The Curator of Forgotten Things

In the seaside city of Bellmare, where gulls circled above salt-crusted boardwalks and the horizon blurred into watercolor smudges, citizens lined up each spring for Forgetfulness Day. Most came willingly, grateful for the government’s promise of emotional cleanliness—one painful memory removed annually by law, a civic duty as routine as taxes.

The Department of Public Wellness operated from a sterile, white building at the city’s edge, its windows reflecting nothing. Inside, technicians in pale blue uniforms guided citizens through rooms where machines hummed quietly, extracting the tangled knots of grief, regret, and shame that bound people to their pasts.

Armand Moreau hadn’t complied in thirty-seven years.

Each morning, the former fire-breather stood before his cracked mirror, removed his glass eye, and polished it with a silk handkerchief. The orb gleamed opalescent, shifting colors like a soap bubble caught in sunlight. When he returned it to the hollow socket, he felt the familiar cold rush as the memories settled back—not just his own, but those of everyone whose forgetting he had witnessed.

The eye was a relic from the Cirque Lumière tragedy, when the big top erupted in flames during the finale. Sixteen performers and twenty-seven audience members perished. Armand survived with burns on his left side and an empty socket where shattered glass had pierced him. The circus doctor, a Romanian with fingers like twisted wire, had fashioned him a new eye from the remains of a crystal ball.

“This will see more than most,” the doctor had whispered. “Mind it doesn’t show you more than you wish to know.”

Armand hadn’t understood until Bellmare’s first Forgetfulness Day, when he stood in the square and watched as citizens emerged from the Department, their expressions placid but their eyes vacant in a way that made his glass eye burn cold. As each person passed, wisps of memory—like smoke, but denser—seemed to drift toward him, drawn to his artificial eye as if it were a magnet for lost things.

By nightfall, his head throbbed with the weight of their discarded pasts: a child lost to the sea; a lover’s betrayal; the shame of cowardice; the grief of watching parents fade. Each memory seared itself into the crystalline surface of his false eye, preserved like insects in amber.

The next morning, Armand began performing again.

He claimed a corner of the boardwalk where ocean spray misted the air. Without fire or fanfare, he stood silent and still until passersby slowed to watch. Then, with the precision of his circus days, he began to move—his body transforming into a vessel for the memories no one carried anymore.

He became a mother rocking an empty cradle. A sailor watching a ship disappear. A child awaiting a father who would never return from war. His performances lasted only minutes, but they left audiences stunned, tears tracking down faces unable to recall why they wept.

For decades, he collected and performed their forgettings. Citizens paid him in coins and bread, drawn to his silent recreations without understanding why. Some came repeatedly, watching the same performance twenty, thirty times, seeking something just beyond recognition.

The Department of Public Wellness noticed. Their records showed an anomaly in Sector 7—citizens expressing emotional resonance with stimuli linked to purged memories. Inspector Claremont was assigned to investigate.

She found Armand performing on a Tuesday, his weathered body mimicking the movements of a father teaching a child to ride a bicycle. The crowd included a middle-aged man whose hands twitched in muscle memory, reaching forward as if to steady invisible handlebars.

“Armand Moreau,” Claremont said after the crowd dispersed. “Our records indicate you’ve never reported for Forgetfulness Day.”

“I forget nothing,” Armand replied, voice raspy. “And I remember what others cannot.”

“That’s sedition,” she said. “Memory retention is a public health violation. Your compliance is not optional.”

For the next week, Armand performed with desperate energy. Word spread—the old circus man was giving his final shows before the Department took him. Crowds swelled. Even Claremont returned, watching from shadows as Armand embodied a woman receiving news of her brother’s drowning—a memory, purged five years earlier, belonging to the baker who stood transfixed, hand pressed to mouth.

On the seventh day, as sunset gilded the boardwalk, Department agents surrounded Armand during his performance of a wedding dance—the groom long dead from consumption, the bride having chosen to forget their vows. The woman herself stood in the front row, gray-haired now, wearing the same pearl earrings from her forgotten day.

“Armand Moreau,” Claremont announced, “you are required to report for memory adjustment.”

The crowd murmured. Armand completed his dance, bowing to the widow who didn’t know herself as such. Then he faced the agents.

“What we choose to forget defines us as surely as what we remember,” he said. “Your Department takes their pain, but also their meaning.”

“The law is clear,” Claremont insisted, though her voice wavered.

Armand nodded, then reached for his glass eye. The crowd gasped as he removed it, holding the iridescent orb toward the sun. Light refracted through it, casting rainbow patterns across upturned faces.

“Then take this,” he said, “if you believe forgetting brings peace.”

He closed his hand around the eye and squeezed. A plume of smoke rose—not fire, but forming the silhouette of a face. Then another. And another. Each distinct, each familiar to someone in the crowd.

A child recognized her dog, lost to old age. A husband saw his wife as she was before illness claimed her mind. A firefighter witnessed the family he couldn’t save from flames.

Throughout Bellmare, citizens stopped mid-step as forgotten moments returned—not as trauma but as truth, as the fullness of lives honestly lived.

Claremont watched her own forgotten sister’s face form in the smoke, and wept.

By morning, the Department stood empty, its machines silent. And Armand was gone, leaving only a small glass bead on the boardwalk—clear as water, remembering nothing, reflecting everything.

*

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