seen

The Tour

A little girl walks the top of a brick wall with both arms stretched wide.

On one side: grass, flowerbeds, a woman walking below.

On the other: sidewalk, traffic, the beginning of everywhere else.

“Welcome to my tour,” the girl announces.

She points with great authority.

“Over here we have three very fancy ants.”

The woman nods solemnly.

“I see them.”

“And this crack? That’s where the baby lizards live.”

“I’ve heard they have excellent neighbors.”

The girl keeps walking, careful not to lose her balance.

A hummingbird hovers beside the flowers printed on the girl’s dress, confused for half a second.

“Our special guest,” she whispers.

Then it is gone.

She looks down immediately.

“Did you see him?”

“I did.”

Satisfied, the little tour guide continues.

The Blue Pen

The classroom has emptied.

A young woman smooths the corner of her stapled pages against the desk.

“It isn’t finished,” she says.

The professor lowers herself into the chair, gray hair twisted into a loose bun, reading glasses slipping low on her nose. A red pen rests beside her hand.

She does not reach for it.

Instead, she picks up the blue one.

The student tries not to watch.

She watches anyway.

The professor underlines a single sentence.

Not because it is wrong.

Because it stopped her.

She taps it once.

“Don’t lose this voice.”

The student folds the pages back together more carefully than she unfolded them.

The Jacket

A tall man crosses the casino floor.

“You probably don’t remember me.”

The face does not arrive.

“I threw my jacket in Washington, D.C.,” he says. “I got tired of walking and listening to facts.”

The memory crashes in all at once.

The middle-school boy. The dramatic collapse. The jacket on the sidewalk.

“Oh no,” she says, laughing. “You.”

He laughs too.

“I’m almost finished with my mechanical engineering degree.”

She looks at him for a long moment.

“I’m really proud of the man you’ve become.”

His smile does not grow wider.

It grows quieter.

The Name That Didn’t Come

“Don’t you recognize me?”

The young woman has brown hair. Kind hands. No name. No face that memory will hold.

They have spent the day carrying boxes together, passing food across tables, brushing dust from their palms.

The young woman has mentioned the old school twice. The classroom with the broken clock. The stories she used to bring after class.

“You read every one,” she says.

Then, finally, “Don’t you recognize me?”

Brown hair. Kind hands. No name. No face that memory will hold.

She waits.

For a second, the older woman almost says yes.

Instead, she says, “I don’t.”

The young woman’s eyes do not fill.

They simply lose something.

Then she nods.

There You Are

The grandmother reaches past her granddaughter.

The young man glances behind him.

No one.

“Grandma,” the granddaughter begins.

But he steps forward anyway.

The old woman’s arms wrap around him with complete certainty.

“Oh,” she says into his shoulder. “I’ve missed you.”

He closes his eyes.

For one small moment, he belongs to someone else’s memory.

—Tonya Snyder