Fiction logo

how to make memories

or, lying to your friends will keep you happy

By Joanna McLoughlinPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 8 min read
2
how to make memories
Photo by Michael Skok on Unsplash

day one

I was invited to the beach today, but they will eventually stop asking me, after a while, when they realise, I never go. Summer is just not my season for fun. I make a different excuse every time, but eventually the walls will close in around me. Someone will ask a direct question and I will either answer them, or I will be able to wriggle out of it somehow. I am used to avoiding the question now.

I am afraid of water, terrified of it, and I have extensive scarring up the length of my left leg. I will tell my friends about the time I was attacked by a shark when I was a child. I will recall my parents’ screams in the moments they thought I would be lost forever in the gruesome scene, crystal waters turning crimson with their only child’s blood, right before their eyes. They will listen to me recount the cycle of my mother’s all-consuming guilt in the aftermath, as the surgeons valiantly fought for my shark-bitten leg, our struggle to overcome this life-changing incident. I would see their eyes wide open as I described the pain and the fear, a family destroyed, and the detrimental impact of my ongoing, lifelong, phobias.

People are cruel, and people are rude, nosey and entitled. They ask questions as if I owe them the entire truths of my life, they pry with fake concerns, they rest in self-righteous judgment. Regardless of my response, they only hear their own answers. Anyway, the truth is rarely as attractive as people hope. Honesty seldom ends up being the best policy, in my own experience.

I didn’t used to plan a lie; I’m just an expert at deadpan joking, usually in bad taste. I realised nobody questioned it until I did that weird fake laugh thing at the end to let them know. One day, I just stopped doing the laugh, and in the absence of comfort, the stories started becoming their own truths. Orphans aren’t supposed to joke, it seems, and the world seemed more comfortable with the lies.

No, of course there was never a shark attack, nobody gets mauled by sharks around here without it being enormous news. Really, I’m not even that afraid of water. Ok, fine, you got me, I have no fear of water. I just don’t like people looking at my scars, or even being in those situations where people consider it their innate right to comment on my scars. I cover up, I avoid.

The worst thing about creating new truth is that the troublesome ones will perpetuate attention, and now I look back on the consequences, I’m second guessing the shark story. It’s one of those things that everyone considers interesting, and then wants to tell their friends. So, the story spreads and then I’ve gone full circle… ultimately, I then must talk constantly about the one thing I intended never being the topic of discussion.

Forget the shark. I will not use that story again; it went so badly last time. I need to prepare the story better because I cannot let it run away with me like that. Maybe a car crash? They’re pretty dull and telling that kind of story tends to send others off on a tangent with their own tales. The fantastical shark was a misstep; the key is to remain unnoticed, under the radar. Distract from, rather than overwhelm, the conversation.

I wish I could be invisible. No, that’s wrong. I hate hiding. I wish I could close their mouths; God knows, their minds are closed enough already. I can see their pity faces and their fascination faces while they attempt so carefully to word their intrusions into my soul. Every stare burns a hole in me, every sentence stabbing into my heart, churning my stomach, eating daylight into dark places I need to keep behind my own veil of consciousness. When they come for me with their questions, it feels like scratching inside an open wound, and every time it has happened, it leaves the pain so much worse than before. The scarring just seems to grow, inside me, outside me; I feel constrained by it, torn by it, enveloped by it. Adhesions upon adhesions, to which I remain bound eternally.

Perhaps, this time, I might volunteer the information, pre-empt their line of enquiry. I will sit down and explain the car crash. I will set the scene, the warm, sunny day, the happy family outing, smiles, and plans. Create the surprise. Fob it off as no big deal. Wait for them to start talking about their car crashes. Job done. Or, maybe this time, I will tell the truth about these scars that haunt me through both the endless nights and the terrifying days.

No, I would never do that.

***

day two

I was ready. There were only two of them, but they were the thinkers of our friendship group. They were also the disseminators of information, so I knew I could count on them to ensure everyone was kept up to date with all the developments.

‘We had decided to take a trip to the beach.’ I was going to keep the details and the dramatics to the absolute minimum, I was so sick of this dance after all these years. ‘I was, like, eight or something, and I don’t really remember the details.’ Nice cover if things get tricky, I always added that. ‘It was so sunny, a really bright day; on the way there, my dad was dazzled by the morning sunlight and swerved to avoid a truck on that little road along the coast outside Brookton. The car was written off, it hit a tree and rolled, like, a billion times.’

‘Huh?’ Andy just looked confused, ‘So you don’t want to go to the beach because you had a crash near it?’

I realised I’d missed out the crucial point of the story. The scars. Shit.

I faltered, ‘I have scars… the accident - really bad, I hate people seeing them,’ and even the stammering would have been fine if only I couldn’t feel the nervous flush rising up through my entire body, burning red into my cheeks like a newly branded animal. They could see it. They would know.

I had not even mentioned my mother’s death. I couldn’t just tag it on at the end, except in that second, I did – ‘It was that day, my mum, you know, and the scars…’ I tailed off. I had not even succeeded in convincing myself.

She took a deep breath and did not quite make eye contact with me. ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you,’ said Cam. The words were right, but her tone was flat, her mind elsewhere. I felt her processing all the information in front of her. She knew.

The evening moved on, nothing changed, we laughed, we drank, and both the moment and the story both seemed to disappear into an easy past.

***

day three

It was lunchtime when Cam knocked on the door. I was about to make eggs. She never usually came over without texting first. I knew it was her when I heard the familiar rattling of an engine that really could use some attention, and it always seemed like a Coke can fell out of her car door every time she opened it; a weird sequence of specific noises that amounted to her own personalised early-warning system.

I opened the door with the carton of eggs in my hand, smiling a welcome, albeit surprised. She was holding a printout in her right hand; her grip on it was fierce, and her face held no pleasantries. Cam pushed the paper towards me, with an outstretched arm.

‘You were fifteen,’ she spat, tears in her eyes. The paper was a news article about the opening of the Brookton coast road, she was nearly right, a few days before my fifteenth birthday. That was careless, was the last coherent thought I can hold on to.

‘And it fucking heads west,’ she added.

I felt the colour drain from my skin, as the lie sank through my flesh and being as if I had been sucked into the very centre of the Earth. I had no awareness of the eggs slipping from my fingers, because it felt as though I had no grip, no hands, no corporeal form. They must have broken, maybe in slow motion, along with the world ending and my own paused heartbeat echoing in my ears like some forgotten gong.

It was not the moment I had been caught in my lie. It was not the clumsy untruth. It was the clawing talons of the past gouging at me with a vicious reality from which I had worked so hard to separate myself. Every story I had woven kept yesterday at bay, but now the opposite was true, and it was as if I could feel my leg weakening, dissolving, breaking in every cell, as it was torn apart for the second time.

Cam was screaming silent words at me, nothing words, laced with spit and fury and the force of her hurt. I could hear only one sound: the sound it made to relive that moment when I was eight years old. The colour red. The sound it made when he tried to destroy me. Red. The sound it made when my mother tried to stop him. Red. The sound it made when he turned on himself. Red. Noise.

My disappearance into unconsciousness came as suddenly as it did that day when I was eight.

***

day twenty two

I am awake, I think. Not really, not properly awake, like other people. I want to go home but I don’t want to remember again. There is nothing in this room that belongs to me, nothing of my own. Three weeks and it’s still easier not to speak. No lies, no truth. There are cards, whoever they are from. I have been hugging a soft toy. I don’t know where it came from. It is a cuddly shark.

I should’ve gone with the shark story.

///if you enjoyed this dark tale, please leave a heart or share my work on social media! Thank you so much for reading ///

Horror
2

About the Creator

Joanna McLoughlin

/// fiction with a dark edge ///

\\\non-fiction on the wellbeing tip\\\

CW/TW for my fiction work: often contains violence and may contain references to trauma/dv/assault

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.