Fake Memories

• Threse Vargas, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2012

“Ivan, can you check if you can find out about the artifact we found?” Jenny asked. “Tish is working on her own research and Oscar is busy with forensics,” she added.

“And can you get us some coffee?” David added.

“Sure, I’ll be back in a moment,” I say with a smile.

I quickly make one of my usual brews. I serve the coffee and went to my office.

I sit on my chair and flip through my diary, looking for some useful notes. I stopped at pages that are relevant and sometimes wander at things like personal thoughts and notes.
But then I notice something. Something odd. I scan the notebook again and again and yet I couldn’t find it. Something’s wrong.

Aaron isn’t in my diary. He’s been working with the police force as an intern for 3 years and yet there’s no record of him in my diary. I never leave anyone out in there. Why would I exclude him?

I put down the notebook and started to think. Why would I exclude someone? Am I starting to forget writing about him? No, I write about everyone else and they’ve been around longer than him…

“What’s the matter?” Aaron was suddenly sitting on my desk now. I was startled and I sprang from my chair.

“My… diary,” I stutter. He picked it up and started flipping through it.

“You’re not in it,” I said. “Why would I leave you out when you’ve been working with us for 3 years? It’s like you never even existed until today,” I continue.

He hisses, “Cross me, and I will invade your mind and fill it with memories until your head is burning, because that’s how I live.”

“Is that what you’ve done to us? Use our memories as a host like how a parasite does?”

He presses his hand against my forehead. “Remember this,“ he says.

I see a flashback of me choking a woman to death. “I know you didn’t mean to kill her,” Aaron says. “You just overdid your stress relief ritual,” he adds.

My head is aching. My mind filled with fake memories. Memories that never belonged to me.
“Remember this,” he repeats.

Another flashback comes in and this time it was me and Aaron disposing a corpse. “I was your accomplice. I was the one you could trust not to tell your dirty little secret,” he says.
He releases me and I collapse on the floor, head aching and body trembling. “I never did that,” I whimper.

“Oh, yes you did,” he retorted. “And you will be haunted by those memories for as long as I exist,” he says.

He leaves me trembling on the floor, overwhelmed by the memory of the girl I killed. I sob uncontrollably, unable to tolerate the pain.

David comes in and finds me on the floor. “Ivan, what’s wrong?” he asks as he made me sit upright.

Still shaking from the trauma, I reply “I’m a murderer.”