A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons

Author:Matthew Lyons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

31

The rest of the day crept by. Without anything on hand to pass the time, Anne lay on the bed, locked in her little hand-built cabin, and watched the sunlight glide glacially across the ceiling, going over everything in her head, trying to fit it all together, as if seeing the whole picture would somehow make it all make sense. Except she didn’t have the whole picture. Not even close. She’d seen frames of it, snapshots, blurry outlines, but with every fresh glimpse, more questions arose, none with easy answers.

This is your home, Annie.

Don’t you remember?

She didn’t. She didn’t remember any of it. Life before that night at the cabin was all shadow and suggestion, more the idea of memories than memories themselves. She knew in her heart that she’d had a childhood, with a mom who she loved, and who loved her in return. She’d died protecting her, after all. But it was all just missing.

Growing up, Anne had managed to push the dead spots aside, telling herself that nobody remembered their childhoods with perfect clarity. Live long enough, and the brain starts making space for other things. Who remembered that much of their lives before age six, anyway? But there was an ocean of difference between memories slipping away to get shredded in the tide and having them burned whole-cloth from your head, with only scorch marks left behind to show that there was ever anything there in the first place. There was real trauma associated with something like that.

More than most people, Anne understood trauma. It latched on to you like a plague or a curse and stayed with you for years, if not your whole life. Trauma left marks, inside and out. She didn’t remember this place, or Win, or the night she got the scars on her hands, but she’d watched it—watched herself—on that video all the same, and seeing what she’d seen on that motel room TV, she wasn’t surprised that her memories had turned to ash and blown away. The pain and trauma from something like that were far too big to get her arms around, too incomprehensible to internalize. Especially at six years old.

Pain was the default setting for being alive. It was a realization that Anne had stumbled upon early on in life, walking away from the pop-canned Jeep that night with a gun in her hands. Either you made your peace with that fact, or you let it eat you. For the longest time, Anne thought she had made her peace with not getting to know the woman her mom really was, of having half of her childhood seared out of her skull, of the nightmares that chased her for years after the fact. But sitting here, now, in a place she didn’t remember where everyone seemed to know her, she started to think that maybe the remembering really would have been worse.

There was a knock at the door. Anne looked up with a start and realized that at some point, the sun had set, slipping gently beyond the trees.

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