Forgotten

She's been cleaning out her grandmother's house for three days now, working through dusty boxes and yellowed photographs and the heavy smell of old wood and forgotten perfume, sorting through a lifetime of things that no one wanted and that no one would miss. She finds Christmas ornaments wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, a wedding dress sealed in plastic that still holds the faint ghost of lily of the valley, and a stack of love letters tied with faded ribbon that she doesn't read because she's not sentimental and she just wants the house ready for the realtor who's coming tomorrow. She works through the afternoon, her back aching, her hands dry from cardboard and dust, until she reaches the smallest bedroom at the end of the hall, a room with a twin bed and a nightstand and a closet with the door slightly ajar, and an old mirror on the wall with glass that's slightly warped, making her reflection look just wrong enough to notice shoulders too narrow, eyes too far apart before she looks away and goes back to the box.

She pulls out a photograph of her grandmother as a young woman, standing in front of the house, smiling and ordinary and alive, and she sets it aside and reaches back into the box, her fingers brushing against something soft and small and unexpectedly cold. She pulls out a child's dress, yellowed with age, stained across the front with something dark and crusted that she doesn't want to identify, and she stares at it for a long moment because she doesn't remember her grandmother ever mentioning a child, doesn't remember any photographs of children, doesn't remember anyone in her family talking about a loss or a disappearance or anything that would explain why this dress exists in this house. She turns it over and finds a name tag sewn into the collar, the letters still legible despite the years, and her breath catches because it's her name, the one her grandmother gave her, the one she's carried her whole life, and when she looks up at the mirror she sees that her reflection is still wrong but now it's smiling, and she didn't smile, she isn't smiling, she would never smile at something like this.

She looks down at the dress, and when she looks back up the reflection is gone from the mirror, and she realizes with a cold, slow certainty that it's standing in the corner of the room behind her, wearing the dress, holding the photograph, looking at her with eyes that are just slightly too far apart, and it speaks in a voice that sounds like hers but older, flatter, like a recording that's been played too many times, and it says, "You don't remember me, but I remember you," and she wants to say something but she can't move, can't breathe, can't do anything but stand there and feel the shape of the room change around her, and she realizes that she doesn't remember her childhood, doesn't remember her mother, doesn't remember anything before this house except a vague sense of warmth and safety that she now understands was never real. The thing in the corner steps closer, and the stains on the dress are fresh now, wet and dark, and she looks at her hands and they're red, they've always been red, she just never looked down before, and the thing tilts its head and says, "You left me here. You always leave me here," and she wants to argue, wants to explain, wants to remember, but there's nothing there, no memory, no truth, just the mirror and the dress and the thing that wears her face and waits for the next time someone finds it. The realtor arrives the next morning to find the house clean and empty, the small bedroom swept and polished, the mirror still on the wall, and she smiles at the woman who inherited it all, tells her it'll sell fast, and the woman smiles back and says good and leaves and never returns, never thinks about the house, never thinks about the room, never remembers the dress or the name or the stain or the thing that spoke to her. But late at night, when she looks in the bathroom mirror and sees her reflection lag behind by just a fraction of a second, or sees it watching her from an angle she's not standing at, she feels something cold press against the inside of her chest and hears a voice that sounds exactly like hers whisper, "I'm still here," and she blinks and the reflection is normal and she goes back to bed and she never remembers, because that's the gift of forgetting, the mercy of a mind that knows to look away. But the house remembers, and the room remembers, and somewhere in a locked closet in a house that no one visits, a small yellow dress is waiting for the next person to open the box and find it.