TOPICAL DIS/ORDER, FICTION
A M N E S I A
IV—VI
by MERCY FERRARS

30/10/2022
Read Part I (Chapters I—III) here.
Four—“Amnesia”
My fingers are trembling. I press my hands against my hips so that no one sees. I am standing in a queue with other people who do not look like me, except we look the same. Each of us wears a plain black T‑shirt and dark grey jeans. Each of us has shorn hair. And each of us looks as pristine as if we had just been born: no blemishes, no scars, no traces of having lived carved into the surface of our bodies. Finally, there’s the paper wristband coiled around my wrist. Each of us wears one. A placeholder to eventually be replaced by a reversible tattoo.
Two days ago, someone disconnected me from the apparatus, put clothes on my bed and provided me with solid food for the first time since I awoke. That someone was a small, quiet woman with warm, gentle hands. I asked for her name when she put my wristband on, but she just smiled.
My wristband says: name: raven | age: 25 | 0609. I try to peek at the wristbands of the others, but I don’t have any luck.
We are standing in front of the entrance doors to a large, white hall. The whole building—or what I could see of it—is bathed in white. No shadows, no colour. No traces of usage. Innocence. White waiting to be tinted. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I watch the people next to me and try to find one who is as nervous as I am. I try to give up obsessively looking for connections between what is happening, what is being said and the confusion washing over me in floods of unrest. But I don’t succeed so easily. After all, it means burying the question of my own identity. It means keeping myself silent and compliant. But today I do what is expected of me. I wait in a queue. I look ahead, I wear a reassuring smile and I try not to blink from all that white.
A gong sounds. The doors swing open and more white floods my vision. We move slowly forward. No one is pushing, no one is in a hurry. We all know that we have our place, that there is no need to be first. For a moment not longer than the flicker of a heartbeat, there is safety in submission. But the instant passes, and distress returns to me like lightning.
We are silent, no one dares to even whisper a word. Language, much like thought, is the intimate lover of a world comprehensible to a consciousness. In the children of Amnesia, a state of confusion fills their shells like a haze. To us, there is not yet a world to communicate by. It makes little sense for us to speak. Our ears, like our eyes, all know only the same thing: an incessant beeping that even now reverberates within us, and the white colour that everything in this place wears. In the whiteness and the absence of a world, there is no feeling either. It is just the empty shell of a word in our heads. We only know the blood from when we were born and the frustration of our sterile rooms. But our silence is not vacant. It is filled with everything we lack the words for.
I sit down next to a man who wears rasp-short snow-white hair, a black T‑shirt and grey jeans like me, with pale, wrinkle-free, porcelain skin, a quiet smile on his lips, and calm eyes that survey the hall in which our strange, silent company gathers. I would like to ask him what colour eyes I have, or if he could tell me about beauty, and who decides what is beautiful. I would like to put my hands on his arm to know what human skin feels like—to know what it is like to touch someone with bare fingers.
I stare at my wristband. Raven. 25. 0609.
In the middle of the silence, a man clears his throat. We all raise our heads at the same time, but lower our gazes. We feel no right to look at him. I don’t know why, but I have to do it anyway. He is short, with long white hair tied back and slender hands with long fingers resting on a desk. He leans over a microphone and stares with dull blue eyes into the crowd of darkly dressed figures. He wears a white, floor-length coat and a pair of black, coarse boots. He looks old, and at the same time he looks young. We instinctively feel that he is different from us. There is something different about him, something we cannot explain.
Maybe he has memories.
Maybe it’s the self-confidence he exudes. Maybe he knows his real name. Maybe he has a home, is what none of us dare to think.
Laughter has been carved into the skin surrounding his eyes, and I can make out a narrow scar on his chin.
He clears his throat again. As if all of us were not already giving him our full attention.
“You’re probably wondering why you’re sitting here.” I turn my head slowly but don’t see anyone nod. “You’re probably wondering why there’s no one sitting here who’s younger than eighteen.” Silence. “You’re probably wondering about something else entirely. The peculiar state of your bodies, or the information on your ID tags.” He waits a moment to let his gaze jump from individual to individual. “Well, I will answer some of those questions for you today. I am your doctor. I have watched each and every one of you with my own eyes as you have fought for your lives, my children, and that is precisely why we are here today. But I would like to start at the very beginning.” He swallows, brushes a single hair behind his ear. Fixes a point behind us and speaks in a firm voice.
“What does a human life consist of? When does existence become life? Questions that countless philosophers have dealt with for millennia, questions that have given rise to a scientific current of their own. We have reason to believe that at the heart of human life is our self-consciousness.” Pause. The hall is so quiet I’m afraid I can be heard breathing. “We reflect our own existence. We act, and we need a reason. Through time, our brain learns with every experience. It remembers, and it adjusts. A map of us is stored in our body. Nobody will ever know what it is like to be us except for ourselves.” The doctor pauses for a moment.
“A human heart is frail,” he then continues. “And at the same time, the strongest force of life known to mankind. We can not always trust it to act in our best interest. When it swings towards the wrong person, the wrong direction, an unsure equilibrium, it becomes an unstoppable force. This map of ourselves eventually will come to stand in our way. One day, there will be a convulsion which cardinally upsets our ground and becomes deeply entrenched in the composition of that map. This convulsion shows in numerous ways: suicide, narcotisation, a sudden outburst of destructive temper. Sometimes, if we find ourselves in that state, it is simply too late. Nothing will bring us back to health, and all we have left is a series of mind-numbing drug prescriptions and the pressure of having to navigate through the ruins.
But in Amnesia, we have found a solution. We have developed a drug. You have all agreed to take this drug. This drug allows you to be reborn in the midst of the flames. An old world needs to die for a new one to arise, and we assist you every step of the way. Part of the initiation process was hence to clear your body of the remnants of your previous life. You had plastic surgery to remove scars, tattoos, stretch marks or birthmarks. You have been told how the drug works before you took it. You can consult your contract at any time. What you cannot do, however, is return to the ruins.” He smiles.
“I will now explain to you how Amnesia will proceed.” He takes the microphone out of its holder and walks to the centre of the hall. “In the company of our psychologists, you will see a video of you recorded before you took Amnesia. You will talk about the name you have chosen for yourself. You can find it on your identification tag, as well as your age and birth date, the latter of which is set as the date you woke up in your recovery room. This wristband is your identity card and must not be lost under any circumstances. Hence, it will later be tattooed on you with reversible ink so you will be easily identifiable by our AI system.
You will then be introduced to the landscape of our clinic. You will be guided through our various activity rooms; libraries and recreational programmes are available to you at all times. We have restaurants, cinema halls, tattoo studios, discos, swimming pools and anything else you might desire. The intention behind this is to build your new personality, your new self. We will continue to monitor your recovery. Once you are fully recovered, we will help reintegrate you into the world outside this research facility.” He clears his throat.
“There is one last thing you should know. Some of you have chosen to join your partners or ex-partners in this project. We have erased the memories in your brain of any existing social connections. From now on, everything is your own choice: you choose your family. You choose your partner. You choose your self. You have full control over becoming the person you have always wanted to be. However, this also means that you cannot remember your own mother or your former partner. At this point, I will quote from the records of our earliest founding story.” He opens a dog-eared book to a page.
“‘The genius of Project Amnesia is that by providing absolute self-determination, we are enabling a new way of living together; one in which we can correct our wrong turns; one in which our interpersonal relationships pursue the aspiration of perfection. Our premise is that the past is the past. It does not matter who you were before you decided you no longer wanted to be that person. It does not matter who you leave behind, it does not matter what you lose. You are free, you are reborn. You are a blank canvas, and you can decide for the first time in your lives how you draw yourselves. You have everything to gain.’”
He pauses for a moment before looking up and casting a glance from his cloudy blue eyes into the room, which glides calmly, seriously and wisely over each of us. I swallow and feel the hairs on my arms stand up from the goosebumps that have gripped me. None of us even bats an eyelid, almost apathetically we look straight ahead, all eyes attentive to the doctor. We wait for the next step, for something to happen. After seconds that feel like an eternity, the doctor tilts his face towards the microphone and says in a steady voice, “You will now go into your individual interviews.”
I sit in front of another white, sterile room and knead my fingers. I feel strangely calm, but a slight, electrifying buzz throbs under my skin, making me sensitive to the sounds, smells and details in this endless, endless white hallway. Raven. I let the letters melt on my tongue. “Raven,” I whisper. It feels strange, and sincere at the same time.
The door opens beside me and a tall woman with wide hips and high cheekbones, wearing a black T‑shirt and grey jeans like mine, steps into the hallway. Her shoes squeak on the floor in the same way mine do. She shakes hands with a small woman with long, flowing, naturally red hair, circular glasses on the tip of her nose, and a smile that triggers a positive, reassuring response in me.
“Goodbye, Rachel. Thank you for your time.” She smiles showing snow-white teeth. There is a flash of something silvery on her upper lip that irritates me. I run my finger gently over my lips and feel nothing. Her gaze now rests on me and she reaches out her hand. “Hello, little one.” I stand up, shake her hand and follow her into another white room that swallows me. Close to her, I can tell that she is wearing a piercing in her gums.
“Sit down, please.” I rest on a hard, mahogany brown chair and stare at my hands, long, bloodless and bony, resting on my lap.
“And you are?” I look up. Stretch out my wrist. She clasps it with her warm hands and scans the information into the computer. “Raven,” she says, and from her mouth it sounds alien. I cannot interpret the nuance in it. “Raven. There you are.” With the computer mouse, she clicks at a few things and says: “Now, please direct your gaze to the blank space above my head.” I nod.
The psychologist operates the computer and amid flickers and static, a person begins to be pictured on the wall. A girl. She looks directly into the camera, her eyes large and piercing green. Her hair is dark brown and twisted into blue box braids. She is wearing a plain beige T‑shirt. She wears no jewellery and no make-up. Her neck is long, her cheekbones high, her expression proud. She is very thin, thinner than I am. Her posture is resolute, her gaze determined.
“And play,” murmurs the red-haired woman.
I see the image move. With a faint flicker, I see her pupils adjust to the light in the room, her nostrils flare slightly. She stares into the camera, and directly into my eyes. She tilts her head slightly and squints her eyes, and her iron gaze drills into my head. “Hi,” she says softly. Her voice is warm and raspy. She turns her gaze behind the camera, presumably to the person monitoring the recording, making sure nothing in it survives that shouldn’t be passed on. My hands are in my lap and I realise that I, too, am being monitored. But I cannot avert my gaze.
Very slowly, her long, slender fingers unfold a piece of crumpled paper and her gaze fixes on it. Shyly, she begins to read aloud. “Hello, stranger. I’m afraid I can’t call you by your name, because although you are me, you are another.” She pauses for a moment, exhaling breath. “We share the same genetics, my heart beats in you, the same feet carry us. But you are not me. You have been given a chance to start over, girl with no name, and my job is to remind you why if you doubt.” She seeks my eye contact, then continues, “Our name doesn’t matter. Nor what constellation I was born in. Or who I’ve loved.” Pause. “Today is the last day I will be here. Dear, I am a cornered piece of cattle, and when I look ahead, I see nothing. I see no light. I see only darkness, displaced in me instead of the night. It surrounds me and digs its talons so deep into my flesh that it bleeds.” She pushes up the piece of fabric on her arm and holds her arm up to the camera, littered with scars. I look at my own forearms. Smooth and flawless, restless in my lap, iridescent obsidian. “I lost my way and never found it again. I want you to have everything. You are free from your past. You are a pure, pure thing. You are free.” She closes her eyes. “You are free.”
“Raven,” says a voice in the background.
She leans forward and smiles, and I think how beautiful she is, with her huge eyes.
“I understand that you are confused. Uncertain. You’re sitting there, and you don’t have an anchor point. Everything is white, isn’t it? Yes, that was my thought too.” Her smile widens a little. “Everything is so white in here that you don’t know where the corners merge and whether, if you bang your head against the wall, you won’t fall into a space-time gap that will fling you out of this madness …” The silence that spreads after these words is icy. “But you should know that there is nothing out there. Nothing for you to be taken to. This is your life now, and this is your home. And I know you are a wonderful person. I feel it. Take care, you on the other side. And think no more of me. Wherever your life takes you, it won’t be the way I go.”
She lifts her hand and holds its palm forwards towards the camera. I slowly stand up, walk to the white wall and put my hand on hers. For a moment she smiles, and I think she knew I would respond like this. Then the image goes black and I stare into silence for a moment. I still feel like a blank canvas, and my brain seems overwhelmed with processing all the impressions and information of today. But it is not over yet. Someone touches me gently on the arm, it is my psychologist. She puts both hands on my arms and tilts her head in a concerned way. “Are you all right, Raven? I know it’s been a lot today. But this is your home. This is your home, and that’s all you need to know.” She smiles, and for a moment I’m not sure if that laugh reaches her eyes. I realise I haven’t said a single word. I clear my throat. “Yes,” I croak from a dry throat and try a tentative smile. “It sounds like prison today, but in just a few days you will realise that you can only find true freedom down here, with us,” she continues. She hands me a business card. “Whenever you’d like to talk to someone or have any questions, Raven, feel free to contact me. You can call me Cecile if you like.” Silently, I take the card, but since I’m not carrying a bag, I just keep it in my ice-cold hands.
“Good,” says Cecile, smiling at me encouragingly, “that’s about it from me. Fynn will now guide you through our fine institution, together with a few others, and show you everything that is waiting for you down here. Just follow the corridor up to the first floor and you’ll meet them there. Only the best, Raven. Welcome home!” She leads me towards the hall, her left hand applying gentle pressure in the small of my back, and a lanky, tall boy with shaved hair, black shirt and grey jeans is already sitting next to the door, looking at us from eyes just as shy as I was a few moments ago. He follows Cecile’s prompting and as the door slams shut behind him, I am alone in this long, snow-white place. I turn once in a circle and everything, everything around me resembles itself. I walk towards a wall and place my palm on the cool surface. So these are the walls that delimit my world. My earliest memory reaches to the moment when I awoke from a comatose dream in a clinically sterile room. And when I press reset one day, I can only ever return to that moment, but never be who I have been before that. There is only Raven from now on.
There is something I keep hidden from the whiteness. Something had slipped through the amnesia and fought its way to my consciousness with persistence. A memory I shouldn’t have.
Of a voice,
and a name.
Five—“Secrets”
We are a small, silent group. It’s almost amusing, because we look like newborns, our eyes huge as if we’re seeing the world for the first time, as if we’re rediscovering moment by moment what life is. And it’s the same, it’s just the same. I have not lived yet. All this is new to me. There are dozens of people walking next to me who look like me. Again, we don’t talk. Autopilot carries us through the world, but underneath is still nothing. We are planets without suns, weakly gravitating around their own weightless core, fixed in a constellation with other burnt up stars against their will. If we were to speak, there was but one thing seething in our veins. Somewhere there’s another me who dares to ask: “Do you remember?” But she doesn’t live here. It hardly feels human to be so devoid of substance. We don’t know what to do with ourselves.
Fynn, on the other hand, Fynn is somebody. Fynn walks a certain way, he has a beard and wears round, horn-rimmed glasses. When he smiles, wrinkles form around his eyes. He has a certain humour, he talks about books he likes and music that echoes in none of us. He is very human. He is not a shell like us. Fynn knows he doesn’t like tomatoes and he communicates this to us at regular intervals, for example when we are standing in the cafeteria, in front of a huge buffet of food, vastly overwhelmed. He asks us to try something, but I don’t know what I like. There are some foods that, strangely enough, I immediately dislike. The smell of fish makes me sick. A tall, lanky boy takes a plate and loads random food on it. I stand next to him and can only stare. I feel so ridiculous and helpless, in this place where everyone single-mindedly knows what they want, people queuing at coffee machines and others laughing as they assemble a salad. Simple tasks that I don’t know how to perform. I know there’s coffee, but I can’t remember if I like it. The slime of being reborn is still all around me. I ask the boy what his name is. “Jamie,” he replies. Jamie has big, almost black eyes. I look at his wrist and see the same numbers as on mine. I’m sure when I look at everyone else’s wrists I will see the same numbers again. We were released into this world on the same day. “I am Raven,” I reply, the words slipping off my tongue. I am Raven. It’s a declarative sentence. But it means something, a lot, maybe. Maybe it means that I call myself Raven, or maybe it means that I am Raven, and maybe it’s a metaphor for the fact that I give myself to this life. Or maybe it’s of a purely descriptive nature, something that simply describes what sound the air makes when you string a few letters together and assign them to my face. Do I refer to these people as my generation and would that mean that I identify with them? Where do these thoughts come from? I shake my head as if I could shake them off with that. Jamie offers to share a plate, but I shake my head silently. I don’t feel hungry. I prefer to sit across from him and watch the people walking through the cafeteria who must have spent quite a lot of time here. They all look so different, and I feel overwrought by all these impressions, these people—so much so that it almost feels like home to sit among my people, all of us wearing the same thing, the same short-cropped head, the same confused look, the irritated hands lying helplessly in our laps.
We know nothing of life and I dress in it.
“Raven.” I turn my gaze to Jamie. He grins. “This is probably the moment we should make conversation. I mean, look at the others. I wonder what they’re talking about.” I tilt my head slightly, close my eyes and listen into the room. “Secrets,” I say then. Jamie laughs, a short, loud laugh that makes the others’ heads turn in our direction. “You don’t think they’re going to spill their secrets over a cup of coffee here, do you?”—“No,” I retort. “But by not doing so, they exist. Secrets are only secrets if you don’t talk about them. And if you ask me, all the talk about banalities is just a distraction from what’s important and actually wants to be said.”—“Raven. You sound like you’ve devoured a philosophy book. Barely out of your room, and already so damn wise.” I just give him a sharp look and he continues to grin.
Secrets. She must have had heaps of them, feeding on her soul over time, weighing her down like barrels, leading her to believe that she had to annihilate herself. I wonder what secrets she carried with her, their shapes and names and faces.
But I, too, have a secret. Skye.
“Let’s move on, guys,” Fynn interrupts the banter around us. “There’s plenty more to see.” The squad of newborns gathers around Fynn like a brood of ducklings around Mama Duck, agitated and chattering. Aching to see the world in which they would fashion themselves like art, or perhaps like clay that combusts itself. Who actually says we’re going to save ourselves with Amnesia? Who gives us assurance that we won’t go insane, exchange our black T‑shirts for white gowns, and beat our heads against the walls until no more blood spills? How do we know we will be happy?
I see flashes of her face in front of me, big, dazing green eyes and skin covered in debris of pain. “I see only darkness, displaced in me instead of the night.” She’s my God. She knows of our beginnings and our aberration. She killed herself so I could live. I might as well try.
Six—“Onyx”
“It never bloody stops,” Jamie remarks in exasperation after we’ve paraded through the facility for two hours. Anterograde, as they’ve named it, resembles a city, with elevators and electric shuttles whizzing silently through reverent hallways. Each sector is assigned its own function. In their heart are the cafeteria and the clinic. At their edges are the residents’ rooms. Between sports facilities and libraries, barbershops and classrooms, studios and meeting rooms, there’s plenty of opportunity to develop freely and unruly in predesigned footsteps.
“Hey Raven. Do you think they’re selling here?” Jamie asks with a mischievous grin. Together, we bring up the rear of the group—two coffee mugs in hand, trying to determine if Raven could be a coffee type. I stop and have a laugh. “You know, the irony is actually that you’re supposed to escape misery here,” I take a sip of bitter black coffee, “but somehow we already cannot wait to mentally shut down.” The bitter taste of the coffee makes me shudder. Jamie gives me a judging side-eye glance. “You want to try mine?” He holds his coffee cup under my nose. I nod and take a sip, coughing as spirits mix with coffee and milk. Fynn pauses and keeps an eye out for us. “Everything okay back there?” he asks over the heads of the others. I nod and spit with difficulty, “I just drank water too fast.” He half-smiles politely and continues with his lecture, which in turn could function as a sleeping pill. Jamie can’t help but laugh next to me. “Goes down a lot better, doesn’t it, Raven?”—“Jerk. Also, where did you get that?”—“When we passed through sector 8 I might have flirted with the bartender.” I look him up and down. “What, with the baby slime barely done dripping off of you?”—“Game recognises game, Raven. Anyways, we should go there tonight and figure out if our trauma prefers whiskey or wine.” He grins. “There’s even a shuttle going there, and since it’s our last week in downtown sterile hell, we won’t have it far to sleep it off.” I sigh. “Fine. Pick me up at nine or whatever.”
“Right, everyone—” Fynn attempts to get our attention. “The bodymod sector is our last stop for today, and I beg of you, please don’t get a tattoo on your first day. Reserve that joy for the Ceremonical. Alright, let’s go in pairs of two. You can look into the studios from the outside but please don’t interrupt ongoing work.”
The air in sector 22 is filled with a steady hum, distant chatter, and music. Plants overgrow the pillars of the building, and on the black walls there is no corner that is not covered by art. From the ceiling, a beautiful woman in lingerie is suspended from hooks that anchor into her skin. The music which streams from the speakers is immediately to my liking almost as if my body were inert with a memory, a fondness. In the midst of stores and people, we walk in rows of two. I feel naked, and Jamie next to me also seems absorbed in contemplation. The people around us carry so much history on them, and through body sculpting, their bodies are so unique that they are polar opposites of us. Here I am suddenly Patient Delta again. I guess I never really left her behind.
The pair in front of us stops abruptly and swings out of the group toward a store called Earth & Rumble. Jamie looks up and I gesture with my head to follow them. The tattoo store is beautifully decorated, with drawings hanging among old antiques and dusty art books, and a spotlight imitating the flicker of sunbeams glinting through treetops on the black walls. The drawings are at once abstract and concrete, as if the spirit of their creator could not decide, or perhaps even dwells in the tension between them. I turn back to our group and see that the others have already moved on, scattered people with shorn hair in muted black and grey outfits. They almost blend into the background, barely noticed by their surroundings. More and more of them stream out and look into piercing studios, hairdressers, or implant surgeons. Fynn is no longer to be seen. Cautiously I go to the door of the store and open it. Jamie grabs my hand. “Raven. We’re only supposed to look from the outside.”—“Go ahead,” I reply. Jamie hesitates. “Are you sure?” I make signs to shoo him away and nod placatingly. “Okay. But I’ll stay close by, on a bench somewhere or something.”—“You’re not my babysitter or my babyguard.” Jamie rolls his eyes. “Obviously, but you’re the only friend I have here.”—“Oh, we’re friends?”—“Yeah, you twit. See you later.” I wave at him and grin before entering the store.
A bell chimes, and I am momentarily startled. I close the door behind me and breathe in the scent of old books and incense sticks. My gaze drifts over the artworks on the walls. The blazing sunlight reflects on my face, and the soft piano music drowns out the buzz of the world outside the doors of Earth & Rumble. The sector disappears second by second into the darkness and cosiness of the shop. There’s still a nose print on the windows from one of the other Amnesia girls. In the mirror I see my face, with thick bushy eyebrows, my short hair, and curious green eyes. My face is played back to me in fragments of light and dark, and I find myself beautiful, even in the undefined seconds in between. Beautiful, but foreign. “Raven,” my lips form inaudibly.
The floorboards creak and I turn around frantically. Someone is leaning against the door frame that separates the anteroom of the studio from the tattoo spaces, watching me.
“Hi,” I say, waving awkwardly. “I apologise. I know we’re not supposed to go into the stores.”
“What brought you here?” the voice replies. A man’s voice, warm and gentle.
“I …” I look in the mirror again, observing my obsidian skin and my bare face. My gaze falls towards the floor, noticing the wooden floorboards full of scratches and edges. “It’s all so white here,” I then reply. “I’ve been longing for a little definition, I think. Running away from the glare. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you feel comfortable here. First day out?”
I nod.
“Must have been a long day.”
“Oh … Yeah. This morning I listened to some old funny man’s big speech, met my former self, and was chased all over Anterograde in the afternoon.”
“What do you think of the Father?”
“Father?”, I ask.
“The old funny man who reigns Amnesia.” The stranger steps out of the shadows into the dark, soft reflection of a summer day, and my eyes catch deep dark eyes, long curly hair barely held together in an elastic, and hazy outlines of art on his light marble skin.
“He was different from us. That is all I could think about. But really … everyone here seems different from us. Everyone is a person. We are just ghosts.” I follow him with my gaze as he walks to the sink to wash his hands.
“Not long now,” he reassures, his back turned on me. “Soon they’ll have you move into your own room, get your own clothes, let you have full authority of your day. Before long, you’ll be a person too.”
I smile. “So how long have you been here?”
“Oh, just a little over a year.”
I stare at his tattoos for a second too long. “You got all these in a year?”
He dries his hands on a towel and nods. “It’s a way of remembering.”
“Of remembering what?!” My heart starts pounding.
He hesitates for a moment.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to keep you,” I mumble.
“You’re not. I was drawing, it’s just me here this afternoon.” He walks to the windows, closes the curtains. Turns the OPEN sign to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. He gestures at me to sit down.
“My name is Onyx,” he says.
“Raven.” I shake his hand.
Read Part I (Chapters I—III) here.| Read Part III (VII—IX)
EDITED BY LARA HELENA.
A M N E S I A is a three-part short story and will be released as a paperbook and e‑book in late 2022 / early 2023. More information on www.mercyferrars.de and on Instagram (@snkllrpublications).
Mercy Ferrars is a MA graduate in philosophy and writes fiction, poetry and non-fiction essays. She is madly in love with Scotland, dogs and Bojack Horseman.
𝕴𝖒𝖆𝖌𝖊 𝖔𝖋 𝖆𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖑 𝖍𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖙 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖑𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖘 𝖇𝖞 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖆𝖗𝖔𝖓𝖌𝖘𝖉𝖘 𝖔𝖓 𝕱𝖗𝖊𝖊𝖕𝖎𝖐