Radioactive

It’s a room. One, in a series of many. No one knows all of the rooms or how to get to them. There are endless nooks and evermore hallways. Everything is bare. Concrete floors and walls like a house of mirrors. Walking around is like living on Escher’s staircase. Your sanity swirls down the drain as sweat from your forehead floats up to the floor. A spark, something glints in the distance and catches your eye. You see it more clearly as you round the corner. You step into a new room, one which you have been in many times before. The walls are plastered with thousands of little mementos, evenly shaped pieces of paper. Partially stuck to the wall, they move in the nonexistent breeze. Flowing, like a shooting star under a carpet. One near you seems to be glowing. It peels off, the relationship with the wall is annulled. The yellow leaf is set a blaze as it floats into the sky and disappears. Most of these tiny fragments are yellow, faded with time. The rest are colored coded by year, with two digits inscribed on the back to mark the date. They have no other form of identity, no pattern, and no reference. Whether a letter, a word, or even a sketch, all these defaced notes adhere to a wall. Scattered to and fro, a mosaic portraying your life. There might be enough room for them all, and perhaps not. Everything is encoded and stored, but you cannot retrieve them. These memories have all been gathered up and shoved into a closet. The landslide as you open the door is enough to kill you, or at least drive you  mad. The door is opened. A gun materializes and rests against a stranger’s temple, praying to the gods. The walls around you suddenly burst into flames, everything is ravaged and burned. Nothing survives, save for a small slab of stone. It marks where he now rests, the last memory of a forgotten world.