Memory Jar Quotes

Relius looked away. "He said that you...cried," he said softly. "But not that he cried as well," said the queen, amused at the memory. "We were very lachrymose... would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head." "Is that when he cried?" "He ducked," said Attolia dryly. "I had not pictured you for a fishwife." "Lo, the transforming power of love.

I want to take all our best moments, put them in a jar, and take them out like cookies and savor each one of them forever.

I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.

You don't want to look back at your years with regrets. Regrets have no place in your memory jar.

A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

Love is inaudible—until you hear it. And once you do, you’ll never forget the sound of her voice.


I find places like this so packed with memories. Visiting them can be like opening a memory jar. You take off the lid and the smells and sounds of a place hit you, unlocking things folded away deep in your brain.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

Dat had always told her that whenever you got angry at another person, it was an opportunity to take a glimpse of your own faults.

God created you with special talents for a purpose, and sometimes those we love most don't understand that. Don't let the doubts of others ring louder than God's whispers to your spirit. Sometimes God's whispers are harder to hear, but they're to be trusted the most.

Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars" - she paused at remembered sweetness - "we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.

Those static images have the uncanny ability to jar the memory and bring places and people back to life. They bridge the present with the past and validate as real what the passage of time has turned into hazy recollections. Were it not for them, my experiences would have remained as just imperfect memories of perfect moments.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

I also try to weigh my motives. Am I doing what I'm doing because it's what God desires, or because I'm afraid people will be disappointed if I don't?

The past is always with you, whether you choose to think about it or not, whether you take responsibility for it or not. You carry the past with you because it transforms you. You can try to bury it and pretend it never happened, but that doesn’t work.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

I’m not trying to take Jamie’s place or erase his memory or make you forget that you loved him. I’m just trying to explore this thing between us.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness. It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief, or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it. —italo svevo, essays and uncollected writings

But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?

Nose to nose with her, he gave her his best bad dog snarl. "You've forgotten who and what you're dealing with here, princess. So let me jar your memory. I'm not on your father's short list of men you can bring home to dinner. I'm not a nice man. So if all you're looking for is sex...just keep this up and you're liable to get it. And don't expect some polite little in-and-out and 'oh darling, that was lovely.' You come to my bed, I'm going to fuck you, and there won't be anything polite about it.

And so it became a safe place for the four kids. Their second home. A jar of sparkling memories.

On May 25, something unexpected happened. Police opened the school up so families of the library victims could walk through the scene. This served two functions: victims could face the crime scene with their loved ones, and revisiting the room might jar loose memories or clarify confusion. Three senior investigators stood by to answer questions and observe.

Her whole life she always pictured falling in love being full of nervous emotion, peaks of romance, and the excitement of wondering if he loved her as much as she loved him. But maybe love was simpler. Maybe true love was finding someone you could talk to with ease, whose heart cared for the same things, and whose dreams could meld with your own.

I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.

I hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life. Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories. So what are you waiting for?

Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on, that which disagrees with our memories -- a new building here, a change in paint there -- is forever jarring and anachronistic.

O ye sweet treasures, to my sorrow found! Once sweet and welcome when 'twas heaven's good-will. O ye Tobosan jars, how ye bring back to my memory the sweet object of my bitter regrets!"  

Sunlight and shade,' his oma had commented once. Jathan liked that, mostly because shade meant that even though things were dim for a time, the sun was still there, just on the other side of the barrier.

Memory is a curious thing. Some details stick in our minds like peanut butter on crackers, and refuse to budge, as much as we might wish they would. Other memories - heavy ones sometimes, ones that seem unbudgeable - can be plucked right out when we least expect it. Lost memories leave remnants, of course, flavors that linger in the mind, but it's difficult to taste things when you don't know they're there

I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine-fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia - but not Bertram. No; if you will take the word of one who would not deceive you, not Bertram. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast village and were working towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters' Bar in the West Indian section. ... There are certain moments in life when words are not needed. I looked at Biffy, Biffy looked at me. A perfect understanding linked our two souls. "?" "!" Three minutes later we had joined the Planters. I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilisation. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove in view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father's life was saved at Wembley.

Sometimes memories hit like a wallop, all of a sudden, and hard. Other times, for no reason that anyone can explain, memories take much longer to sink in. They seem to meander a bit before choosing which mind to settle into.

Galen, he recognized her immediately." "Emma?" Galen breathes. This can't be happening. "No. The stalker." "Wait," Rayna says. "Her? Her who?" "Galen," Toraf says. "It's Nalia. Yudor swears on Triton's memory it is. She's not dead. He's on his way back to stop the mating ceremony. Nalia. It all comes together as if the pieces of the puzzle were suddenly jarred into place. Galen tears through the living room and to the beach, Toraf and Rayna close behind him.

Without the restless insects the place seemed stunned, stupefied, shocked by the ballet of gossamer violence, the wonder of plain and simple things drawn together to conjure such beauty, transforming that bubble of urban air into a theatre where an astonishing performance was fleetingly played to an awed audience of one, the memory of which would sparkle for a lifetime. And he knew it then, in that moment of dead happiness, what a gift, what a thing he had seen, what a treasure he held.

This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air. "When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free. As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance,there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs, upholstered in that itchy particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins, freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it was still a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.

There was a hint of something lingering in her mind. A memory, perhaps, although Jo could only catch the flavor of a few remaining tendrils.

I thought I placed the boy's face then. It hovered dimly at the rim of memory—the sort of face to which I would never bother to attach a name.

loved tagging along when she pushed open the storeroom door and went inside. It was a small room but filled with an overwhelming array of sacks bulging with different kinds of beans, nuts, flour, sugar, rice, and a multitude of spices, emitting a symphony of assorted smells I can still summon into memory at will. Large glass jars squatted on the shelves, stacked to the ceiling,

I put the memory of that morning inside a large jar. I took this jar and carried it down, down, down, flights and flights of stairs, placing it inside a cabinet, locking it away, and walking briskly back up the stairs to continue with the life I had built. Now jars filled every inch of my mind. I had nowhere to put them. They cluttered the stairwells, could not be contained in cabinets. I was full of these sealed.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves n a larder, but transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorised with every act of recollection. ~Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones—buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told.

The memory of that first state of Freedom and paradisiac Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding.

I think the worst thing is the way you lose part of yourself.” I roll on to my back and stare up at the dark, speckled roof. “There’s so much that only Lief knew about me. So many memories that we shared – mostly of things we shouldn’t have been doing – but now I’m the last one who remembers them. Times we woke in the night and stole honeycomb from the jars in the kitchen. Times we used to jump into the hay on the farm. No one will ever know me like that again. And what if I forget things? What happens then?

A memory rises: Etienne was in a field east of the city with his brother. It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for the boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.

That last summer, the kitchen reeked of pickling spice, anise seed and juniper berries. Watermelon jam, lavender jellies and crystalized fennel cooled on the pantry shelves. Jars with mango pickles and pickled onions, an old habit from his days in London, were set aside in the wine cellar to cure. Honeycombs were stacked in bowls on the sideboard, draining, waiting to be melted into candles mixed with olive oil and pressed into soaps. Thunderstorms were canned along with plum jam. Memories seeped onto the pine floorboards.

He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one's words, Proust's included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You almost an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.

We are a rotating cast of aspects of self that are shown to one person, or in one setting, and hidden in another. Memorial services are often jarring in this regard: friends and relatives eulogize the deceased in such conflicting terms they might be talking of different people.

For so long, she'd taken her memories of Patty - the memories they'd created together - and held them outside of herself, protecting herself from the pain of carrying them deep within. It was as if she carried all the memories in her jars. But if doing so, it was as if she'd also kept everyone else - those still in her life - at arm's length too.

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.

The octopus, although an invertebrate—with no thalamus or cortex to speak of—behaves in ways that utterly belie its primitive label. It has around 500 million neurons, not too far from the numbers in a cat. But the octopus brain is decidedly unusual, with an exceptionally parallel architecture—almost always a positive quality when you are talking about brains. The majority of octopus neurons are to be found not in its brain, but in its arms. In effect, if you include the neuronal bundles in its limbs, the octopus has nine semi-independent brains, making it unique in the animal kingdom. The octopus is also a genius among ocean creatures. It has highly developed memory and attentional systems. In nature, this allows these invertebrates to take on a wide range of shapes to mimic other animals, rocks, or even plants. In the lab, octopuses can distinguish shapes and colors, navigate through a maze, open a jar with a screw-on lid, and even learn by observing the behavior of another octopus—an ability thought previously only to exist in highly social animals.

asked nothing from thee; I uttered not my name to thine ear. When thou took'st thy leave I stood silent. I was alone by the well where the shadow of the tree fell aslant, and the women had gone home with their brown earthen pitchers full to the brim. They called me and shouted, `Come with us, the morning is wearing on to noon.' But I languidly lingered awhile lost in the midst of vague musings. I heard not thy steps as thou camest. Thine eyes were sad when they fell on me; thy voice was tired as thou spokest low---`Ah, I am a thirsty traveller.' I started up from my day-dreams and poured water from my jar on thy joined palms. The leaves rustled overhead; the cuckoo sang from the unseen dark, and perfume of babla flowers came from the bend of the road. I stood speechless with shame when my name thou didst ask. Indeed, what had I done for thee to keep me in remembrance? But the memory that I could give water to thee to allay thy thirst will cling to my heart and enfold it in sweetness. The morning hour is late, the bird sings in weary notes, neem leaves rustle overhead and I sit and think and think.

I asked nothing from thee; I uttered not my name to thine ear. When thou took'st thy leave I stood silent. I was alone by the well where the shadow of the tree fell aslant, and the women had gone home with their brown earthen pitchers full to the brim. They called me and shouted, `Come with us, the morning is wearing on to noon.' But I languidly lingered awhile lost in the midst of vague musings. I heard not thy steps as thou camest. Thine eyes were sad when they fell on me; thy voice was tired as thou spokest low---`Ah, I am a thirsty traveller.' I started up from my day-dreams and poured water from my jar on thy joined palms. The leaves rustled overhead; the cuckoo sang from the unseen dark, and perfume of babla flowers came from the bend of the road. I stood speechless with shame when my name thou didst ask. Indeed, what had I done for thee to keep me in remembrance? But the memory that I could give water to thee to allay thy thirst will cling to my heart and enfold it in sweetness. The morning hour is late, the bird sings in weary notes, neem leaves rustle overhead and I sit and think and think.

But despite heavy clouds, a feeling of contentment hangs in the air, coming from the kitchen's ability to be two things at once: to be an enclosed space that effectively opens up the world through taste and flavor and imagination. Nature comes in here. Pomegranate seeds on rice dishes, a strip of orange peel for a negroni, or a ribbon of lemon skin for a martini. A lime wedge for gin. A bowl of ripening pears. A jar of dates. Peaches roasted in rose water and stuffed with marzipan. Blackberries scattered on pancakes. Apricots cinched in chutney. Memories of melons, and the vine pergolas and fruit trees of summer, of prized Uzbek cherries carried in boxes across borders. The kitchen is an orchard.

The mysterious kachampuli wasn't a magical elixir. There were still a few hiccups- a dash too much salt here, an overcooked and chewy chunk of pork there- and it took a few more attempts and a few more days to make it perfect. It rained the day they got it right. Anna could hear the thrum of it against the glass of the window as she speared a piece of meat on a fork and promptly burst into tears because it tasted just like every time her mother had made it. It tasted like rain on the air and frogs hopping across the grass and coffee beans in a jar and the green, green leaves of the forest rustling in the night and the sound of her mother humming a song. It tasted like a future in which the rain and the coffee beans and her mother weren't out of reach after all.

Jackaby did not speak as we left the building. We were three or four blocks away from the station house when Lydia Lee caught up to us, the coach rattling and clinking and the dappled gray horse stamping its hooves impatiently on the cobblestones. Miss Lee managed to convince the Duke to clop to a halt just ahead of us, and my employer climbed into the carriage wordlessly. Miss Lee gave me an inquisitive look, but Jackaby finally broke his silence before I could explain. “Don’t bother with niceties. Take me home, Miss Lee.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to need you to go to jail for me afterward.” “That is the second time a man’s said those words to me,” she replied gamely. “Although the last time I got flowers and a dance first, if memory serves.” “Bail,” amended Jackaby as Miss Lee hopped back into the driver’s box. “They usually do, in the end,” she said, sighing. “What? Listen, I have a jar of banknotes in my office earmarked for bail. I’ll bring it out to you as soon as we arrive. I need you to bring it to the processing officer at the Mason Street Station. He’ll sort out the paperwork. Just sign where he tells you to. Ask for Alton.” “Allan,” I corrected. “I’m fairly sure it’s Alton,” said Jackaby. “You want me to post bail for somebody?” Miss Lee called down as the carriage began to rattle on down the street. “I guess I can do that.” “Thank you,” Jackaby called back to her. “Who am I bailing out?” “Everyone.” The carriage bumped along the paving stones for a silent stretch. “By everyone, you mean . . . ?” “It is a rather large jar of banknotes,” said Jackaby. “Right,” came Miss Lee’s voice at length. “You’re the boss.

There was a rupture in the fabric of space inside the truck, and a rift developed that connected worlds and dimensions. William Connoley, travelling book-salesman and keeper of the portal between the worlds, saw shimmers of a room with a large, dark, wooden table laden with mysterious utensils, a chair, glass-like shards on the floor, vials, small windows, shelves with jars, and many other things he had never seen before. The vision, strange as it was, only lasted seconds, but it burnt itself into his memory. Then a bright flash of light took away his eyesight momentarily, while an invisible roller-coaster-like sensation filled his stomach with the most unwelcome and sickening feeling. There was a roaring sound, and suddenly smoke filled the cabin, chasing William into the street as he coughed and gasped for air. His eyes burnt from the grey fumes.

It had been obvious to me from a young age that my parents didn’t like one another. Couples in films and on television performed household tasks together and talked fondly about their shared memories. I couldn’t remember seeing my mother and father in the same room unless they were eating. My father had “moods.” Sometimes during his moods my mother would take me to stay with her sister Bernie in Clontarf, and they would sit in the kitchen talking and shaking their heads while I watched my cousin Alan play Ocarina of Time. I was aware that alcohol played a role in these incidents, but its precise workings remained mysterious to me. I enjoyed our visits to Bernie’s house. While we were there I was allowed to eat as many digestive biscuits as I wanted, and when we returned, my father was either gone out or else feeling very contrite. I liked it when he was gone out. During his periods of contrition he tried to make conversation with me about school and I had to choose between humoring and ignoring him. Humoring him made me feel dishonest and weak, a soft target. Ignoring him made my heart beat very hard and afterward I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. Also it made my mother cry. It was hard to be specific about what my father’s moods consisted of. Sometimes he would go out for a couple of days and when he came back in we’d find him taking money out of my Bank of Ireland savings jar, or our television would be gone. Other times he would bump into a piece of furniture and then lose his temper. He hurled one of my school shoes right at my face once after he tripped on it. It missed and went in the fireplace and I watched it smoldering like it was my own face smoldering. I learned not to display fear, it only provoked him. I was cold like a fish. Afterward my mother said: why didn’t you lift it out of the fire? Can’t you at least make an effort? I shrugged. I would have let my real face burn in the fire too. When he came home from work in the evening I used to freeze entirely still, and after a few seconds I would know with complete certainty if he was in one of the moods or not. Something about the way he closed the door or handled his keys would let me know, as clearly as if he yelled the house down. I’d say to my mother: he’s in a mood now. And she’d say: stop that. But she knew as well as I did. One day, when I was twelve, he turned up unexpectedly after school to pick me up. Instead of going home, we drove away from town, toward Blackrock. The DART went past on our left and I could see the Poolbeg towers out the car window. Your mother wants to break up our family, my father said. Instantly I replied: please let me out of the car. This remark later became evidence in my father’s theory that my mother had poisoned me against him.

I cannot remember who scored runs or took wickets, and I have always held in check the temptation to take an archaeological dig into Wisden to find out. Long ago I realised that to go looking for the evidence risked shaking loose the memories I already had; and possibly losing some of them as a consequence. So the important fragments of that day remain intact, shut and airtight in my mind, as if sealed in a jar. The scorecard my grandfather bought me - and filled in with a silver ballpoint pen - is long gone too. I have nothing that preserves our time together there except for the dozen or so still, square images which I can slide in a private show across my mind. These keep alive its broad outline, which is sufficient. The bold statistics don't matter anyway. What does matter is the imprint our journey to Trent Bridge left on me. It's evident in this book, which is also part-payment of an outstanding debt to my grandfather which I can never fully repay.

the rhythm which was barely intricate to most ears in the commons was to him painful because it was timed to the processes of his body, to jar and strike against them…and she was surprised he had held up this long. “All right, Cord, to be lord of this black barrack, Tarik’s, you need more than jackal lore, or a belly full of murder and jelly knees. Open your mouth and your hands. To understand power, use your wit, please. Ambition like a liquid ruby stains your brain, birthed in the cervixed will to kill, swung in the arc of death’s again, you name yourself victim each time you fill with swill the skull’s cup lipping murder. It predicts your fingers’ movement toward the blade long laid against the leather sheath cord-fixed to pick the plan your paling fingers made; you stayed in safety, missing worlds of wonder, under the lithe hiss of the personafix inflicting false memories to make them blunder while thunder cracks the change of Tarik. You stick pins in peaches, place your strange blade, ranged with a grooved tooth, while the long and strong lines of my meaning make your mind change from fulgent to frangent. Now you hear the wrong cord-song, to instruct you. Assassin, pass in…

right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas—you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life!

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed. At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo-any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang: Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea… "Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

Shelves filled with jars of items meant for spells and ridiculous concoctions meant to heal bodies, inflict sickness, remove memories and countless other purposes covered most of the walls. The people brave enough to venture out into this part of the swamp and walk through this door were the ones most desperate for an answer. Most people who knew of the true power of voodoo stayed away. It wasn’t an evil humans needed to dabble in. It could possess you, steal your soul if you allowed it.

Our turn was near at hand. An hour after we received the order to advance on the Russian guns. With the blame, on whomsoever it may lie of that rash order, I have nothing to do. That vexatious question can never be settled, since he on whose shoulders they place it lies in the valley of Balaklava, the first who fell, and cannot raise his voice to reply, or give the lie, if it be a lie, to his calumniators. If Louis Nolan were to blame, his love for our Arm, and his jealousy over its honour, his belief that Light Cavalry would do the work of demigods, and his irritation that hitherto we had not been given the opportunity we might have had, must plead his excuse; and I think his brilliant courage, and the memory of that joyous cheer which ended in the wild death-cry which none who heard can ever forget, might silence the angry jar and jangle of contention above his grave, and set the seals of oblivion upon his error!

If only memories, explicit ones, could be caught and held in a transparent jar like fireflies.

It had been rose candy day in the Waverley house, the scent still permeating the air, even though the kitchen was closed for the evening. It smelled as if there were a garden hidden in the walls somewhere. The back labels on all the rose candy jars read: 'Rose essence is for memory of long ago first loves, have a taste and you will see the one you once dreamed of.

A bit reluctantly, trying to leave my bruised ego behind, I was warming to the Appalachian idea. Bourbon and branch water. Dulcimer music. Wildflowers in jelly jars. Biscuits and country ham. That did have a certain charm.

Parents are the barometers of emotions for children and it has a domino effect. I have never seen my mum cry so much in all of my live, which scared me and made me cry, which scared Katie and made her cry. We all cried together. As for Dad, he was supposed to live for ever. The one who could open all the jar lids nobody else could, who fixed whatever was broken, was supposed to do that for ever. The man who let me sit on his shoulders, climb on his back, case me around while making monster noises, throw me in the air and catch me, spin me around so much that I felt dizzy and fell over laughing. And in the end without being able to say thank you and a proper goodbye, my final memories of him turn into coffin sizes and medical forms.

In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler’s-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream.

The cleaning lady is green despite her blue eyes we love her beauty to death. we sniff unwashed since the beginning of the world lusting to know. and from too much knowledge we forgot that the intersection between giving and receiving the spring mist an empty sack gurgling not even French perfume makes it go away. we’re more organic exophthalmic eyes. muddy balloons. if we don’t want she chooses from what we have. what’s better more syrupy we keep searching our memories perhaps there’s a leftover slice of bread a good deed by mistake, a sprig of onion wide as a rope. we search through everything we have at least a sprinkle of kind words. an offering she wants us to stop for a moment to change our meaning. to make us at least leaves the kitchens of growing upward. what she puts us through what she doesn’t put us through. all that’s left is a baby the size of a baguette. who hopes and hopes. we’ve started thinning out and one who passed through the no. 9 mental hospital he says he’s a national security agent we that he’s a security guard. he isn’t sick he’s always right. a metal cup or maybe a jar that expands threateningly we don’t even curse him behind his back. not because of fear we think more positively when he’s around. it took us too long to understand that No, the nervous tic, with a question mark at the end of a sentence, is actually Yes. emotions jumped out of him like strings. he told us he wouldn’t have left that manelist diva. should’ve seen how he compared her to the woman he never had. he about smashed his phone. it wasn’t our fault he was the only man without a woman. (in english by Diana Manole)

In the tin-covered porch Mr Chawla had constructed at the rear of the house she had set up her outdoor kitchen, spilling over into a grassy patch of ground. Here rows of pickle jars matured in the sun like an army balanced upon the stone wall; roots lay, tortured and contorted, upon a cot as they dried; and tiny wild fruit, scorned by all but the birds, lay cut open, displaying purple-stained hearts. Ginger was buried underground so as to keep it fresh; lemon and pumpkin dried on the roof; all manner of things fermented in tightly sealed tins; chilli peppers and curry leaves hung from the branches of a tree, and so did buffalo curd, dripping from a cloth on its way to becoming paneer. Newly strong with muscles, wiry and tough despite her slenderness, Kulfi sliced and pounded, ground and smashed, cut and chopped in a chaos of ingredients and dishes. ‘Cumin, quail, mustard seeds, pomelo rind,’ she muttered as she cooked. ‘Fennel, coriander, sour mango. Pandanus flour, lichen and perfumed kewra. Colocassia leaves, custard apple, winter melon, bitter gourd. Khas root, sandalwood, ash gourd, fenugreek greens. Snake-gourd, banana flowers, spider leaf, lotus root …’ She was producing meals so intricate, they were cooked sometimes with a hundred ingredients, balanced precariously within a complicated and delicate mesh of spices – marvellous triumphs of the complex and delicate art of seasoning. A single grain of one thing, a bud of another, a moist fingertip dipped lightly into a small vial and then into the bubbling pot; a thimble full, a matchbox full, a coconut shell full of dark crimson and deep violet, of dusty yellow spice, the entire concoction simmered sometimes for a day or two on coals that emitted only a glimmer of faint heat or that roared like a furnace as she fanned them with a palm leaf. The meats were beaten to silk, so spiced and fragrant they clouded the senses; the sauces were full of strange hints and dark undercurrents, leaving you on firm ground one moment, dragging you under the next. There were dishes with an aftertaste that exploded upon you and left you gasping a whole half-hour after you’d eaten them. Some that were delicate, with a haunting flavour that teased like the memory of something you’d once known but could no longer put your finger on. Pickled limes stuffed with cardamom and cumin, crepuscular creatures simmered upon the wood of a scented tree, small river fish baked in green coconuts, rice steamed with nasturtium flowers in the pale hollow of a bamboo stem, mushrooms red – and yellow-gilled, polka-dotted and striped. Desire filled Sampath as he waited for his meals. Spice-laden clouds billowed forth and the clashing cymbals of pots and pans declared the glory of the meal to come, scaring the birds from the trees about him.

A small voice urged me to take a chance and trust him with my story, but I trapped her in a Mason jar and vacuum-sealed the lid. I didn’t owe him an explanation—I didn’t owe him anything. If I told him about my past, he would undoubtedly see me differently. How could he not? I didn’t think he was the type to judge me, considering he had his own issues, but my past would color the way he perceived me. Instead of headstrong temptress, he’d cast me in the role of a wounded bird and try to cage me. Protect me. I craved his dark intensity, and I didn’t want him to sheath those sharp edges. If he couldn’t see me as more than my past, I wouldn’t give him my present. Plus, telling him would breathe life into the memories. I’d never told anyone, ever.

In 1021 he conquered the Chalukyas of Kalyana, who then controlled much of the Deccan. In 1019, Rajendra sent another expedition against northern Karnataka and southern Maharashtra. Then in 1022 he marched his army 1,000 miles north to the Ganges and beyond, subduing the powerful kings of Orissa and Bengal, before marching south again with piles of precious gems as well as precious and numinous sacred idols of their state deities and jars full of sacred Ganges water. In memory of this,

How well you do know your own mind? This is, no doubt, a sobering question. Yet it must be answered before proceeding. The utility of any tool is defined, in part, by consistency in deployment and predictability of outcome—the absence of unforeseen surprises once it is in use. A pencil sharpener whose blade engages erratically is no asset and should be culled from your tool kit. So, too, is a mind whose unseen contours hide jarring or potentially compromising impulses, memories, panics, prejudices, weaknesses, and the like.

Father Father" Father Father Will you forgive me If I should leave your garden? I will miss the water lilies White are still my sheets of linen White is still my skin that I Bathe in scents of memories And of "Joy" by Jean Patou Father Father Will you forget me When I've crossed the seventh sea? I will sink this boat, this canopic jar To feel again the beating of your royal heart Blood as pure as porcelain Fills my loins and lungs I'll sink to the bottom To the Valley of the Kings

That is where I entered the sewer to escape,” she said. A little farther down she pointed to a street corner and said, “There I rifled the pockets of a dead man, looking for bread.” Megan tried to imagine Renata as a 14-year-old girl, only a year younger than herself, and what it must be like for her to still carry those memories. “What did you do every day?” Megan asked. “Books. I found books and would read them by daylight in a warehouse, sitting with corpses. Until the sewer, reading was my only escape.

Bennie knew her mother had loved her long after she was well enough to say so, though she barely remembered her mother’s caring for her as a child. Bennie guessed her mother had performed the routine functions that mothers do every day, for there had been evidence of it. Bennie had won awards in elementary school, tiny pins like tie tacks that lay ignored in her jewelry box, for getting good grades and having good penmanship. She had stumbled across one of the tacks this morning, dressing for her mother’s funeral, and it jarred loose a single memory: her mother teaching her cursive writing at the kitchen table, a fleeting picture of the rounded circles and elongated loops of

So you’ve run off from him, have you?” Beatrix asked, smoothing the wiry ruff on his head. “Naughty boy. I suppose you’ve had a fine old time chasing rabbits and squirrels. And there’s a damaging rumor about a missing chicken. You had better stay out of poultry yards, or it won’t go well for you in Stony Cross. Shall I take you home, boy? He’s probably looking for you. He--” She stopped at the sound of something…someone…moving through the thicket. Albert turned his head and let out a happy bark, bounding toward the approaching figure. Beatrix was slow to lift her head. She struggled to moderate her breathing, and tried to calm the frantic stutters of her heart. She was aware of the dog bounding joyfully back to her, tongue dangling. He glanced back at his master as if to convey Look what I found! Letting out a slow breath, Beatrix looked up at the man who had stopped approximately three yards away. Christopher. It seemed the entire world stopped. Beatrix tried to compare the man standing before her with the cavalier rake he had once been. But it seemed impossible that he could be the same person. No longer a god descending from Olympus…now a warrior hardened by bitter experience. His complexion was a deep mixture of gold and copper, as if he had been slowly steeped in sun. The dark wheaten locks of his hair had been cut in efficiently short layers. His face was impassive, but something volatile was contained in the stillness. How bleak he looked. How alone. She wanted to run to him. She wanted to touch him. The effort of standing motionless caused her muscles to tremble in protest. She heard herself speak in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “Welcome home, Captain Phelan.” He was silent, staring at her without apparent recognition. Dear Lord, those eyes…frost and fire, his gaze burning through her awareness. “I’m Beatrix Hathaway,” she managed to say. “My family--” “I remember you.” The rough velvet of his voice was a pleasure-stroke against her ears. Fascinated, bewildered, Beatrix stared at his guarded face. To Christopher Phelan, she was a stranger. But the memories of his letters were between them, even if he wasn’t aware of it. Her hand moved gently over Albert’s rough fur. “You were absent in London,” she said. “There was a great deal of hullabaloo on your behalf.” “I wasn’t ready for it.” So much was expressed in that spare handful of words. Of course he wasn’t ready. The contrast would be too jarring, the blood-soaked brutality of war followed by a fanfare of parades and trumpets and flower petals. “I can’t imagine any sane man would be,” she said. “It’s quite an uproar. Your picture is in all the shop windows. And they’re naming things after you.” “Things,” he repeated cautiously. “There’s a Phelan hat.” His brows lowered. “No there isn’t.” “Oh, yes there is. Rounded at the top. Narrow-brimmed. Sold in shades of gray or black. They have one featured at the milliner’s in Stony Cross.” Scowling, Christopher muttered something beneath his breath.

Been in love since I was a kid, But now we had outplayed our bid, Jar of memories shut by a lid, She wanted me to leave her forever, And so I did!

THE TALKING CURE K. J. Zimring | 3996 words Kim Zimring recently moved from Georgia to Seattle. Her poignant story about an old man's memories of a perilous childhood, however, was written in New Mexico, at Walter Jon Williams's "indisputably fine Rio Hondo workshop." Kim is a graduate of Clarion 2005 and her previous stories have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, and the Writers of the Future anthology. My first memory is of my dead mother. I'm crouched by her face, mouth close enough to kiss, waiting for a breath that never comes. An open jar of mushrooms sits beside her, spoon embedded in its boggy heart. Botulism is the cause of death, I presume, though why I selected that for the image I couldn't say. Some warning about home-canned goods wrapped together in my childish brain with the classic Oedipal love/fear complex: Mother, bringing food and death.

So maybe it’s love, but maybe it’s too soon to tell. I need to know that my feelings are real. That I didn’t feel this way just to jar a memory or to pay him back for all the wonderful things he’s given me.

In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler’s-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless.

My Mother was amazed about the availability and abundance of all that food; about chickens without feathers; about borscht in a jar. I was astounded about the variety of foods in a super market, about the packaging, about the great array of fruits and vegetables available so readily in autumn. There were many kinds that I had never seen before. To my surprise, I was told that everything could be had all year round. I was struck by the idea of washing machines. It had not occurred to me that human hands could be replaced even to that extent. The highways and the bridges astonished my Father greatly, especially the bridges.

Of course, come to-morrow" I said and gave him my address in Brooklyn. Before he arrived, he sent me a magnificent arrangement of flowers. We had moved to Brooklyn in November and had the essentially necessary furniture, but no flower vase. When the flowers arrived, I used two borscht jars to put them in. Carlos Bendayan arrived and we talked and talked. He was the son of a wealthy Sephardic family from Venezuela. Carlos was a young man, about 21, on his first trip abroad alone. He was telling me that he realized that I must be Jewish and it became clear to me that I knew very little about Sepharadim. His name was Hebrew, it meant: son of the judge. He was going to spend the Christmas vacation with his parents and younger brother in Spain. Actually, he was being groomed to enter his father's business.

some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain.

Ugh. That smell. It always conjures up hated memories of the stupid jar of pennies my father had kept on the window sill in the den whenever he was home. The stench of the copper pennies baking in the hot sun stunk up the room even more than he did. I hated going in there. Even after he went back on the road and Mom moved the jar, the smell lingered.

When it seems you are having too much fun, then a switch turns on in your head and makes you think; if only there were a way to take a snapshot of this moment and place it into a mason jar next to some peach preserves. Or, you can just close your eyes and let the joy sink into your psyche. Each, in their own way will last a lifetime." - A.H. Scott 4/29/12

Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. She got a twinge – as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a ‘phantom tooth’, when the nerve is exposed – she felt a twinge walking past the garage, where she and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam-jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueller than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She didn’t want to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she was, and she found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement, through the high road – Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she could reel them off blindfold; and then down under pigeon-shit bridge and that long wide road that drops into Gladstone Park as if it’s falling into a green ocean. You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect.

In part, sucking cock is muscle memory. When a girl has her head pushed down for the first time, she starts to learn to tease a blowjob out for delicious minutes for a man she adores or get it over with as quickly as she can for a man who had pressured her.

Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness. It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief, or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.

I read in some scientific journal that the brain doesn’t know the difference between a fantasy and a memory, that they both leave the same signature. I also read that a memory isn’t stored like data on a hard drive or a jar of olives in the pantry. Rather, it’s re-created from scratch every time you conjure it.

And just as he was describing the event, his body began to slightly tremble again - a visceral reaction to the memory of his mother. The trauma of her leaving had seeped into his cells.

say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin. Start with a waking, end with a wake, maybe. Hard asleep is, I am informed, the technical term. Hard, because you’re shut down, dried out, frozen for the trip from star to star. They have it down to a fine art—takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of miscreants who are desiccated down to something that can… well, I was about to say survive indefinitely, but that’s not how it goes, of course. You don’t survive. You die, but in a very specific flash-frozen way that allows for you to be restarted again more or less where you left off at the other end. After all the shunting about that would kill any body—the permanent, non-recoverable kind of kill—who wasn’t withered down. They pump you full of stuff that reinflates you to more or less your previous dimensions—you’ll note there’s a lot of more or less in this process. It is an exact science, just not one that cares about the exact you. Your thought processes don’t quite pick up where they left off. Short-term memory isn’t preserved; more recent mental pathways don’t make the cut. Start with a waking, therefore, because in that instant it’s all you’ve got, until you can establish some connection to older memories. You know who you are, but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. Which sounds terrifying but then let me tell you what you’re waking up into: actual hell. The roaring of colossal structural damage as the ship breaks up all around you. The jostling jolt as the little translucent bubble of plastic you’re travelling in is jarred loose and begins to tumble. A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space. The fact there’s a below and an above shows that the planet’s already won that particular battle over your soul and you’re falling.

The jar quickly drained between them, with Kimmie drinking most of it, until only the soaked flower lay at the bottom. Kimmie reached in with her fingers and brought it to Lee's face with mischief glistering in her eyes. She tickled the tip of her nose and trailed it down. Without thinking, Lee closed her eyes and parted her lips. She felt it fill her mouth like a soft spider. The petals were jellied and lush as she bit softly and chewed. The taste was an overwhelming version of the liquor itself. A phantasm of undiluted shifting flavors: honey, leaves, bubblegum, ash, blood. When she finally swallowed, she lay back on the ground with the force of it. Her skin tingled like something was coming up through her pores. Thin roots sprouted from every inch of skin that touched the grass: the back of her head, her shoulder blades, her thighs. They probed into the dirt and snaked their way down, farther into the earth, branching and spreading below her. She could feel the roots glowing. An electricity crackled through her, and she knew it was the power of the land. They were connected. She sensed the groundwater flowing below as it fed the wells of the houses tucked into the mountains. When she focused on the water itself, she could access the memories it held, of every living thing that ever made a home on this land. A dinosaur lapping from a creek with its long tongue. A prehistoric woman peering down into its reflective surface and seeing herself staring back. She could sense the coal, the natural gas, the zinc, the marble, nestled like treasure deep within the clay and stone.

Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. She got a twinge – as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a ‘phantom tooth’, when the nerve is exposed – she felt a twinge walking past the garage, where she and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam-jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueller than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She didn’t want to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she was, and she found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement, through the high road – Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she could reel them off blindfold; and then down under pigeon-shit bridge and that long wide road that drops into Gladstone Park as if it’s falling into a green ocean. You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect.

Memories of that stone room echoed around my mind. Of the jars of lightning and the metal tools that had carved into my flesh over and over. Darius had done that to me. It was all Darius. Every time I thought of him or woke calling for him in the night or screamed his name while begging for his help, that was what I'd gotten in return. He’d never come for me. He’d abandoned me to that fate.

So, what are your thoughts about this symbol, Kate?" he asked mildly. "Well, you see, the picture jarred my memory. Actually, I can't believe that I forgot---but, then again, I was just a wee thing at the time." "Forgot about what?" he asked impatiently. "My mother's book!" He eyed her warily, recalling at once the book he had seen the Count DuMarin's veiled daughter, Lady Gabrielle, holding tightly to her chest on the night she had been handed over into the watchful care of Captain Fox. Rohan had assumed it was a Bible. "My mother brought a book with her from France containing this same symbol!" Kate explained. "It was a big thick tome, with all kinds of strange symbols and diagrams and writings. It had little maps and puzzles of different sorts figure out. Back when I was a little girl on my father's ship, my parents were constantly poring over it." He frowned. "Rohan, it was all about Valerian the Alchemist!" she exclaimed. "I don't know if the book was by him or simply written about him, but it contained clues to the secret location of his tomb. They were on a treasure hunt!" He narrowed his eyes. The Alchemist's Tomb? But it had passed into legend long ago. "Alchemy---you know!" Kate was saying excitedly. "Changing base metals into gold? There was supposed to be a horde of hidden treasure buried with him.

The butter was real of course. Daddy had a fetish about using only real butter. As he handed it to me, I noticed the hue was brash and yellow, almost like the artificial color used in the making of cheap Margarine. The boysenberry preserves were recently purchased. The glass had a bright red foil label with intricate embossed wording and as I turend the lid, I heard the sucking sound of the seal breaking. Daddy looked over, concerned, until I carefully laid the jar of jam on the counter, pushing it toward him. "I can do everything Tweetie Bird," he said to me. I smiled, embarrassed at my old nickname from when I was a child and nodded my head.