It begins with a jar.

  Not the first I had ever seen, nor the most ornate—no, in fact, it was a vessel of the plainest sort. Glass thick with age, lip crusted with a dusty seal of old wax and older time, resting upon a shelf that had, I presume, stood long before I knew to measure standing. Inside: a curious, trembling thing. Pinkish-grey, bulbous and shriveled in the shape of sentiment. A heart, mine, if the label could be trusted, though even now I question whether any heart I have ever possessed could look so small.

  “HEART – Age 9.”

  That was the inscription. Faint, handwritten, smudged by time or perhaps by the oils of hands long past. Were they mine?

  I do not recall placing it there, nor removing it from myself.

  Yet I knew what it held.

  Oh, how I knew.

  I had once believed memory to be something soft, gossamer-like, the way one thinks of candlelight or music from another room, easy to dim, easy to forget if you simply tried. But no. Memory is flesh. It pulses. It resists preservation. That is why we pickle it in form and fable, why we encase it in jars and speak of it only in hushed tones...lest it beat again.

  She was there, in that jar. Her name, I cannot give you. I remember her in crimson.

  Yes—red was her color.

  The day I met her, the sky had been iron grey, a color that clings to me now still. I had been walking through the field that bordered the old vicar’s orchard, where wind had no manners and crows spoke in riddles. And there, by the broken fence, stood a girl with a kite in her hand—a ragged thing, red as her eyes.

  “You know,” she said, without looking at me, “if you tie your memories to something red, they won’t fade.”

  Her voice struck me as older than her body, which was slight, a fragile thing. She was no taller than the fencepost, no wider than the space between my dreams. Yet she spoke with certainty. She spoke with none of the childlike wonder we all had at the time, but rather a wisdom colder than she.

  She handed me the kite string, and I took it.

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  Of course I did. We always take the cursed things willingly.

  That evening I tied a red ribbon to my wrist. Then a crimson thread to the handle of my bedroom drawer. Then a scarlet mark on the inside of my door.

  Then came the obsession.

  You see, memory is a cruel and luminous thing. It lives best when one does not stare too hard. But I, fool that I am, tried to preserve it. I became a curator of all things red. I was only but a child. Every good thing I wished to keep, I wrapped in ruby-colored silk. I scrawled journals in red ink. I bled on pages on purpose.

  Yet still, she faded. Red hadn't preserved anything but the memory.

  And when I took the jar again tonight, hoping to feel the warmth of that overcast afternoon, the tremble of her hand as she passed me the string, but I found only silence. The heart within was still, pale, suspended in that glistening chemical like a thing asleep.

  For the first time in years, I wondered: Did she ever exist at all?

  There are those who believe the past is a map—set, precise, waiting only to be unfolded and read with proper light. I do not. The past is no map. It is a wound. And like all wounds, it festers if you pick at it. So, I won't.

  I set the jar down on the lacquered table, and it made a noise that echoed too loudly in the small room. A wet clunk, followed by a hush that reminded me of funeral parlors, or confession booths, the likes of which I never wished to revisit. The air thickened.

  I did not wish to open the lid.

  I had opened it once, years prior, when the longing had twisted into hunger, and the ache into compulsion. I thought perhaps if I touched it, if I laid my fingers upon that little meat relic of my childhood, I might remember the way her voice curled around certain vowels, or how her eyes flicked left when she lied. But I had found no sound in the jar. Only a scent. Not rot, as one might expect, but something sweet. Sickly. Almost floral. Like lilies pressed beneath glass, robbed of their perfume.

  I had vomited in the sink.

  Tonight, however, I did not unseal the jar. I only watched the heart, small and motionless, suspended in its prison. The fluid had begun to yellow faintly, I noticed. Was that time, at last? Or failure? Or were even chemicals susceptible to despair?

  I do not know.

  I found myself speaking aloud, not to the heart, not to the girl, but to the space where she had once existed.

  “What were you called?” I asked, voice brittle. “You with the kite, and the ribboned hair. You who told me red would save me.”

  No answer came.

  I suppose it was foolish, to believe it ever could.

  But still, I lit a candle. Still, I placed the jar before it. Still, I sat beside the flame as shadows twisted up the walls.

  And as the light flickered through the cloudy glass, I imagined it—a twitch. A ripple. A tremor of something life-like. A beat. One, faint, slow beat.

  I stood up so suddenly the chair screeched. I stared, heart thudding against my ribs. But there was nothing. No movement. No breath. Silence again.

  Only glass.

  A a heart that could not remember the name of the girl with the red kite.