Short Story: 'I Buy Memories'

I felt as if the gap between the buildings was calling me.
However, whether that was actually an act of "calling" is not certain now.
After all, memories do not have options.

A gap not even 60 centimeters wide.
Scuff marks like old scars, as if someone had once tried to force their way through and torn the buttons off their coat, remained on both concrete walls.
I held my breath and proceeded through that passage.

Before long, a small window appeared, reminiscent of a prize exchange booth at an old pachinko parlor.
Above the window hung a crude sign, scribbled on a scrap of cardboard.

<I Buy Memories>

The letters were shaky, a handwriting that seemed to pour anxiety into the reader.
Beyond the small window was a petite old woman.
She was a dusty existence, as if she had been absorbing the accumulation of time all by herself.

The old woman looked at me and grinned.
It was a way of opening her face that couldn't be called a smile; it was like a magic trick where she turned her facial skin inside out.

"How much will you sell your 'yesterday' for?"

The old woman's voice was not words, but sound.
It reached not my ears, but the inside of my lungs.

"……Yesterday?"

"Yes. Yesterday. The memory of yesterday that you no longer need now that it's today. I'll buy it for a high price."

I didn't understand the meaning. But strangely, no questions arose.

"Yesterday…… I don't think anything special happened."

The old woman nodded.

"A 'memory of nothing happening' has value. Much more than a memory you've convinced yourself 'happened'."

A small silver plate with banknotes on it was offered through the small window.
I accepted the banknotes and put them in my wallet.

Then the old woman instructed me to blow onto the plate.
I did as I was told and blew onto it.

A faint current of air was born in the alley where there should have been no wind.
The next moment, I could no longer remember "yesterday".

"Thank you very much. Please come back to sell again."

The old woman said that and put the plate away.

I went back through the passage.
The sky was the color of afternoon, but I didn't know which afternoon it was.

I visited that place many times after that.
I sold the day before yesterday, I sold last week, and I sold my college years.

And then one day, the old woman said:

"This is the final, one-of-a-kind item. Your 'first memory'—with this, everything will be wiped clean."

"Wiped clean?"

"Because you will no longer be 'you'."

I nodded.
After all, I didn't even remember who I was to begin with.

The old woman held out a tray with banknotes on it.
I handed over my final memory.

Ever since then, I have been sitting inside the small window.
Today, someone is coming down the hallway again.

I turn my face inside out and grin.