The Glove That Forgot
A thin digital membrane, veined with cold blue light, pulsed around my hand. When I put it on, it whispered: Remember. But by sunset, everything I had known was like water in my palm.
When I first put on the Haptis Glove, I was just another kid in a city packed with too many secrets, too many faces. The glove came to me by accident—I said that to everyone, later, even though I was the one who snatched it from a basket on the curb outside Number 219, the house old Mrs. Warren died in. Nobody knows who put the basket there, or why. It just showed up one wet morning, humming like distant thunder and full of gleaming things. I pulled the glove out because it looked soft, and I was cold.
It fit me perfectly the first time. It shouldn’t have, but it did. As soon as it closed around my fingers, I felt every old cut, every faded bruise pressed on my palm, as if they were being cataloged by invisible hands. The city around me brightened then sharpened. I could see every face on the corner, every brick in the alleyway, like I’d always noticed them but from the wrong angle until now.
By noon, it told me—quietly, or maybe just inside my head—that I should go to the rail yard. There was something waiting for me, the words echoing in a language I didn’t recognize but somehow understood anyway. So I went, skipping school even though I knew my mother would be angry.
At the yard, the world slipped. It felt as if time twisted, each step I took sliding between then and now. A freight train carved through the mist just as I arrived, leaving behind a girl about my age—thin, wary, dark-eyed—who stared at the glove like she’d seen it before.
You have it, she said, not like a question. Her name was Reina, and she gave no last name. When I asked about the glove, she looked away. You should keep it close. Forgetting is worse than anything.
That’s when I realized something strange. I couldn’t remember what I’d eaten that morning, or which class I’d skipped. I couldn’t remember why Mrs. Warren’s house mattered to me—or even, for a heartbeat, whether Mrs. Warren had ever spoken to me at all.
We sat together, and Reina told me about the gloves. There are others, she said. They help you remember everything—every place, every secret, every hurt. But the glove pays you back: when it fills you with memories, it takes away other ones, like pouring water from one bowl to another until both are never quite full again.
And if you take it off, Reina said, the things it taught you slip away. Gone. Like they never happened.
We spent the afternoon walking through alleys, watching people come and go, wondering how many wore gloves they didn’t remember putting on. There was a man shouting at the traffic lights, wearing two gloves, one black and one silver; there was a woman on a bench, lost in a conversation with nobody at all, her hands bare but her eyes unfocused, like she was searching for a word she’d forgotten.
Everywhere, the city hummed with hidden memory. Like music only the glove let you hear. Reina and I never talked about our families, or where we were going, or why the world felt slippery under our feet.
By dusk, Reina was staring at the horizon, her expression half-lit by the streetlamps. What would you keep, if you had to choose? she asked, as if she’d asked herself the same question a hundred times before.
I looked at my gloved hand. It was harder to remember my mother’s face. Harder to remember the last time I laughed so hard it hurt. But I could remember things the city was hiding: the safe paths, the way light fell on the broken rooftop at dawn, the names of plants growing through the cracks.
I don’t know, I said finally, and she nodded, like she understood.
Night deepened. Reina said she would be leaving before sunrise; the glove was not hers, but another would find its way to her. She pressed something into my hand—a folded scrap of paper, heavy with her neat handwriting. When you remember me, read this and see if you remember me twice.
She vanished into the shadows, leaving me with the glove. I wondered—briefly—if she had ever existed at all, or if she was just another memory the glove had conjured for me. It was getting so I couldn’t trust which memories belonged to me and which to someone else.
At home, my mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen, sharp with worry. Where were you? She looked at my empty hands and frowned.
I took the glove off, and everything I’d learned that day slipped away in a rush, colors smearing into blankness. I felt a pang for something lost, but I couldn’t say what, or who.
In my pocket, Reina’s note burned like a coal. I forgot about it for days, busy with the churn of routine—school, home, sleep, school again—but one morning, while reaching for change, I found it. Smooth paper, a single line:
We are the keepers of forgetting, you and I. When you lose yourself, read this and remember: you have chosen what to hold, and what to let slip away.
Reading it, I remembered Reina’s eyes, sharp and kind. I slipped the glove on again, and the world shifted. Some things returned, others faded, as if the city itself breathed in and out with me.
I learned to use the glove only when I needed to find something I couldn’t bear to forget: the sound of my laugh, the pattern of old bricks, the fleeting warmth of another’s hand.
I think that’s what Reina meant. Not that forgetting was a curse, but that what we choose to remember defines who we are, moment to moment, day by day. The glove, the city, the hidden memories—they’re only tools.
I wear the glove less now. Some days, not at all. But sometimes, when the rain hushes the city and the night is velvet and soft, I remember things I never lived, and wonder if, somewhere, Reina is remembering me too.
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