By Nicole Chan
As usual, morning in the village was quiet. Until I saw Martha.
She was hauling boxes into the street outside her cottage. Everyone knew her as the widow who hadn’t left her home since her husband’s death five months ago. A porcelain lamp shattered against the bottom of the wooden bin.
“Martha?”
She turned from her humming, eyes bloodshot yet strangely light. “Oh, good morning, Edgar, dear.”
I glanced at the growing pile. “What are you doing?”
“I woke up and found my house full of things I don’t remember getting,” she said, amused. “Can you imagine? All this mess.” She kicked a box aside. “I must’ve sleepwalked to the market.”
I stepped closer, the hair on my arms standing up. “You don’t remember any of it? Martha, there are dozens of boxes out here!”
“I know! Quite a mystery, isn’t it?” She hefted a velvet curtain and tossed it onto the heap as if it were a candy wrapper.
I bent to move a stray piece of veil, but my fingers brushed something cold and hard, a silver frame lying face-up amidst the junk. It was her wedding photo. I’d seen it a hundred times on her mantelpiece: Martha in her lace veil with her husband beaming beside her.
“Martha,” I said carefully, “who is this?”
The woman squinted at the photograph. “I’m not sure,” she admitted with a sheepish laugh. “Probably someone important.”
I stared at her. Five months ago, she had wept so violently at the funeral that it took three neighbors to hold her upright. Now, she was discarding her husband alongside old newspapers.
I had heard stories like this before. A soldier slept soundly for the first time after a full moon. A mother stopped visiting the cemetery after forgetting why. A hunter who no longer sweated at the sight of the forest because the trauma of a large beast had simply… evaporated.
Everyone called it a blessing. The Silver Mercy.
Until that morning, I hadn’t believed those marketplace stories. People’s faces filled with envy when they spoke of those the moon had “chosen.”
How lucky, they would sigh. As if grief and pain were nothing more than a stain to be scrubbed clean.
And standing in the street, watching Martha sort through the remains of her marriage like waste, my throat tightened. This was not the way to heal. It was a second death.
Martha bent again. She added her husband’s wool coat and a stack of yellowed letters tied with a frayed blue ribbon to the heap. I looked back down at the wedding portrait. Her younger self looked embarrassingly joyful, but it was a face that knew exactly who the love of her life was.
I looked up. The moon was pale against the morning sky. I slipped the photograph beneath my arm and stepped away from the pile before Martha could ask for it back.
Or worse—fail to.
By dusk, the village had begun preparing. A loaf of warm bread left on a windowsill, a bowl of honey by a doorway, coins stacked in careful little towers. At one home, a child solemnly tucked a pressed flower into the crack of a stone wall.
For the moon, I assumed. Or for whatever thief hid behind that name.
I followed the offerings until I reached the edge of the village, where the road faded to tall grass and open fields. By the time the sun had fully disappeared, I was hidden behind a row of birch trees just beyond the village border, the wedding photograph still tucked inside my coat. The full moon was enormous overhead, its light flooding the field like water.
Then, someone stepped into the field.
A lone man limped barefoot through the grass as moonlight reflected off his sleeves, his dark hair, and the paleness of his hands as he lifted them toward the sky. He looked as thin and worn as a ghost.
He closed his eyes. From where I stood, the air around him seemed to shimmer.
My stomach dropped. It wasn’t a story after all.
I stepped from behind the trees. “Stop.”
His eyes snapped open. “You shouldn’t be here.”
I laughed bitterly. “And you should? You’ve been… been doing something to the people!”
“I’ve done nothing to harm them.” His voice was defensive and strained.
“You make them forget things. Pieces of themselves,” I replied.
“Pieces they were drowning in.”
My brows pulled together. “A woman forgot her husband,” I argued, fingers curling around the photograph in my coat. “She was throwing his things into the street like they belonged to a stranger.” Admittedly, she hadn’t been outside for months. But as she was now, as if her husband never mattered…. That wasn’t right.
“The memory was killing her,” he insisted. “I saw the way she held his coat every night instead of sleeping.”
“So you—,” I rubbed my temples. “Helped her by making her forget him?”
“I removed what was hurting her.”
I shook my head, a sigh slipping out. “You took the entirety of her because she loved him with her whole being!”
“I don’t take what defines them.” He frowned. “Only what pains them.”
“Pain defines us, too,” I snapped. “We don’t get to choose. We’re the sum of everything. Pain, joy, grief, fear… All of it!”
“Then what would you have me do?” he questioned. “Let them suffer?”
“Yes.”
He flinched. “And what about the ones who won’t survive it?”
“How do you know they won’t survive unless you give them a chance?” I shouted.
He looked at me, his moon-colored eyes softening into something that looked like agony. “I just want to save them,” he whispered, “even if I have to contain their pain inside me!”
I took the photo out. “Leaving them without a choice isn’t saving.”
He went still. For a heartbeat, I thought he might argue. Instead, he lowered his hands, the shimmering slowly dying.
Far away in the village, voices screamed.
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