A disturbing look at memory, and how it can betray us

Memories light the corners of my mind...
– Barbra Streisand

Forty years later, I still remember a specific moment in time, sitting on a school bus, listening to Olivia Newton John sing “Have You Never Been Mellow?” on the radio speakers.

I remember the time I went up to Manzanita Lake, even longer ago than that, looking for pieces of obsidian and pretending they were arrowheads. And I remember playing ring-toss in the hallway of a home where I haven’t lived since I was a teenager.

Why do some events from our past leave such an imprint on our brains? Events that have no bearing on our lives today, but somehow get stuck there, like splinters embedded in our minds, sticking out from just below the surface?

Meanwhile, we forget other things we ought to remember. A good friend’s birthday. Where we put our keys. What day of the week it is.

Memory has always fascinated me because it isn’t as cut-and-dried as it seems. Eyewitness accounts of a crime are notoriously fallible. Yet a song can come on the radio, or a scent can waft through the air, and they can seemingly transport us back to a moment in time that seems real all over again.

How much of what we remember is real, how much is based on our perception at the time it happened, and how much has been altered through time?

What if someone had a perfect memory? And what if that someone was able to use it to conjure up those memories in the flesh? I explored that concept in Memortality and its sequel, Paralucidity. It’s the story of a young woman who brings her childhood friend back from the dead — and finds herself pursued by those who covet her ability, learning to master it as she finds herself fighting for her life.

That’s pure fantasy, of course.

But the opposite, sadly, isn’t fantasy at all. For some of us, memory degrades as we get older. Absent-mindedness, senility, and Alzheimer’s disease can rob us of our past — or at least our ability to access it.

It’s still there, just barely out of reach. Others may remember things about ourselves we don’t. But they’ll never share the thoughts, feelings, and emotional triggers that exist inside our minds, because those things are ours and ours alone.

Until they’re taken from us by age or some medical condition.

A disturbing tale

My newest release, Death’s Doorstep, explores what happens when a man sees the love of his life slowly losing her memory before his eyes.

There’s more going on than he could possibly know, and the journey that lies ahead of him is a reality-bending detour from life as he knows it into some no-man’s land that shares a border with the Twilight Zone.

If you enjoyed my collection of short, disturbing stories, Nightmare’s Eve, chances are you’ll enjoy Death’s Doorstep as well.

Samaire Wynne, author of Titania Academy, read it in one sitting and describes it as “A story that stays with you, long after you’ve read the last page. Disturbing... to say the least.”

It wrote it to be a quick read, fast-paced and engaging, with twists and turns along the way — kind of like memories themselves.

What if they aren’t what they think they are?

And what if death isn’t what we think it is?

Death’s Doorstep is the story of Allen Hembridge, a physicist entering middle age, has been happily married to the love of his life for two decades when things start to go terribly wrong.

She’s slowly becoming a different person. Getting headaches. Becoming more forgetful. Lashing out at him as though he were a stranger.

There’s an old saying that life’s a journey, not a destination. What if the same is true of death?

Allen is scared to ask that “what if” question. He should be. The answer will scare him a thousand times more.

Death’s Doorstep is available on Amazon as a paperback, Kindle ebook, or free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited.

Settle in under a warm blanket on a cool autumn night. Or any time you’re ready to have your fears brought to life, your assumptions tested and your perceptions turned upside down. It’s time to find out what it feels like to be on Death’s Doorstep.