The Memory Breach

SEPTEMBER 2025, FLASH, 1700 WORDS

The first time I stole someone’s memory, it tasted like burnt coffee and vintage whiskey. I didn’t mean to do it—I was just trying to help Mrs. Henderson find her keys. She’d been standing in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s, crying into her reusable shopping bags, when I touched her shoulder and asked if she was okay.

That’s when it happened. The memory slipped from her mind into mine like honey dripping from a spoon. Suddenly, I knew exactly where her keys were: wedged between her red Toyota driver’s seat and center console, next to an old pizza receipt and a forgotten tube of Revlon’s ‘Fire & Ice.’

Mrs. Henderson stopped crying immediately, blinked twice, and walked away humming Sweet Caroline. She didn’t remember losing her keys. She didn’t remember me. She didn’t remember the last three hours of her life at all.

But I remembered everything. Including the reason she’d been crying—her son hadn’t called on her birthday. Again.

“Hey, Echo!” Yada’s voice yanked me back to the present. She was waving her hand in front of my face, her collection of silver bangles jangling like wind chimes. “You’re doing that thing again where you go all zombie mode on me.”

“Sorry.” I focused on the chemistry homework spread across the library table between us. “Just thinking.”

“About the weird memory thing?” Yada was the only person who knew about my … ability. She’d been there for the second incident when I accidentally absorbed our history teacher’s memory of his first kiss behind the bleachers in 1982. Mr. Peterson’s memory had tasted like peppermint gum and awkward teenage hormones.

“It’s getting stronger.” I lowered my voice, though the library was nearly empty. “Yesterday, I got three memories just from brushing past people in the hallway.”

“Ooh, any good gossip?” Yada leaned forward, her dark curls falling over her shoulders.

“Someone’s grandmother’s secret marinara recipe. The exact moment a kid realized Santa wasn’t real. And …” I hesitated, “the password to the principal’s computer.”

Yada’s eyes widened. “No way.”

“And that’s not even the weird part.” I glanced around before continuing. “The memories … they’re starting to leak.”

“Leak?”

“Like, yesterday I caught myself humming a lullaby in Hungarian. I don’t speak Hungarian. But last week I accidentally took a memory from that exchange student, Zsófia, and now …” I shrugged. “Random Hungarian.”

Yada sat back, twirling a curl around her finger; her quiet demeanor partially revealed what might be ruminating in her mind. “That’s … concerning.”

“You think?” I started packing up my books. “I have to figure out how to control this before—”

The scream cut through the library’s silence like a knife.

Yada and I exchanged glances before running toward the sound. We found a small crowd gathering around the reference section, where Ms. Lau, the librarian, was kneeling next to an unconscious student.

“He just collapsed,” someone cried out.

“Call 911!”

“Is he breathing?”

I recognized the boy—Jordan Bruce, junior—captain of the robotics team. We had AP Physics together. He’d been acting strange lately, more withdrawn than usual. And there was something else—sometimes, when he looked at me during physics lab, I caught a glint of curiosity in his eyes, like he knew something about me that I wasn’t aware of.

Before I could stop myself, I was pushing through the crowd.

“Let me help,” I heard myself say.

“Echo, don’t,” Yada tried to grab my arm, but I was already kneeling beside Jordan, my hand on his forehead.

The memory hit me like a tidal wave.

Darkness. Pills. A note hidden in a copy of Fahrenheit 451. But underneath it all, something deeper: the crushing weight of never being enough, of parents who loved him but couldn’t see past their own expectations, of feeling invisible in his own home.

My head spun as Jordan’s memory settled into place alongside Mrs. Henderson’s keys and Mr. Peterson’s first kiss. But this was different. This memory wasn’t finished yet.

“The book,” I gasped, pointing at the shelves. “Check Fahrenheit 451.”

Ms. Lau gave me an odd look but pulled the book from the shelf. A folded piece of paper fell to the floor.

While everyone was distracted by the note, I pressed my hand to Jordan’s forehead again, harder this time. I’d never tried to give a memory back before, but I had to try. I focused on pushing instead of pulling, on returning instead of taking.

Jordan’s eyes flew open as the paramedics arrived.

Later, in the hospital waiting room, Yada brought me a cup of terrible vending machine coffee.

“So,” she said, sitting beside me. “You can give memories back now?”

“Apparently.” I stared into the coffee’s gloomy appearance. “But it’s not that simple. When I gave Jordan a memory back, I think … I think I gave him something else too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I accidentally gave him Mrs. Henderson’s son’s phone number.” I took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “And possibly Mr. Peterson’s first kiss.”

Yada snorted. “Well, that should make the robotics club interesting.”

I tried to laugh at Yada’s joke, but the weight of what had just happened pressed down on me like a concrete blanket. Jordan was alive, yes, but I’d done something unprecedented. I’d not only taken a memory—I’d given memories back, and not just his own.

“Do you think he’ll …” I trailed off, picking at the cardboard sleeve on my coffee cup.

“Start craving Fire & Ice lipstick and speaking Hungarian?” Yada finished. “Honestly, Echo, I think we’re way past normal here.”

She was right. What had started as accidental memory-taking had evolved into something else entirely. I was becoming a memory hub, a collection point for other people’s lives, and now I could apparently redistribute them like some sort of cosmic library.

“I need to learn to control it,” I said, more to myself than Yada. “Before …”

The hospital waiting room door swung open, and Jordan’s parents rushed in, followed by Principal Martinez. I shrank deeper into my chair, suddenly very interested in my cup of coffee.

“The doctors say he’s stable,” Principal Martinez was saying. “But they found traces of—”

“It doesn’t matter what they found,” Mrs. Bruce interrupted, her voice sharp with protective fury. “My son needs help, not judgment.”

I risked a glance up. Mrs. Bruce’s eyes were red-rimmed but fierce and her husband stood beside her like a silent guardian. The sight triggered another memory—not mine, but Jordan’s. Sunday dinners with too much silence. Report cards with perfect grades that never seemed perfect enough. The kind of love expressed through expectations instead of words.

“Echo?”

I jumped. Principal Martinez was standing in front of me.

“Ms. Lau mentioned you were the one who knew about the note. How did you know where to look?”

Yada’s bangles jangled nervously beside me. I could feel her tension radiating like heat.

“I … I saw Jordan near that section earlier,” I lied. “He seemed upset, so I just … had a feeling.”

Principal Martinez studied me for a long moment. His memories tasted like chalk dust and grape juice, decades of students’ faces merging like watercolors. I focused on keeping my hands wrapped around my coffee cup, afraid of what might happen if I accidentally touched him.

“Well, your intuition may have saved his life,” he said finally. “Good work.”

As he walked away, Yada let out a long sigh, as if she had been holding her breath. “That was close.”

But I barely heard her. Because when Principal Martinez had looked at me, something else had happened. For the first time, I hadn’t just sensed his current memories—I’d caught a glimpse of his future ones too. Or at least, the shape of them, like shadows formed by events that hadn’t happened yet.

“Yada,” I whispered, “I think I’m still evolving.”

“What do you mean?”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Jordan:

I know what you did while I was unconscious. The memory you gave me back … it wasn’t just mine. We need to talk. I think I understand now why you’ve been looking at me strangely whenever our eyes met. – Jordan

Yada read the text over my shoulder and whistled softly. “Well, this should be interesting.”

As I stared at the phone, Jordan’s words morphed into something else. Another future memory, this one unbearably clear. An unfamiliar old man in a blue sweater, walking his dog next Tuesday morning. He would stop to tie his shoe, clutch his chest, and collapse on the sidewalk while his golden retriever whined helplessly beside him.

The memory tasted like mud water.

“Echo?” Yada’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “You’re doing the zombie thing again.”

I blinked, and the vision faded, but the memory remained. If I could see future memories, what else might I witness? Car accidents before they happened? Terminal diagnoses before doctors delivered them? The last words people would speak before they never spoke again?

“What if,” I said slowly, “I start seeing other weird things I’m not supposed to see? Things that haven’t happened yet but will?”

Yada frowned. “Like what?”

“Like the deaths of people I love dearly.” The words came out heavy as warm tears rolled down my eyes. What am I supposed to do with that? Warn them? Save them? And what happens when people find out I can do that?”

I could already imagine it. The whispers in hallways. The way people would cross the street when they saw me coming. The accusations of witchcraft, of being cursed, of bringing bad luck just by existing.

“They’d call me a freak,” I whispered. “Or worse.”

Yada reached over and squeezed me in a bear hug, her bangles quiet for once. “Hey sweetheart. We’ll figure it out. Together.”

But I wasn’t sure there would be a ‘together’ for long. Whatever I was becoming, might eventually separate me from everyone else. For the first time since this whole thing began, I started wondering if my memory catching was a gift or a curse.

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Behind the Scenes with Christian Emecheta

What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?

E.C. I got the idea from wondering what it would be like to accidentally tap into someone else’s memories. I was thinking about how we sometimes feel weighed down by other people’s problems, and I thought – what if that was literal? What if I could actually take someone’s memories without their knowledge?

At first, Echo could only steal memories. But when I was editing, I realized the story needed more complications. So I added the part where she can give memories back. That made things messier and more interesting. The future-seeing part came later too. I wanted to show how her power was getting stronger and scarier just like most powerful characters in movies.

The basic idea stayed the same, but the details changed a lot as I wrote different drafts. I kept asking myself. “How would Echo manage her gifts?” and that helped me figure out where the story should go.

How does this story fit into your body of work – is it similar in ways to what you usually write, or is it very different?

E.C. This story is actually quite different from what I usually write. I don’t really have a consistent style or genre – I write whatever inspires me at the moment. Sometimes I write realistic fiction, sometimes fantasy, sometimes completely different things altogether.

“The Memory Breach” came from a specific idea about memory and empathy, so I wrote it as speculative fiction. But my next story might be completely different – maybe a romance, or historical fiction, or something experimental. I like exploring different ways of telling stories depending on what motivates me.

I think this approach keeps my writing fresh for me. I don’t want to get stuck writing the same type of story over and over just because it worked once.