He commits the word on his hand to memory and then he rubs the ink away against his wet trousers until the mark is gone. He’ll remember it. Best to cover the evidence in case he’s found.
A thought flexes itself deep inside his head, awakening. Something creeping on the edge of recollection, a memory, or the ghost of one. Just out of reach. Someone saying something to him. If he could only remember. Someone telling him something important, so important. Something he needed to remember. Something he had to do. Suddenly it comes to him.
Don’t fuck it up.
A memory. That’s what they had told him, but who exactly he can’t recall. He grasps at the memory. Its warning, the threat, so strong and clear.
Don’t fuck it up.
Don’t fuck what up? Think. Think.
He chases the thought but it disappears out of sight. He notices his own bare feet beneath him on the sand. A thought surfaces; he remembers reading once that suicides often remove their shoes before killing themselves. Is he a suicide? How he knows the fact about the shoes he does not know. Did he take off his shoes, did he leave them, and his things, and his life, in a tidy pile somewhere? Abandoned? But why would he do that? He doesn’t feel sad. He doesn’t feel like the kind of person who would kill himself. But then, maybe nobody ever does?
Don’t fuck it upis all he has to go on. But what if he already has?
Another memory flashes out of the darkness. A burst of something. Someone telling him.
You need to find her.
Find her? He straightens. It’s a crystal-clear directive. A purpose.
Is that why I’m here? To find someone? Who is she to me?
He thinks of the word he removed from the back of his hand, and blinks.
Why do I need to find her?
The memory is what it is. There is no more. Whoever she is, he needs to find her.
They must have said more.
He tries to force the memory but the throb awakens deep at the base of his skull. He lets the thought go.
All he knows is he was told by someone, instructed by someone…he can’t remember who told him, or what they sounded like, or their face. But he trusted them, he knows that much.
How can he find her—this woman—if he doesn’t know who or what he’s looking for?
A sound in the distance breaks the man’s concentration. A voice calling out. Instinctively he turns toward the forest, his heart pounding. There is no one there. The wind perhaps, though it sounded more like a person calling—a name. It came from the forest, a voice carrying over the wind. He stares long after the sound has gone. Certain he heard it. Someone.
But there is no one.
He turns back to the water.
The sound comes again. This time from immediately behind him. A voice. He freezes. There is someone standing right behind him.
He turns slowly on the wet sand. Someoneisthere. A young woman. She wasn’t there before.
Where did she come from?
He blinks, trying desperately to make sense of what is happening. His thoughts racing.
She wasn’t there before, was she? Is this her?Is she the one I need to find?
But in the same instant he knows.
It isn’t her.
He studies her as she stares back at him. She is talking to him, her expression confused, concerned, as if she may have been speaking for a while. She’s saying something, words he can’t quite understand; her language garbled, the sense not apparent.
