Writer’s Digest 94th Annual Competition Mainstream/Literary Short Story First Place Winner: “The Memory Eater”
Congratulations to Eric Reitan, first-place winner in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 94th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s his winning story, “The Memory Eater.”
Congratulations to Eric Reitan, first-place winner in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 94th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s his winning story, “The Memory Eater.”
The Memory Eater
by Eric Reitan
Malachi, who delivered mail for forty-seven years, stands at the screen door clutching a letter. He pictures the route he’ll have to take: north, west, and north again, stair-stepping through Tulsa’s tangled highways.
The branches of the old oak are their own kind of tangle, ice-coated, gleaming like quicksilver in the streetlamp’s glow. Behind the tree moves something large, dark, and shaped all wrong.
“Dad?”
The voice startles him. He shakes his head, looks at his fist. There’s an envelope in his grip with an address in blue ink, Claire’s precise handwriting. No stamp. And words scrawled in his own hand: Important. Remember.
Remember. He blinks and shakes his head again.
“Dad? Close the door. It’s cold out there.”
As if on cue, wind rattles the door. Ice-coated branches crackle and chime. A black shape behind the oak shifts into view.
“Dad!”
Why is he standing at the door? He looks at his hand. A letter. Important. Remember. The ink of those two words looks fresh. Not like the address. He can almost remember writing them.
He needs to ask Claire. She’d know. “Take me home.”
“This is home now, Dad. You live with us now.”
“How can I live with you? There’s no room.” Claire can’t handle more than a few hours with Dan’s wife. What’s her name? Something with an H.
He likes how the ice coats each blade of grass and shines on the wooden stairs. Not on the street, though. Too much heat from the day. He lifts the envelope.
Important. Remember.
“Oh God.” It’s almost too late. His heart thuds. He grabs the doorframe. Outside, multi-jointed black limbs settle like tapping fingers on the oak’s trunk. “I have to go! I need to ask Claire.” He shakes the envelope at Dan. The contents stir: the slip-slide of a necklace chain. He pictures a garnet pendant resting below Claire’s collarbone.
“We can’t go anywhere, Dad. Roads are slick as snot.”
“The roads hold the heat. They’re only wet.”
“Except where they’re not!” Dan sighs. “What you got there, anyway?”
“Claire told me…” He shakes the envelope at Dan again. He pictures his route: through downtown, past the Greenwood District. Up to a stranger’s door.
Dan squints. “Is that something from before Mom—” Dan closes the distance and tries to take the letter, but Malachi jerks it back, pressing it to his chest.
Dan sighs again. “It’s got an address on it. We’ll put it in the mail when the weather clears.”
“It’ll be too late. Little Danny will be cursed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know!” Tears form in his eyes and he blinks them back, swallows them back, refuses to cry in front of his son. “Claire knows.”
“I’m sure she did.”
There’s a pressure in Malachi’s chest, a pressure he can’t allow. He swivels back to the ice-glazed night. Something large and black moves through the freezing rain: a dozen insectile limbs with too many joints; a massive, sagging body the color of tar or black oil; a mouth that…a mouth that…
It opens wide. He sees. He screams.
*
The living room furniture doesn’t suit the house. He knows these beautiful old two-story homes, built in the 1920s with their creaky floors and built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace.
He’s holding a mug, but what’s in it isn’t coffee. It smells like coffee but it’s darker, oilier, moving in a way coffee shouldn’t move.
“You feeling better?”
Malachi looks at Dan. His boy. When did his boy grow a beard? It looks silly on him. “I need to go home.”
“Dad—”
“It’s close. You should let Danny walk by himself next time. You’re overprotective.” He tries to picture his grandson Danny, but all he can see is Dan, his little boy Dan who’s got a beard now and is staring at him with sad, angry eyes. How can eyes be sad and angry at the same time?
“Danny started walking to your place when he was eight, Dad. Walked there almost every day before—” Dan shakes his head. “What’s the point?”
Malachi tries to picture little Danny walking by himself. “How old is he now?”
“Fifteen tomorrow. We’ll have a party if the ice melts.”
Malachi lurches to his feet. “Fifteen.” He looks around. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“The envelope! I—”
The black thing oozes from the mug until a spidery limb breaks free.
*
Malachi wakes in the night and reaches for Claire. His hand closes on emptiness. He sits up, back protesting. Enough light seeps through the curtains to show this isn’t his bedroom. But one of Claire’s paintings is on the wall: a boy squatting by Swan Lake.
“That’s what our boy will look like, don’t you think?” Claire says. She’s toying with her garnet pendant, the one he gave her, the one she never takes off except to shower.
“Not right away.”
“Of course not, silly.”
“He’s got a beard now. Why does he have a beard?”
Claire doesn’t answer. He looks for her but she’s gone.
He gropes for the bedside lamp, struggles to find the switch. Finally light spills over the rocker, the one they could never part with despite the missing spoke. Why is it here? The world’s all wrong, all sideways. Malachi lurches up and looks for something to wear. The clothes in the closet hang neatly alongside a creature made of oil, with limbs like multi-hinged sticks and a sack-like body with a mobile mouth.
He doesn’t scream because then Dan will come and stop him, and Danny will turn fifteen and the curse will consume him. He grabs clothes and throws them on over his night shirt, slides into the loafers by the rocker, turns his back on a dozen black legs reaching through a gap in the rocker’s spokes, and staggers into the living room.
What’s he looking for? His eyes scan the hutch, stop on the envelope. He snatches it and studies the address. For forty-seven years he delivered mail. He knows where this is.
Outside, everything is crystalline. Tree branches creak under the weight of ice. The landing and steps shine with slickness, but if he can reach the grass he’ll be fine. He grips the black iron railing. He’s stiff but strong. Walked miles every day of his life.
He can do this. Across Utica, through Swan Lake Park, north on St. Louis.
He shoves the envelope into the inside pocket of his tweed coat and starts down the steps. The railing moves beneath his fingers: flexing, unfolding. He flings himself forward. The lawn crunches under him, a hundred blades of grass turned to tender icicles.
*
A bronze sculpture of a trumpeter swan spreads its wings, preparing to take flight.
The Trumpet of the Swan. One of his favorite books. He read it to Dan and then Danny. Have they finished reading it yet? Danny will want to know how it ends.
A crack like a gunshot. A crash. A car horn starts to bleat.
He looks towards the aftermath: across the street, by a house built with oil money, a house with columns and pretensions and too many rooms. A tree limb has surrendered to the weight of ice, branches splayed over an SUV’s roof, one limb pushing through the glass.
He has to get home. Dan is waiting for him to finish The Trumpet of the Swan. But Swan Lake Park has become a wonderland of glittering slickness. And the tree limb across the street, tired of tapping the horn, rears up, its body a flaccid sack of tar-coated fat, its limbs crackling like the ice as it straightens dozens of knobby joints.
The body heaves and twists to expose a gaping mouth, a mouth full of fire and gunshots, rage and terror, the blackened skeletons of houses, and blond-haired women darting from the ruins, golden prizes in their fists.
Malachi flees, falling by the statue of a mostly-naked youth scolding a swan.
“I need to get home,” Malachi says. “Claire will know.”
“Home is gone. Claire is gone.” He doesn’t know who says it, but it sounds like Dan’s voice when he’s cranky and condescending.
“My house is just half a mile that way!” He flings his arm toward the path he knows, a path written in his bones.
“Where did you kiss her first, Malachi?”
This sounds nothing like Dan.
Malachi rises, turns in a circle, trying to remember the last time he kissed her. Was it here? Claire loved Swan Lake.
“The first kiss,” Claire says. “Not the last.”
He looks for her, but his eyes land on a massive bulk heaving incrementally across the street, piston legs hauling and straining, maw swiveling towards him, releasing the sound of bombs and bullets and the last cries of the dying.
*
They always go through the kitchen door, the family door. The front door is for strangers and guests, for dinner parties that stretch into the night with candles and Claire’s bright laugh.
The door is locked. He pats his pockets for the key, then looks for the rock under the holly hedge where they hide the spare. There’s no rock, no hedge. Everything is wrong and the black thing is moving in from the side, limbs skittering, bulk-sack body swinging so its mouth flops towards him.
He pounds on the door. “Claire!” He keeps pounding until lights turn on inside, and then the light over the door. A man yanks it open. “What the fuck!” He’s huge and black-bearded.
Malachi flees, skids on a slick patch but somehow keeps his feet. He was always good at that, keeping his feet, but it’s harder now and a monster is chasing him and a strange man shouts after him to wait, come back, come inside.
“Where did you kiss her for the first time?”
*
They were seventeen when it happened, but they’d always known each other. Malachi never had a sibling. What he had was the girl next door. While war tore the world apart, they played in Woodward Park. When Claire’s brother came home without a leg and everyone called him a hero, Malachi and Claire used their allowances to buy candy cigarettes at Sipes. When the river flooded Riverside Drive, they rode their bikes there to see the spectacle.
But the first kiss happened on a hot summer night outside the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, two weeks before their senior year. They’d been to a choir concert and were waiting at the base of the broad church stairs for Claire’s father to pick them up.
That was when Malachi gave her the garnet pendant. Of course he fumbled with the clasp, and of course she giggled at his clumsiness. She asked him how it looked and he said beautiful.
*
He clutches the black rail that bisects the concrete stairs, his neck aching as he looks up at the church’s art deco spire: sweeping lines of limestone and terra cotta sculptures that resemble Incan gold. His body shivers. His hip aches and his chest lances with pain. He wonders if he’s broken a rib.
“Claire? Why are—”
“Where’d you get it?” she asks, lifting it from its resting place on her collarbone. The garnet’s facets catch the moonlight.
“Mom,” he answers. “She gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday. Said to give it to the right girl when I found her. ‘I don’t have a daughter, and I don’t want it anymore.’ That’s what she said.”
He never asked why she didn’t want it. His thoughts were anchored to the first part: When you find the right girl. He knew it would be Claire, even though it took two years to build up the courage to give it to her.
“Why are you giving me a family heirloom?” Claire asks.
“Because you’re the right girl. You’ll always be my family.”
Tears fill her eyes. She rises to her tiptoes to kiss him, and his feet slip out from under him, and he falls onto icy concrete. Pain shoots up his tailbone.
“Claire?”
She was here, and it was a summer night, and the stored heat from the day still poured from the church’s limestone walls. His eyes rove up along the spire. The thing perched on top looks like it’s impaled, but then the legs begin to move, and the body slips like liquid through the spire’s blades.
It scuttles downward with a clacking like a hundred metal legs, or a thousand, or the sound of icy tree limbs snapping and crashing all around.
*
An old man huddles over a trash can lid where paper cups, catalogues, and plywood bits are starting to catch fire. The man’s grizzled face breaks into a smile. He shakes the lighter at Malachi in triumph before settling back to stare into the flames.
Malachi smells garbage, urine, and something sweet, like apple pie. He eases closer to the fire. A glance around shows him he’s in an alley. The black thing is framed by the buildings at one end, but it stays just beyond.
The old man nods to himself before looking back at Malachi. “New here,” he says. “Bad night.”
“Cold,” Malachi answers.
The old man nods.
“I can’t do it myself, Malachi. I wish I could, but I can’t anymore. Just…please, it isn’t ours. It never was.”
He blinks at Claire, flat on her back in the bed. Claire always slept on her side, her knees pulled up.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s stolen!”
Malachi shakes his head. Anger rises in his throat. Why would she say such lies? “My own mother put it in my hand.” He shouldn’t snarl at her, not when she’s sick, but how can she speak such lies?
He turns away, his body trembling. He slips, grabbing the dumpster’s edge to slow his fall. Still, he lands with a crack on the cold concrete. The pain surges up his spine.
“I saw it in a picture,” she says from the bed. Malachi blinks back tears, because she’s dead and he’s so angry with her, and her voice is so weak and the pain is shooting up his back and the old man’s face is hovering close.
“I know, I know,” says the old man. “Slick as snot.” His words cover up Claire’s voice, but her words remain, words about the picture in the library display and the throat of a beautiful woman. “Like a Black Mona Lisa,” Claire whispers. “The same smile.”
The old man helps him back to the fire.
“That’s not proof of anything!” he declares. “There could be more than one like it, right?”
“Of course,” says the old man.
“My family. We were never racists.”
“If you say so.”
But Claire isn’t done. Her voice comes from all around now, echoing in the bricks, gliding across the ice and up his spine: “Looters.” Malachi’s eyes rake towards the end of the alley. He sees them, the looters, running in and out of ruined homes—and the tarry black thing there with them, its maw open and its spider-legs clicking against the alley’s walls.
Malachi weeps.
“How long has she been dead?” the old man asks.
“I don’t know! How can I not know?” He slams his fists into his legs. And then, because the pain feels good, he does it again.
“If you can’t remember, sing. A song she liked.”
“Blue Moon.” Malachi rocks back and forth. The tune slips through his head, swirls out from the little fire in the alley, over the gleaming ice until it touches a single, multi-jointed leg.
“Please, Malachi. I’m too tired to fight. Just…please.” The monster heaves itself up, pushing its bulk between the buildings. Malachi knows what it is. He knows.
“I have to go,” he says.
*
He kneels in a ring of ice-filmed bricks. “Where am I?” His voice becomes a chorus, flung back to him from every direction.
“Of course there could be more than one,” Claire says. “But there’s a name. Inscribed on the back. I always thought it must be some relative of yours I didn’t know.”
“It’s yours, Claire!” His voice returns to him like the voices of a dozen men, a hundred, a multitude gathered round to stone him for his sins. “I gave it to you.”
“I know, Malachi.”
“Because I love you!” He staggers to his feet despite the ice, defying the accusers striking him with his own voice. “It’s always been you, Claire, and now you’re going to die and you want me to…to….” He stops because he can’t make his voice work, because the sobbing is too deep in his throat.
All her life she wore it. Always that gift from when they were kids in love, kids who never stopped being in love. How rare is that? How rare and perfect and caught up in the shine of a garnet pendant. And now she’s dying, and he knows what he has to do: hold onto it until Danny turns fifteen. Give it to him then. Give it to him and tell him how his mother gave it to him on his fifteenth birthday, an heirloom to give to the woman he’d marry. Tell him how Claire wore it every day, all her life, more precious than a wedding ring, and now it goes to him, to beautiful Danny whose head is just as full of dreams and yearning as Malachi’s own, a boy more like Malachi than Dan would ever be, who’d choose his own Claire, his own beautiful bride, the pendant weaving through the generations like a thread, tying them to one another so tightly Claire couldn’t die, she’d live on every time Danny saw the pendant at his lover’s throat.
“I can’t do it.” The words return to him like a blow. He’s afraid his ears will bleed. He covers them before he cries again, “I can’t!”
The spider legs reach over the wall’s lip. The body heaves up and over, slapping onto the footbridge. The mouth opens. Screams pour out, and the looters laugh. He sobs.
When Claire hands him the envelope, he shakes his head but takes it anyway. And then he leaves her there, leaves her with that uncertain look on her face, uncertain because she doesn’t know what he’ll do, because he doesn’t know, because he can’t lose her, because everything is dark and he can smell the smoke of countless bonfires pouring from the monster’s maw.
*
He stands on a street corner. A highway to his left is empty of traffic. Of course. The bridges and overpasses will be slick, slick as black oil, and maybe the monster isn’t coated in oil at all, maybe it’s black ice, invisible in the dark, and it’s a wonder he’s standing, held up only by his hand on a street sign’s pole.
He knows where he is. A mail carrier knows his city.
Did someone drive him here? Is he supposed to wait for someone to pick him up? Maybe Dan is on his way. Or Claire. It’s strange that he’s out on a night like this, the ice making the branches hang heavy and the power lines sag. It must be something important.
Important. Remember.
Fifteen.
“What are you doing?” he asks Claire.
She’s pale and thin, and her eyes are red. She sits at the computer, typing, leaning in, moving her mouth as she reads. Finally she looks at him. “I’ve known for a year, Malachi, and I did nothing. I always thought there’d be time. But there isn’t any more time.”
He turns fifteen today. “Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. I’m dying and…and I’ve got to do this.”
Fifteen? That can’t be right. Danny’s little. He was only nine when Claire died.
The cold aches in the hollow spaces of his head. It intensifies and he tips back his neck, his eyes taking in the night sky. The darkness has shape. It slides free of the gaps between the stars. He tries to run but falls on his knees at the edge of the street.
He has no way of knowing how close it is. The thing’s size could mean it’s a monster to fill the heavens or that it’s close, that its maw is about to splash hot breath down his neck.
He scrambles on all fours, heart thumping, hands scrambling for purchase, and the darkness has a voice, and the voice is bullets and fire, and the voice is Claire ripping all his fantasies apart, asking him to give it up, to give her up, to forget about nostalgic threads and knots and Danny’s fifteenth birthday because it’s not an heirloom, it never was an heirloom, it’s always been a curse, and there are still things we can fix, even if it’s only garnets and a bit of gold.
*
He’s sprawled in the street. White light shines through his closed lids. He blinks and lifts his head. Flashing red and blue behind the white, and a shape, a man in a uniform like the one he used to wear.
But no. This is no postman.
The officer squats next to him. “Are you hurt? An ambulance—”
Malachi shakes his head. He reaches into his tweed jacket and pulls it out. “Here.” He beats at the address with his fingertip.
The officer squints at the lettering, at Claire’s precise hand. “That’s right around the corner. Is that where you live?”
Malachi pushes himself to his knees. No ambulance. They can’t take him away in an ambulance when he’s so close. His whole body aches. He imagines broken ribs, a fractured hip. The pain is everywhere but still he rises without wincing, rises to his full height. “I’m fine,” he says.
He put it in a drawer. All it would’ve taken was a stamp, and instead he put it in a drawer. His will over hers. His dreams over her sense of justice. Stowed in a drawer for Danny’s fifteenth birthday.
“Oh, Malachi.” Her voice is kind, too kind for a man like him. “You know that isn’t true. You never took it out of the envelope.”
He blinks as he turns to the officer. The sky is paling. Almost dawn. “I found it two weeks ago,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“If you could just…” He gestures at the address.
The officer helps him to the cruiser. He sinks into a seat. As the car lurches forward he turns and sees his oily black monster scampering alongside, its gut heavy with stolen memories.
But then it stops. Malachi cranes his neck, watching it recede into the glittery dawn.
As the police car pulls into the drive of the small green house, Malachi takes in the gray shingles and overgrown junipers. Dawn light splashes the white garage door.
“I know this place.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s light,” Malachi answers, pointing to the dawn.
*
Dear Baker Family,
I’ve worn this pendant most of my life. I thought it was an heirloom of my husband’s family. In a way it is, but a cursed one, heavy with crimes.
The inscription on the back—R.A. Brown—matches the name of one of your ancestors killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Ruth Ann Brown. Last year I saw her picture at an exhibition about the massacre. She was wearing this pendant. Maybe one of my husband’s relatives stole it in the looting.
Its return can’t undo history, but maybe it can do something. I don’t know. But in your hands it becomes what I always wrongly took it to be: a family heirloom.
I hope it brings some measure of joy to you and yours to have something that was taken, restored.
Sincerely,
Claire Jacobs
