L Chan
CARVING YOU OUT OF MEMORY
You can make a golem out of anything corporeal, anything you can mould and sculpt. There’s things that you can’t lay hands on, but there’s ways. The tools: a crescent moon bladed flensing knife, a meat hook the size of a man’s curled finger. Each tool bears inscriptions, profane under a dozen religions, jagged strokes scratched out whalebone.
Both illegal. Black market magic, the sort you go five nodes deep on the dark web to access on forums, invoiced in bitcoin, deliverable only to PO boxes from a lax service provider. Unregistered golems are already illegal; but I already have one foot wet, so I might as well carve a golem out of the sickest, deepest memories a person has.
I have just the right ones of you.
The hook bites deep into my forearm, drawing no blood, only the tingle of neuralgia to even let me know it’s there. Carvings do their work when I pull; memories stretch out like taffy. I choose a good one to start, when I was at emergency to fix my face, lip split from the thick ring I bought you for our first anniversary, eye swollen shut. I told the nurse there’d been a fight at the bar and she sniffs at me, examining the smooth, unbroken skin on my knuckles. She gets me cold cocoa from the machine in the corridor and it’s the nicest thing anyone has done for me in months. Yeah, a good place to start.
The edge of the blade is not sharper than a dinner knife. Memories don’t cut easy, effort brings sweat to my forehead; the knife, rending and tearing, leaving a ragged edge. There’s no neat way to cut out a memory.
I lay the slab of memory on our dining table. My dining table. Even though you moved in, and then out, and I reclaimed my body and my space, I can’t quite shake that sense of ownership. Maybe I can cut it out too. Maybe I can’t. I’m going to try.
I snag another memory, this time from my belly. You remember when I found your draft emails to the folks back home who didn’t know about my city life? Weaponized secrets? By the time you sent out that email two fucking years after we split, I’d already told them. I don’t think you remember, because you don’t give a shit. Now I don’t have to remember, because I’ve hacked it out of me, the pain of losing a memory so exquisite that it squeezes fat tears from the corners of my eyes.
I pile memories high, unmaking you in my head by excision, making you out of every fucked up thing you’ve ever done, every rotten memory we have together. The memory knife doesn’t break skin but I bleed all the same, except it’s sawdust and shame. Cutting you out of me makes me feel more whole than before. How I wish I could scrape the stink of you from my bones, but the hook can’t go that deep.
Shaking hands mould the pile into something approaching the human form. Jitters can’t stop the golem from looking like you, but only coming to half my height. I figured it’d be bigger, there was so much to cut out. But you were never bigger, you just made me small.
I kiss it on the golem on its lips; I give it its word, its shem, its purpose. It goes when I ask, eschewing the door for the vents, nimble as a spider. Those hands look every bit as strong as yours. Good.
I do regret what I did. Or did not do; I wasn’t strong enough you see. Not to cut every memory out, just the ones I didn’t want. I’m almost in love with you again at the end. All sorts of promises are being broken today. Your folks will call; they liked me more than they liked you. But even they’ll be surprised when I cry at your funeral.