The Memory Place by Christopher Thomas

“Do you remember when I told you about going skiing that one time with my family–when I was a teenager? And I met that girl and we hit it off, but something happened and I lost track of her and I didn’t know her name or where she was staying, and I never saw her again? Do you remember that,” Danny asked. Lynd, hunched over the counter, her mouth full of cereal, shook her head. “Sure you do. You don’t remember me telling you that?”

Lynd shrugged, unconcerned, “I don’t know, maybe. Why? Did she finally find you,” she joked as she shoveled in another spoonful of cereal before the last one was fully gone.

“No. In fact, last night I realized it never happened.”

“What never happened,” Lynd managed through her chewing.

“None of it, I think. I mean, we went skiing. I went with my family. We did this sometimes, every two or three years. But I never met that girl, I never lost track of her. I never knew her name because it didn’t happen to me.”

Lynd shook her head again, her mouth still mostly full, milk dribbling down her chin and back into the bowl. “I’m not sure I get it, but, so what? You once thought you met somebody, but you didn’t?” She looked over her shoulder to check the clock. 

“No, I didn’t. It did happen, sort of, but it wasn’t me,” Danny explained. “I was up last night. I couldn’t sleep. There was this movie playing on TV from back then. I remembered the movie but I didn’t remember much about it, so I watched it. The girl I never met was in the movie.”

Lynd looked at Danny for the first time as her chewing slowed. She repeated his words, “The girl you never met was in the movie?”

“The girl in the movie is the girl I remember meeting, the girl I’ve told people I met, the girl that I thought I lost track of that weekend–but it never happened. That’s why whenever I thought about it I could never place exactly when it happened, which winter, which ski resort.” Danny felt a shiver. “It means something.”

Lynd dropped her spoon in the sink and pushed her cereal bowl away, a third full of milk and the soggy bits she hadn’t finished. “It means you couldn’t sleep, stayed up too late, watched some bad TV and probably dreamed a little along the way. It doesn’t mean anything.” Lynd checked the clock again, “You don’t have work today, why don’t you go back to bed and get some sleep.”

Danny nodded, but he knew he hadn’t dreamt anything, and that this wasn’t some false idea born out of insomnia. A subplot of this forgettable movie about masculine ski trip hijinks had somehow taken seed and become a memory that he believed was his, that he sometimes reminisced over, but none of it was true. It didn’t happen to him and now he knew it. More importantly, he feared this called into question all of his memories. Who was he if not the sum total of his memories? And if some of that sum total aren’t his memories, who was he then? Who else could he be? 

Lynd picked some scattered items from the counter and threw them into her bag, then grabbed the cereal bowl and in one gulp drank what remained. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, walked over to Danny, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Love you. Get some sleep. We’ll stay home tonight, maybe play a game,” and with that she was out the door.

Danny watched her go, watched her spring out and down the steps, while he wondered who he was and how much of him wasn’t really him. He wondered how much of Lynd wasn’t really Lynd. He sat still and stared at the empty bowl on the counter and wondered aloud to no one in particular, “who eats cereal like that?”

Christopher Thomas lives in the Daniel Boone National Forest in eastern Kentucky. He has one published novel, Never Sated, Never Sane (Chromium Press, 2005).

28 March 2025