Charred Memories

By Yashna Jalan

“Pa, let me make your tea.”

Alan watches the girl twirl her fingers through her long blond curls. She reminds him of Goldilocks, though he cannot recall her name. What unsettles him more is the flicker of knowledge: the way she will one day be found in her kitchen, collapsed beside a packet of cigarettes. He has seen that ending before. He lives with it daily.

How he wishes he could remember her now.

“Of course,” he says gently. “Add a lot of milk.”

She stops, almost corrects him, then bites her lip. “But—”

“What?” His voice sharpens, too quick.

The morning outside is purple, like a bruise spreading across the sky. She pulls the curtain apart and folds the fabric slowly, carefully. The sun slides in, the color of unfinished truths, and Alan thinks again of her pale body in the kitchen, years from now. The memory of what hasn’t happened yet presses into him with the weight of certainty.

“You don’t like milk,” she replies at last.

Alan frowns. “I love milk. I don’t drink tea without it.”

“I added it yesterday,” she says softly. “You pushed it away and cursed.”

Her voice breaks off, and her hands retreat behind her back.

Alan studies her. He doesn’t know why she talks this way, as though she has the script of a play he cannot remember. But he knows the arc of her life better than she does. He knows she will break her arm on the stairs, and that her husband will smile the wrong kind of smile, the kind that splits the sun in half. He sighs. The inevitability of those things exhausts him. 

“Maybe I was sick, I should apply for leave,” he mutters.

She hesitates between a laugh and a frown. “Don’t you remember, Pa? You are not in the army anymore”

But he doesn’t. That is cruelty. That is the void.

“Oh,” he whispers, pulling the covers away from his body. The act feels oddly nostalgic, like peeling away skins. It reminds him of the moment just before darkness. That memory doesn’t frighten him. Nothing about endings frightens him anymore.

“I’ll be done with the tea.”

“I would like to go for a walk,” Alan says as he tries to stand.

“No, Pa. The doctor said you need rest.”

But her words are slower than his impulse. He pushes himself upright and promptly collapses back onto the bed. There is no pain, only humiliation, the kind that cuts deeper than bruises.

In that hollow space of defeat, a thought strikes him with sharp clarity: Even stripped of strength, even mocked by my own mind, I have one liberty left, deciding who I want to be.

She rushes to help him. “Why do you keep forgetting the accident?” she asks, as she massages his mangled knee. She steadies him. “You keep forgetting everything lately, Pa.” 

“ Yes, because you never leave a man behind…. And that is not and accident, just battle scars”

He knows more than she can imagine. He knows how she will get the scar on her wrist. He knows that in eight years, when the police call him with news of her body, his old heart will lurch with grief so unbearable it will feel like memory itself is breaking.

“I remember,” he lies.

She nods.

“Go get my tea.”

When she leaves, he stares at the light switching on in the kitchen. Thinking about small things: lamplight, teacups, the smell of boiling water, comforts him. They make him feel as delicate and powerful as snowflakes.

She returns with a silver tray, sets the cup before him. The tea glows like dawn, and his hands clutch it thickly.

“Where’s Mike?” Alan asks suddenly.

She pauses. “Who is Mike?”

Alan presses his lips to the rim of the cup and kisses it softly, instinctively, like a forehead. Tears rise unbidden.

“Your lover emm your  husband,” he says, his jaw clenched.

“But, Pa… I’m not married.”

He looks away. Sips. She sighs, sinks into the chair opposite, her eyes searching for him.

“Pa, you’re forgetful,” she says carefully. “Do you need to see the doctor?”

“I am fine.”

“I’ll take you anyway. You say strange things.”

Alan smiles faintly. That’s in four years, he thinks, the moment she will drag him into a doctor’s office. He shakes at the rough weight of that foresight.

“Your hair is beautiful Susan,” he murmurs instead. 

She was taken aback, because it was years since he had taken her mothers name.

He knew he had said something , he shouldn't have, but he couldn't understand why.  It was as though her existence was locked away in some vault of his mind. Too painful to let it surface. Memories are beautiful to make, but so darn painful to forget. 

When the tea is finished, only a brown trail of sugar remains. He hums Oh Susana, dont you wait for me.. and abruptly stops.  He hands her the mug, but as she covers it with her palm, he strokes her stomach, and  he blurts without meaning to: “He has Mike’s smile. Mike is good, but he’s not good enough. No one is good enough for my Susan”

Her face changes. The mug shatters against the wall, fragments scattering like startled birds. She grabs a broom, breathing hard, and mutters, "That's not my name”

Alan wraps the sheets around his body. The twisting fabric feels like peeling skins again, like rituals he half-remembers with blades and hands unwashed. Memory and imagination blur until he cannot tell which is which.

She doesn’t know who he is anymore, and he doesn’t know who she is. But he knows this: in eight years, when they discover her in her kitchen, he will sit on a hotel balcony with cars groaning below, his aged body trembling, his grief inconsolable.

That is how he remembers the future. That is how he knows he loves her now.

“Can you take me for a walk?” he asks.

She hesitates, then nods. “But tell me what’s happening first.”

“Take me outside and we’ll talk.”

Arm in arm, they leave the house. She sways their steps gently, as though she can guide him with rhythm. The streets are alive with market stalls and laughter. He claps like a child, delight spilling briefly through the cracks of confusion.

He painstakingly pulls out a cigarette. She hides her disdain and her fear, remembering the doctor's advice not to curb any natural feelings. 

They pass an antique shop. She waves to an old man. “Good afternoon, Michael!”

Michael. The name lands heavy. The man clasps Alan’s hands. Alan shudders. Handholding feels wrong. Too intimate. Too deliberate. He wonders why this man grips him as though they share a history he cannot touch.

“How are you, Alan? Good to see you out,” Michael says warmly.

“I am fine,” Alan replies cautiously, though the words feel foreign in his mouth. A surge of pain, unnamed and sharp, ripples through him.

“The sun is magical today,” Michael says. “You’ll be back to yourself soon.”

Alan pulls away. He doesn’t like the way Michael’s eyes linger at her.

They stop beneath a bakery sign hung backwards. His daughter lowers herself onto a trembling bench. He lights the cigarette. 

“How are you feeling, Pa?” she asks.

Alan studies her face, the worry lines too deep for her age. “Who was that man?”

“Michael,” she says, exasperated. “Mum’s and your best friend. My godfather.”

Alan laughs into his palms, the sound muffled,ironic and desperate.

They reach the Doctors office, Alan feels the warmth of familiarity. 

They give each other a warm hug. The doctor checks him with the same level of cordiality that he has shown over the years. He recognized Theo, and the fact that they had both served in Vietnam, formed an intangible bond. He asks him routine questions. He skirts around the topic of the fateful night. Trying to evaluate how much or how little he remembers about the fateful night. He was blank about it then as he was now. Silence is the loudest scream.

“ I would like to speak to Carol, for a bit now” 

“ She’s waiting outside,” he said , while the nurse led him out. 

He waits outside the chamber in a wooden chair. The golden hour plays and he smiles as though engulfed in nostalgia as the notes of Sway with me fill the room. 

“ He has been this way since mother died in the kitchen fire,” she told the doctor. “It's been more than twenty years. He has deteriorated so much… that he doesn't remember me” she sobbed.

. “ He just did,” said Dr Theo, nudging  the box of tissues towards her. She looked up in shock and surprise…then said “ So, he is getting better… right doc?” trying to cling on to some thread of intangible rope. 

“ Not really, he will float in and out of consciousness. Carol, there might be things he remembers but keeps to himself. That might prove to be detrimental, to him” he reached out and touched her hand, and continued, “and others around him. I think it's time ..” 

“ No, never..I will take care of him,” she said , trying to sound confident. 

“ You are too close to him, to see objectively” 

“ Carol,” he said in a soothing voice flipping through Alan's file “ My first diagnosis was PTST” he paused to lower his voice “ but it went untreated”. 

“ Yes, but you knew how mum was about these things, she never took it seriously…” she mumbled

“ Her death was a shock to him, his brain blanked it out. Almost full amnesia, but now, he is remembering things…. And half memories and half truths can be dangerous” 

Dr Theo sat back and looked at Carol. She was his daughter's age, but looked way older. How desperately she was trying to hide her vulnerability. Lines of worry were visible. She was clearly suffering from trauma fatigue herself. 

“ Carol,” he said softly, “ It's time to put him in a home that deals with patients like him. Think about it” he said empathically. 

He walked her out. They walked back in silence. A silence of many unasked questions.

He doesn’t know her name. But he knows that in a year, after her marriage she calls him in tears, telling him about her adultery and begging to come home, he will take her in. He will tell her Mickeal was never good enough. 

These invisible snippets of the future crowd him until he fears they will scar him permanently.

“I can see the future,” he whispers.

“Oh, Pa,” she says softly, almost pitying.

He looks at her, and knows, without knowing how, that she doesn’t believe him. He begins to laugh again, clutching his palms to his mouth as though to trap the sound. And in that laughter, he leaves behind, her and Mike, and the kitchen where everything will end.

The next morning, Doctor Theo’s phone rang just after dawn. The voice on the other end was clipped, professional, but it carried the weight of something irreparable. A young woman had been found dead, her body pulled from the blackened wreckage of a kitchen fire. She had named him as her emergency contact.

Theo sat in silence for a long moment, the receiver pressed cold against his ear, the words trickling into him like ice water. He thought of her handwriting on the forms, neat but uncertain, and the way she had once smiled as though still learning how. It felt unbearably strange that such small gestures now marked the line between presence and absence.

When he arrived, the house was little more than smoke and charred walls. On the sofa nearby sat an old man, fragile and wasted, his gaze fixed on nothing. His hands trembled against his knees. He could no longer recall his name, nor the years that had shaped it, yet his body remembered enough to grieve. He cried softly, not for her as the world had known her, but for something more private and inarticulate, perhaps the memory of being loved, now lost even to himself.

His mouth formed sounds that stumbled and broke, fragments of words reduced to ash, much like the room around him. He was speaking to his shadow on the wall, mumbling nonsense syllables as though confiding in an old friend who could no longer answer. And in that senseless murmur, Theo heard the rawest truth of all: the grief that lives after memory, the sorrow that does not need names.

By Yashna Jalan