What A Year Was For
For the first month after the Cup, Pia was very careful.
She watched the adults around her. Her parents seemed — unchanged, but lighter. Her teachers seemed unchanged. The city seemed unchanged. Things she had heard her parents argue about, last summer, were no longer argued about. The bakery on the corner that her mother had been angry with for some reason — whatever the reason had been, it was gone. Her mother now greeted the baker warmly. The baker greeted her back warmly. The grievance had been, very precisely, removed.
Pia read all of this with a kind of careful attention she had never had before. She was, she realised, watching the city the way an outsider would. Because she alone — as far as she could tell — knew that something had been taken.
She decided to find out what it was.
This was harder than she had expected. The Cup did not just remove memories from inside a person. The Cup removed traces from the city. The city did not, by tradition, keep records of the year just gone. Newspapers from the past year were collected and burned the morning after the Cup. School essays were destroyed. Family photographs from the year were given to the keepers, who burned them in the temple. *The year never happened* was the phrase. The whole city had agreed to it.
But not everything could be removed.
The tree in the courtyard had grown. The crack in the wall by the bakery had