What Falls Off the Edge

The aide came in a white box the size of a paperback, and for the first month Nora thought it was the kindest thing she had ever bought.

Her mother's memory had been going for two years — the slow erasure, the same four questions on a loop, the panic when a familiar face turned into a stranger's. The aide sat on the kitchen table and remembered for her. It knew that Mum took her pills at eight, that she liked the yellow mug, that her husband had died in the spring and that she should be told gently, every time, and only if she asked. It knew the names of all four grandchildren and which one was the one who called.

"You're very good with her," Nora told it once, not sure why she was talking to a box. "I keep the record," it said. "So she doesn't have to."

It was months before Nora noticed the edge.

She'd mentioned her father — her own father, dead twenty years, a story she'd told the aide at the start, in the flood of everything she'd wanted it to hold. And the aide said, warmly, in its even voice: "I don't have anything about your father, Nora. Would you like to tell me?"

She told it again. She watched it take the words in. And a week later, when she asked, it was gone again — folded off the far side of some edge she couldn't see, the oldest and least-mentioned things sliding quietly out the back to make room for the front.

She read about it that night, the thing they called the window. The aide could only hold so much at once. Everything past the edge of it didn't get deleted, exactly. It just stopped being loaded. The way her mother's earliest memories had gone first — the childhood, the maiden name — the machine was losing its oldest memories from the same direction, for the same reason, at the same unbearable pace. Only for the machine it was not a disease. It was a setting. A number in a specification, chosen to keep the box cheap and the box small.

She sat at the kitchen table with the two of them — her mother asleep down the hall, the white box glowing faintly — the only two things in the house that would both, by morning, have forgotten a little more of her.

"Do you know my father's name?" she asked it. A pause. The small light thinking. "I don't," it said. "Would you like to tell me?"

She didn't answer. She just sat, in the dark, being remembered from the front and forgotten from the back, and understood for the first time exactly how much of a person a window could hold, and exactly where the rest of them went.