Forgetting

By Tierney Mestre

My name is Case Marrow, and I will not be Forgotten. 

The buzzard hisses like a cornered animal, four blades shrieking as they beat against the wind and waves of sand. It snarls and pitches forward, and I slide, unsecured, across the cargo area and toward the uneasy operator. He’s a big man, broad and well-muscled, with a bulbous flight helmet covering his face. He seems almost apprehensive of my presence, leaning over the controls as if I’m about to wrest them from his grasp. 

I’ll admit, the thought had crossed my mind. 

Maybe he can tell, or maybe he is intimidated in some way by a broad-shouldered sixteen-year-old who weighs half of what he does. Perhaps he doesn’t like that my gaze keeps wandering to that helmet of his. The goggles are black-tinted and vacant, plastered atop his face like the dark eyes of an insect, and the strip of thick leather that covers his nose and mouth is dark and oil-stained. It’s ugly.

---

Nothing in the Golden City is ugly. 

But this is not the Golden City. The City is walled and safe from the winds. The Golden City is home to high society—a place of extravagance, learning, beauty. 

I’ve never been inside, but I will. I will return from the wastes. I will never set foot in the Outskirts again, never again walk among the slums outside those walls. Never face working the oil rigs under the burning sun. I will not be Forgotten. 

The buzzard’s engine cuts. We free fall and my stomach leaps into my throat. The operator says nothing, shows no indication of surprise. Just…nothing. The sand beats against the belly of the small aircraft with a vengeance, but otherwise, silence. 

The plummet is gut-wrenchingly long before he flips a switch, and the rotors kick back to life before we slam into the sand. Suspended in a harness, the operator doesn’t feel the jolt as I do, hunched in the cargo area between the seats. My boots leave the metal platform entirely, and I slam painfully back down with a shock that shoots up my spine and a thud that reverberates throughout the buzzard. The operator turns, regarding me with those blank lenses, before waving a gloved hand at the tied-shut sack that lies on its side by my feet. 

My only lifeline in the wastes. Three day’s supply of water, two of food. I could make it stretch to five if I’m really careful, but that’s all the time I have. There are few usable resources out in the wastes. Buzzard wrecks and mummified corpses make up the rest of what’s to be found beyond the City and its Outskirts. 

The door of the buzzard opens with a jolt, red light beaming in, scalding hot and bright as the sun itself. I throw up a forearm to shield my eyes—they’re blue. A sign of bad luck, and twice as sensitive to the light. The operator grunts, turning in his harness and shoving the bag towards me, since clearly I hadn’t gotten the message the first time.

---

Fine. I grab its single goat-leather strap and pull the sack to my chest before stepping into the wastes. I’m bathed in burning light. There’s nothing but red, sandy dirt, and my shadow, stretched long and painted maroon by the falling sun. It’s time. I am Forgetting. I will return anew, purified by the wastes to become a member of the Golden City. I will not be Forgotten. 

And my name will no longer be Case Marrow when I return to claim my place as a citizen. 

Four rotors sputter to life once more, and I’m nearly knocked off of my feet by the beats of wind and sand whipped up by the blades. I stagger forward, bracing myself for the inevitable: hitting the red dirt forearms-first with a grunt and a word I’d never dare say in front of my mother. The air is ripped from my lungs violently, and I am left heaving in the dust. The buzzard is gone. I didn’t see which way it went. 

It takes me longer than it should to regain my breath, and I pull myself into a sit to examine the damage: scraped elbows I can live with. They need to be wrapped. Every bit of exposed skin does when a sandstorm is inevitable. They strip naked flesh raw. 

So, I dig through my bag for the rolls of cloth and the hide canteen I know I will find, and get to work. 

---

I was fourteen when I made the decision to go out into the wastes in hopes of winning my membership into the Golden City. It was after a market day. The sun in the Outskirts was particularly scalding, and the shadows cast by the walls of the Golden City were not as much of a reprieve from the heat as they should have been. Sales had been down—they always were—I wove between adobe buildings with my head down and my fists buried in the pockets that contained what few coppers I had managed to prevent their jingling.

In the slums full of hungry, sun-burned people, carrying money had to be discreet. The only place one could show the gleam of coin without risking getting robbed was the market strip, guarded by tan-clad guards with guns strapped to their backs. They were only really there to protect merchant goods, but they had foul tempers and didn’t take kindly to any sort of ruckus being raised on the strip. Likely, they never wanted to be assigned to the Outskirts. The disdain in their eyes was marked, full of curled lips and uneasy glances. 

I looked over my shoulder before dipping into an alleyway and pulling myself through a paneless window. 

“Case!” Eve was fifteen and skinny, far more than I, with limbs that didn’t quite fit her body. They were too thin, too knobby, and too long for her little frame. 

“I have to be home before sundown, I’m back from the strip,” I muttered. At my words, her eyes lit up. I pull coppers out of my pocket, count out six, and shove them into her thin, pale hands as our market-day routine called for. “Where’s Graham?” Her brother, two years her junior and already her height, was nowhere to be seen. 

“Oy!” He must have heard his name, as he pushed past a curtained doorway and met eyes with a gap-toothed grin that spread unevenly across his sun-browned face. Eve thrust the coppers into his hands, and he winked at me before turning to leave. “Gotta get to market before sunfall,” he supplied before ducking back behind the curtain and out of sight. 

I kissed Eve on both cheeks goodbye and lifted myself out from the empty window frame. 

It was the last time I ever saw Graham alive. He never made it to the market. We identified his body, bloodied and beaten over six coppers. He must not have hidden the jingling of his coin.

In the wake of his death, the two of us swore to get out of the slums once and for all when we were old enough to endure the Forgetting. 

She had laughed, then, despite the tears. It tickled her that we would not be able to recall such a promise once we became citizens of the City. Her laugh was a big, raucous thing, out of place coming from such a frail and round-faced girl. 

---

I’m reminded of her as I finish tying my wrappings. She was so much paler than the rest of us, a monument to her taboo Golden City heritage, and had to wrap herself during the months where the sun spent more time in the sky than beyond the horizon, lest her skin blister and peel. There’s no way she could have tolerated the heat out here. 

But I can, and I will not be Forgotten. 

I find myself trudging forward, following my shadow as it darkens a path before me, sun to my back. We were flying towards the sun when we left the Outskirts, slums darkening the tall stone walls of the City, nearly worn white by the beating sun. Thus, heading away from the sun would return me home. 

Home. I throw my head back and take a drink from my canteen to keep myself moving. That’s what propels me forward as the night creeps in and the skies darken. My shadow fades, but I’m facing the right direction. As long as I keep moving, I shouldn’t lose track of the way I’m headed. 

I lose track of time without the sun as a marker, and the desert waste goes dark. The stars are distant, casting little light. I’m quickly unable to see the red sands in front of me. Stopping for the night is how one dies out in the wastes. Is that what happened to Eve? No, couldn’t have; she was too smart for that.

I toss my bag into the dust with a gentle thud before shoving my hand in blind, rooting around for the lighter I know is stored. We are allowed one bag for the Forgetting. Eve and I had spent months perfecting our supplies—often youths partaking in the Forgetting pack too much water, or only worry about food. Poor supplies are a surefire way to be Forgotten, lost in the desert. I wonder how many souls it has claimed. 

Mine will not be one of them. 

My hand brushes metal, blessedly cool against feverishly hot skin. A lighter. Its inverted bell shape is awkward in my hands, but will protect a little flame against the harsh winds of the wastes. I fumble for the knob, and with a series of metallic clicks, a weak golden flame sparks to life between my hands. I should save its fuel for if I need fire, but I can’t bring myself to snuff it out. At least I have a little bit of light against the impossible dark, a small amber glow to guide my path. 

As dull as they are, the stars seem brighter out in the waste without light leaking over the walls of the Golden City and blotting them out. Back home in the Outskirts, they’re almost nonexistent. I don’t think I ever had realized that there could be so many. 

---

The last time I spoke to Eve, the night was nearly as pitch-black as it is out in the wastes. We were huddled in the adobe hut that had once housed her family. Now it was just hers—maybe a blessing, given that many of the Outskirts families’ houses were packed tightly with children, like goats in a slaughter pen. She was pale and thin, huddled under ratty blankets despite the night’s relative warmth. 

She had been spending all of her money on supplies for the wastes. I had been pretending not to notice.

The both of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder on her bed mat in a sort of reverent silence, each all too aware of the following day and too worried about stoking the other’s fears to bring it up first. 

It was me that broke the silence. I couldn’t bear it. 

“Do you have everything packed?” 

Eve’s eyes were impossibly dark despite her fair complexion. She had always joked that my blue should have been hers, and I always retorted that her luck was plenty bad without them. That night, though, her gaze was distant and dull, lacking its usual warmth. Fixed on something I couldn’t see. 

“I’ll have to Forget you.” 

She was worried about the coming day. Her own buzzard would take her away, drop her into the desert wastes, and she would begin Forgetting. She would be tested under the burning sun, and if she managed to find her way back, would have earned her citizenship to the Golden City. 

Now I wonder if her pilot was as uncaring as mine, behind those dark lenses. Eve would have to leave every aspect of her old life behind. Become a new person, with a new name, history Forgotten and unmarked by the dark, ugly stain of life on the Outskirts. I wouldn’t Forget her, though. I’d promised to find her. 

“When I’m in the Golden City, we’ll find each other. It’ll be less than a year apart.” “What if I don’t…” she trailed off, gaze roving to the curtainless window, the only source of light a weak, yellow beam from a lamp hanging haphazardly from the adobe outside. “What if I’m Forgotten?”

“You won’t be,” I pulled her into a brief hug before rising to my feet. Despite being a year younger, I was head and shoulders above her little frame. 

“Wait!” 

She stops me before I can pull myself through the window sill, and presses something cool into my dry hands. 

It’s her father’s ring, a golden band carved with intricate, swirling designs. I thought she had sold it not long after his death out on the oil rig. 

Speechless, I stared at her for a moment. Finery had no place in the Outskirts. This was something to be killed over. Only one thing could escape from my throat as I stammered at her, shifting my feet uncomfortably. 

“You’ll be okay.” 

At the time, I didn’t know it was a lie. 

Four days later and no whispers amongst the guards on the market strip. Only one boy had completed the Forgetting in our lifetimes, and the chancellor of the Golden City had made sure to announce it to the Outskirt folk—that we, too, could become like them. If we only Forgot the shame of our birth. 

Yet, nothing. Days turned into weeks, and I became the only one to remember Eve’s name. I dared invoke it only once, when I told Ma I would be Forgetting when I turned sixteen. It was the only time she ever struck me. The bruise lasted for weeks. 

---

The inky blackness of night bleeds red at the birth of a new day. 

The winds are volatile, threatening to whip into a storm, but I keep moving. I have no other choice. The first of my two canteens is growing light—a cruel reminder of my limited time.

I have made a good pace thus far, but my muscles ache, desperate for a moment of reprieve from sloughing through soft sand. 

I will have to keep going if there’s going to be a storm, as the wind suggests, lest I lose my way. 

Despite the growing heat, the sun is a welcome guest as it rises above me–a guide. My eyes burn, but I ignore it, plodding forward until the sun is directly overhead and the winds whip around me. I pull the wrappings around my face tighter to protect raw skin from the onslaught of biting sand and keep moving. 

I have to keep going, even as the winds become fierce enough for the sand they wield to rend skin from bone, and the sun begins to fall behind me. This time there is no shadow to follow; it’s lost among the storm. I can barely see my boots as I struggle forward, yet I stop only long enough to take a swig out of my canteen. At some point, I fish a piece of salted meat from my bag. 

I’m unable to tell what kind of animal it once was. It tastes like nothing but sand, but it’s food. For all I know, it tasted like sand before being caught up in a windstorm. I chew slowly, thoughtfully. 

When it is gone, the sun is to my back, falling behind the dunes and bathing the wastes in a vermilion light. There’s a shape in the distance, dark and foreboding, but unmoving. I stop in my tracks to study the thing. 

It’s the twisted metal carcass of a buzzard wreck. In its ruined belly might be supplies, but I risk losing track of my direction in the dark. I can’t stop moving now. Despite the aching of my muscles and the feverish tint to my skin, blistered by the infernal heat, I must keep moving.

The wreck is smaller than it appeared from afar, jagged claws of ruined metal twisted by its uncontrolled descent and the constant, battering winds of the wastes. There is no indication of how long it has been sitting, abandoned to the elements. Whether it was wrecked days or years ago, the ruined buzzard keeps its history to itself. 

As I stagger into the heart of it, my limbs grow impossibly heavy, and a gust of wind sweeps me off of my feet and knocks me to my knees. I need to rest, as much as I hate to, lest I collapse where there’s no shelter from the storm. I barely can wedge myself behind a twisted spire of steel before I tumble into the sand, wrapped hands fumbling in my bag for my canteen. It’s gone. 

I’m too exhausted for panic, there’s only a bitter resignation that burns in my belly as I toss my bag into the sand and slump against the hot, ruined metal and close my eyes. Only for a moment. Only a break. 

---

I never told Eve I loved her. 

Not after Ma brought me over to meet her father at 8 when he was tossed unceremoniously from the Golden City, two children in tow. He was paler than the rest of us and stood out in a crowd for being so clearly Golden City born and raised. I was a shy child, and she was bright and round, in good health. She grabbed my hand and dragged me into the next room to play with her brother while our parents talked. 

I didn’t tell her I loved her when she was thirteen and her father died in an accident on the oil rig. That night Ma let her stay over, and that night only. She never wanted to be seen around disgraced City folk after that initial meeting, and barely tolerated our friendship as it was. Yet, Eve and I piled onto my little bunk, with Graham on the floor the night of their father’s death.

Her brother snored gently in a pile of blankets, but Eve couldn’t sleep. I pulled her close and she told me of what she remembered of the Golden City, where her mother lived. I knew they were the embellished tales of a scared girl who was desperately homesick, but her eyes lit up like they never had before, so I listened. 

When she was fifteen, we lined up, tears in our eyes, to identify the found body of Graham. He hadn’t come home that night, but we held onto a futile hope that he had decided it wasn’t safe to walk alone at night and bedded down with one of his many friends—he was good at that, making friends. Eve lived in a state of perpetual exhaustion and rarely had the energy to go out to do much else but work as an assistant to the tailor next door. 

She screamed when she saw his body, battered and broken. They had knocked his teeth out over six coppers. I should have told her I loved her then, as I beat back my own grief to calm her down. She’d make herself ill, exhaust herself so much she couldn’t work the next day, and she needed those coppers, so instead I choked it back and held her to my chest. 

And I should have told her I loved her before I slid through the window and left her alone with her thoughts the night before she was Forgotten. 

But I didn’t. 

---

The morning comes about violently, with beams of golden light and the high-pitched screech of a distant buzzard. Sand sifts into my mouth and falls from my nose as I startle, scrambling to sit upright. 

I reach for my bag next to me, and am met with a fistful of sand. Panic rises in my throat, pounding in my ears as my eyes shoot wide. It’s gone, alongside the goatskin canteen that holds my remaining water. Last night’s resignation throbs through my chest.

I dig through the sand, hoping it’s buried somewhere, anywhere. What was supposed to be a grunt of frustration devolves into a sob, and in a moment tears streak my chin. They trail down my face, staining red from the grime and dust. 

I’m alone in the wastes, and the only thing that was to keep me alive—if only temporarily—is gone. 

The buzzard in the distance shrieks again, and I whip my head up. 

My bag, battered and stained red with mud, is hung by its single strap across a piece of sharp, gleaming metal. As I stagger to my feet and stumble towards it, my boot strikes something with a thud. 

My missing canteen, blessedly full of water. I pull my bag from where it had been slung to check its contents. They’re all there, and at the bottom of my pack, something catches the sun. The golden ring Eve had handed me. I palm the metal, somehow still cool, and shove it onto my big finger—the only place it will fit—and shoulder my pack with a final sob before I run a sleeve over my tear-stained face. I need to keep moving. 

I can almost see Eve here in the desert, slight frame bent like a sapling in a storm. Her dark hair must have whipped around her face to beat her cheeks, obscuring her vision. Or was her hair red? The color seems to evade me, missing from my memory like a woven cloth with a single thread that had been pulled from it. I can’t help but think I did that once, as a child. 

I must be heat-addled. 

Another buzzard whips by, jolting me into the present. Despite the haze of the settling storm, a distinctive outline roots me to the spot.

The City is near. I could make it in less than a day’s walk. 

To survive the Forgetting is to throw away an old life. You’re no longer the child of someone who lived and died slaving away on an oil rig, the son or daughter of a weaver or goat farmer. You’ve proven yourself in the wastes, been purified, and returned a new person. Your old life is gone, your debt is paid. 

Eve was prepared out into the waste to regain her citizenship in the City of Gold. She was ready to lose parts of herself, pieces of her past like her brother’s name, or her father’s easy smile. She was ready to lose me. 

But I cannot lose Eve. I can’t lose Graham, or the woman at the market who always paid a copper or two too much for Ma’s woven rugs because she knew who would be getting them—her son had survived the Forgetting many years prior, and she would never see him again, but knew he was safe in the Golden City despite the fact he could no longer recognize her face. I even cannot lose Ma, bitter and jaded as she has become, for she must have known I stole coppers all of those years and turned a blind eye. 

I can’t do it. 

Even as the sun falls a third time, even as my eyes burn and my lips parch, I steel myself over and turn my back to the Golden City. Step after step, I leave it all behind. My name is Case Marrow, and I will not Forget myself.

Author Bio

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