To Remember

Ayla sat in the grey sand, the warm froth of a late June sea lapping at her knees and toes and thighs. The hem of her khaki shorts was damp, alternately wetted by the waves and dried by the two suns positioned at ten and one in the lilac sky above.

“Ayla.” 

She whispered the name to herself, with a subtle glance to her left and to her right to see if she was still alone. Several times a day, Ayla reminded herself of her name. 

Sometimes she did it while washing her face, her slim fingers massaging her forehead, the bridge of her long nose and the ridges of her cheek bones, trying to imagine what she looked like now at 16 years old. 

Sometimes she mouthed it while spooning soup between her pursed lips, a time when she knew that everyone else was too focused on their own bowls to see what one girl was doing with hers. 

Sometimes she spelled it slowly, or traced her fingers across the sand, willing them to remember the shapes of letters: A…Y…L…A.

For nine years, Ayla had practiced this quiet remembering. Most often she worked on simple, important tasks like her name or her birthday, or the names of her family members. 

Her mom most of all: Gelda. 

When a long evening stretched out before her, she liked to lay back on the beach, her bare toes reaching for the waves, and close her eyes. She started always with her very first memory: her three-year-old self perched on the edge of a wooden stool, leaning her round belly into the counter top for stability; her chubby fingers swirling through a tray of dye and shaving cream. She could still hear her mom laughing as Ayla tried to taste it, confusing it with whipped cream. 

She scrolled mentally through years of softball and swimming lessons and playdates, hugs from her grandparents, and birthday parties. Then there she was, turning seven years old the very morning of The Reckoning.

This one memory Ayla didn’t believe she needed to practice to remember. But she practiced it anyway, because something small in the back of her mind told her she should. That it might be important someday. 

She remembered the feel of her flannel sheets as she woke up that morning, her mother’s voice pushing open her bedroom door with a hearty, “Morning, Ayla! Uppy uppy!” Her mom swept into her room, a tray of breakfast goodies balanced on one hand and their small dog, Tater, tucked under her other arm. Depositing both the food and the dog on the bed, she swung around, opening curtains and picking up clothes and toys in one swift typhoon of motherly affection.

Ayla stretched, and sat up against her pink pillows. She balanced the tray of bacon and eggs, toast, and juice carefully on her lap. A small box, wrapped in silver and gold foil paper, caught her eye.

“Can I open it?” she asked.

“Mais oui, mi petit choux,” her mother smiled, showing her tiny, slightly crooked teeth that Ayla loved.

She unwrapped the box as carefully as it had been wrapped, one corner and fold at a time. At last, she removed the black lid and lifted the cotton pillow to reveal a small heart shaped locket. Beautifully, perfectly silver, it had the teeniest sliver of a sapphire on one side.

“Open it!” her mother squealed. “Look inside.”

As Ayla fumbled with the locket, her mother gently lifted it from her hands. With the smooth edge of one bright blue fingernail, she pried open the edge of the locket, and handed it back to her.

In one half of the heart, her mom smiled back at her. On the other half, Tater’s brown eyes twinkled.

Ayla gasped.

“Thank you, Mama.”

“You’re welcome. Now eat your breakfast before Tater steals more of your bacon!”

At this point in the remembering, Ayla’s heart squeezed sharply for Tater, and she clutched the locket in her shorts pocket as tightly as she dared. 

And at this point in the remembering, the point just before The Reckoning, Ayla would shiver, and sit up, and rejoin the others.

The others didn’t mean to forget, of course. Forgetting was what was supposed to happen. As Ayla sat down for lunch with everyone who had survived the long journey from Earth to Catania, she watched their blank faces as they moved to their chairs. They murmured “hello” and “excuse me” to their neighbors as they passed, but without any recognition as to whom they were speaking. Here on Catania, everyone was equal in at least one sense of the word: Without personal possessions, without perceived differences, without names, they were all interchangeable. 

Across the room, a woman walked with a slight stoop, her dark hair pinned in a bun like everyone else’s. Ayla’s breath caught as it did at every meal, every walk on the beach, every moment when she walked through a door and saw her mother. 

“Gelda,” she whispered.

“G. E. L. D. A.”

The head of the woman next to Ayla started, and she gave Ayla a long, searching look, her green eyes glazed with years of forgetting.

“Excuse me?”

“Soup,” Ayla said hurriedly. “Time to eat the soup.”

The woman nodded slightly, mollified. She picked up her spoon, waiting for the bowl that would bring her peace.

Ayla struggled after every bowl of soup. Remembering was harder then. Most people chose to nap after lunch and dinner, before resuming their hobbies in the garden and art room. Those who chose the garden could be seen pulling green things from the ground, piling them next to others who would then put them back into the black soil. Those in the art rooms painted walls in long, fluid stripes of taupe and ivory and alabaster, passing paint brushes one to the other in silent synchronicity. 

Ayla avoided both.

She split her time between the darkness of the woods and the brightness of the beach. Sometimes she wandered between the two, hoping for a glimpse of her mother. 

Sometimes she was lucky enough to get close enough to touch her. These were bitter times for Ayla, to stand so close to her, to smell her, to remember her arms around her. She would stand close enough for her mother to see her. 

“Excuse me,” her mother would say politely. “I’m passing by.”

And that was it. Ayla would go back to either the woods or the sea, or sometimes even to a bunk. There she would lie either in the soft moss, or the warm sand, or the scratchy sheets, and remember Tater and Dad and Mama and the Before Times. 

The day that the people of Catania started disappearing, Ayla was lying on the moss in the woods, remembering the second half of her 7th birthday, the day of The Reckoning. 

The day when her dad had suddenly lost his mind over her mother’s perfume. 

“You’re giving me a headache, Gelda!” her dad had shouted. “Why would you do that? Shower, bathe, something, just get rid of that nauseating odor!”

Ayla’s mother had done none of that. Instead, she had shouted a bit herself, and slamming the door, left for the afternoon. Late that day, just before Ayla’s party was supposed to start, she came back into the house, dropped her keys on the table, and took a shower. 

She didn’t hear her husband scream when he was dragged from the house, but Ayla, hiding behind the couch, did. She couldn’t see the creatures who took him, but she could hear their scaly feet drag across the hardwood floors. She could hear Tater’s warning barks end with a squeal, and burying herself deeper behind the couch, cried tears she knew she couldn’t let anyone hear.

Later when the creatures returned to cover Gelda and Ayla’s heads with burlap and walk them out, Ayla could hear their grunty breathing and smell their mossy bodies. 

Never in nine years had anyone seen the creatures. The women and the girls who became women didn’t know how they arrived in Catania, or how they knew what to do or where to go. They just ate their soup, worked their gardens, painted the walls, and slept, a life of quiet forgetting. 

Except for Ayla. 

Today, years after that, years after The Reckoning, the people of Catania started disappearing with much less noise. 

The first was a young woman, maybe a few years older than Ayla, who wandered through the woods past her, and then was just gone. 

Ayla sat up, looked around, but the other girl was nowhere to be seen. 

An hour later, at lunch, the three women to her left, right, and across the table leaned in for a bite of soup, and as their spoons brushed their lips, they faded from view. 

Ayla felt sick. She knew she needed to eat her soup, but she couldn’t. As she scanned the long table up and down, searching for the only face that mattered, four more people slipped away. 

Ayla knew it was wrong, even though she’d never been punished for it or seen anyone else punished for anything, but she pushed herself away from the table. She ran up and down the room, behind the chairs, searching for her mother’s face, sometimes forceably pulling people by their shoulders to see who they were. 

When she made eye contact, they flinched, dropped their spoons and evaporated beneath her hands. 

Tears slid down her cheeks as everyone she saw vanished, until there were only two people left in the room with her. One old woman sat at the head of the table, slowly sipping soup from the end of her spoon, her eyes focused on some point far beyond Ayla. Another woman sat a few seats down from her, her head bent over her bowl.

Mama. 

Ayla threw her arms around her mother, willing her to stay. 

Her mother looked up at her, through her. 

“Mama,” Ayla said, feeling her own hands, her legs, drifting away like sand with the change of the tide. 

At the end of the table, the old woman still sat, still slowly eating her soup. Ayla watched as she, too, slipped away in a silver haze. 

She looked deep into her mother’s eyes, saying her name again and again, “Mama, Gelda, Mama!” Her mother grew brighter as Ayla faded. 

Her mother’s eyes stared back, not registering her daughter’s disappearance. 

Metal hit the floor with a clink, a slight shiver of chain. 

Gelda, alone now, reached down to pick up the locket. She caressed it with her garden worn nails, prying it open to find a woman and dog staring back at her. 

She knew this woman. This dog. Confused, she stood and scanned the room, the table of half empty bowls, spoons scattered like confetti. 

Her face contorting with pain, she remembered. 

“Ayla,” she whispered. 

“Ayla! AYLA!"