The City That Forgets

Every five years, on the night of the autumn equinox, the city of Thel held the Cup.

It was not a single cup. The Cup was the name of the ritual. Every adult in Thel — every citizen over thirteen — stood in their front courtyard, at the moment the bells rang at sundown, and drank a small porcelain cup full of a clear, slightly bitter liquid. The liquid had been mixed by the city's keepers. It had been mixed for five hundred years. It contained — the keepers said, without going into detail — the herb that allowed the city to forget the worst of the year just past.

The Cup did not erase a person's whole life. It erased, very precisely, the most recent twelve months. It was the city's way of staying gentle with itself. The keepers said: every city carries grievances. Most cities let them rot. Thel does not. Thel takes the worst year of the cycle and lets it go. The peace we have, we have because we let go.

Pia had been told this her whole life. She had watched, four times before, as her parents drank the Cup. They had blinked, set the cup down, and looked at each other with a kind of new kindness. Pia, as a child, had been told that the Cup was a gift. She had been told that one day, when she turned thirteen, she would join them.

Pia had turned thirteen the year before this Cup.

This was her first.

Her parents had explained, gently, what to expect. You will not lose anythingimportant, her mother had said. You will lose the year just past — every memory, every face you met for the first time this year, every small frustration. You will keep, very intact, your childhood. You will keep me. You will keep your father. You will keep your school. You will not, after the Cup, be missing anyone in your life. Most of what is removed is small.

The night of the Cup, Pia stood in the courtyard with her parents and her younger brother, Toma, who was eleven and not yet drinking. The bells rang. Each of them — except Toma — lifted the small porcelain cup. They drank.

The liquid was bitter. Pia almost gagged. Her father patted her shoulder. That's it. That's the worst part. Now sleep.

The family went inside. They went to bed. The city, all around them, fell silent.

Pia woke up at dawn. She lay in her bed with her eyes open. She tried, deliberately, to recall what she had eaten for dinner the previous Tuesday. She could not. She tried to recall the name of the new history teacher she had had since September. She could not. She tried to recall a book she had been reading. She could not. The Cup had worked. She felt, exactly as her mother had described, steady — as if the past year had been gently lifted off her shoulders, leaving her standing taller.

But.

She knew the year had happened. She knew her younger brother had been ten the autumn before. She knew she had been twelve. She knew the tree in the courtyard had been smaller, last spring, than it was now. She knew, in the way you know a chapter of a book even though you cannot quite remember its sentences, that the year had contained — something. A specific thing. Something she could not, after the Cup, get to.

She lay in bed.

She thought, very carefully: I remember the texture of not-remembering.