying low any man crazed enough to run. She chose to lay there and hoped a miraculous wind would blow the gas away.

She choked to death that day.

She remembered how much it burned—how she could feel it coating the inside of her lungs, shutting them down, filling them with fluid, drowning her from the inside out. She tried to beg him to shoot her, but no sound came through the agonizing suffocation.

Only her hands worked.

Her fingernails tore ragged gashes into her own neck as she clawed for air. The last thing she saw was Tom, staring as her vision tunneled, the world collapsing into a pinprick of light.

Instinct took over. She reached for him. Reached for her murderer. Begging.

He had gripped her bloody hand as she died and yelled over the booming shells. “I’m sorry, lad. This isn’t right. But I had to.”

She remembered.

Since the Recollection, everyone was remembering things.

But this time, Tom was Anik. He grabbed at his throat, bright blood spurting out between his fingers. That was another thing she remembered from her past life—where to stab a man, even though she had died too soon to do it. She put the training to use in this one.

He stumbled, reaching for a wooden bench, but his hand slipped. He went down hard, sprawling face-up on the ground, hands pressed to his neck. Blood, shockingly red on the snow, steamed as it drained out of him.

She saw him staring at her, reaching out for help with his left hand. She grabbed it, his blood sticky and hot on her palm. She met his eyes. Watched the light fade from them.

“I’m sorry, lad. This isn’t right. But I had to,” she tells him as his vision faded.

“Maybe this makes us even. Maybe it doesn’t. Let me know in your next life, Tom.”

She stood, turned, and hurled the knife into the lake as he went still. She smiles again, big and bright and closes her eyes as she walks, soaking in the moment. It was more than revenge. It was karmic.

This was the first Recollection murder. A settling of old scores from different lives, different times—where justice had never come, and mercy had been denied. It wasn’t about this world and this body. It was older than that. Souls remembering crimes that reached back into the dark of antiquity. Searching. Hungry for revenge.

It wouldn’t be the last murder.

She whistles as she wipes her hands in the snow. Happy. The first time in a month that she’d smiled at all. Since she’d woken up with someone else’s memories in her head. It was global. She wasn’t alone. Some people remembered a lot. Some people only got a flash. But everyone got something.

She hadn’t been particularly careful, didn’t know how to be if she was being honest. She was just afraid that if she didn’t do it now, she’d never get the chance to do it again. Tom would have gotten on a plane and disappeared back to his latest life as Anik.

Choosing a secluded part of the park was the most she could think to do. The late season snow had helped, almost made it feel ordained. Sacred. No one was around. Maybe that was good enough.