The dust rises with each step, dancing in the weak sunlight that filters through broken windows. I shouldn’t be here. It’s the first rule of memory collecting: never read furniture from your own past. But this house — this chair — has been haunting my dreams for weeks.
“Just a quick touch,” I mutter, adjusting my gloves. “In and out. No one needs to know.”
The wingback chair sits like a throne in the debris, its fabric grey with age and neglect. To anyone else, it would look abandoned, forgotten. But I know better. Furniture remembers everything: every conversation, every tear, every moment of silence.
I remember this chair being burgundy. Soft. Velvety.
My hand shakes as I peel off my right glove. The other collectors use bare hands for better contact, but I’ve always needed that barrier, that choice of when to connect and when to stay safely distant. Memories have a way of pulling you in, drowning you in other people’s lives.
But these aren’t other people’s lives, are they?
My fingers hover over the armrest. This is where I used to perch while Mom read stories. Where Dad would sit when he was sick. Where I last saw them both, before —
The fabric is static electricity under my skin. The memories surge up, eager, hungry.
Wait. Something’s wrong.
These aren’t my memories of the chair.
These are the chair’s memories of me.
And I don’t remember half of what it’s showing me.
Colors blur and spin until I’m watching myself at twelve, but not the twelve I remember. This version of me has long hair in braids, not the pixie cut Mom insisted on. I’m crying, begging someone — Dad? — not to go. The chair remembers how my fingers dug into its arms, how my tears soaked into burgundy velvet.
But that’s not right. Dad didn’t leave. He died. Here, in this chair, while I was at school.
The memory shifts like a kaleidoscope.
Now I’m sixteen, wearing a prom dress I never owned, and Mom is taking photos while a boy pins on a corsage. She’s alive in this version, her hair still dark, not white like it was in the hospital.
“Stop,” I whisper, but the chair has more to show me.
Graduation. Wedding dress fittings. A second marriage for Mom. Dad’s retirement party. A lifetime of moments that never happened, all viewed from this silent witness, this keeper of alternate possibilities.
I gasp and yank my hand from the chair, the scene dying in my head.
I’m not seeing memories.
I’m seeing a life I was supposed to have.
Something — or someone — changed my timeline. Stole my parents. Rewrote my history.
And this chair, this stubborn, burgundy sentinel, somehow remembered both versions?
Maybe?
My hand shakes as fumble for my phone. I need to call the other collectors. We’re not just reading memories anymore.
We’re finding proof of temporal theft.
And I think I know who stole my life.
Image made with Midjourney.
Prompt provided by NoGENver, GoOnWrite.
Flash Fiction written by S. J. Pajonas with assistance from Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Listen to this story on YouTube at https://youtu.be/5nuH6eKVN1A
