I Can't Finish the Memory

You know Audrey, I do remember the Last Fall Festival... it's been, what--decades now, I guess?

Audrey, that's... this is so bizarre. The Last Fall Festival is like a pressure point for memories. I was just thinking about it today, in fact.

We went there a few times, I think. It was put on by the church?

No, not the church.

Was it the school? The community center?

Who was it?

But there was someone, something awful there, I thought--I remember how much I didn't want to see its face, couldn't look... why does it seem so familiar now, that face I couldn't face?

The Festival.

Vivid recollections of the ancient little gymnasium stuffed to the ceiling tiles with color and clutter, the weird musty and delicious smells, gym-walled echoes of scuffling heels and whispering pink or paisley polyester, all the writing is cursive, there are games where you walk on squares of tape until the song stops and people are winning tools and homemade brownies, homemade pies...

I remember a back hallway. Like a hallway.

Where the bathrooms were... do you remember? It was this dim corridor where the swelling echoes of the gymnasium bounced and roiled, swirled as one great scream behind you while you walked?

Do you remember that game--it was set up at the entrance to the bathroom hallway.

You'd be looking up at the colors and numbers, but the shapes were all awful. Every option on the rainbow board looked like an abstract painting of some kind of torture. Worst though, it's strange--I swear I recall that when I won, the sneering boy would give me a popsicle stick doll with my face on it, using my school picture.

The bathrooms... do you remember how they went on forever? Impossibly huge? How cavernous they loomed away from you, how there were screams, cries of others faraway, how hollow the echoes would drift?...

But mostly, Audrey, I keep remembering the dread of that dark corner at the hallway's end, where the creature is hunched and turned away, pale and murmuring, and I didn't want to see its face more than anything in the world, I would stand forever there if it meant never seeing that face...

Audrey...

It was your face. Only so much older. And decades later, here you are, at last...

so young.